The Radio DJ is King

He’s a day-time radio DJ on a small to medium sized radio station. He’s on-air four hours a day – Monday to Saturday. His job is to pull in listeners with wit and personality so that his station can sell plenty of ads. By the end of the show, he’s drained. Only his dreams drive him forward to the next day: dreams of moving on to a bigger, better station which can fairly reward his commitment and skill.

That’s a case that’s far from unique. There are scores of jocks in the UK who are working for less than a waiter, or a shop assistant. In the case I have just described, the shift rate is £40 - or £240 a week. Forget job security. Perks? Ha!

The result has been a steady decline in the quality of people wanting to broadcast on radio, especially music radio. What do I mean by ‘quality’? I mean the ability to grasp and respond to the minutiae of a typical listener’s brain and lifestyle; the ability to sell station content in an engaging, imaginative and subtle way; the skill to tell a story lucidly and with wit; the passion to ‘represent’ listeners, and so on.

Is £40 for an on-air shift enough to persuade bright people who want to perform into a career in radio? Is this kind of money the message that the radio business really wants to convey to the best and the brightest.

The current cliché is, of course, “Content is King”. For that, read “DJ is King”. It’s the jock who provides your station with its hinterland, its soul and character. He’s your station’s face: on him rests almost all hopes of success. But, at the moment, he’s under-valued big-time.

Smaller stations should be making the search for clever, creative personalities their number one priority. Programme bosses ought to start finding and paying properly people who are a) brighter and more articulate than they are; and b) better than the person they replace.

Big personalities with big potential are not easy to find. But how many station bosses go looking? How many stations have devised tests to separate those with real wit and fluency from those who’ve done a media degree course or who have worked on the campus radio station?

If finding them is the first problem, the second is persuading them that a career in front of a microphone is going to be rewarding. Is a qualified teacher or a barrister going to switch careers for £40 a day? Is a young graduate going to be attracted by that kind of money when a career in law or oil exploration might be possibilities?

The £40 a day station on which I pinned my points at the start of this piece is not a brilliant listen: the DJ’s are second-raters. They have no stardust. They’re unable to make me, and most other people, laugh. They’re in the studio (some of the time) in body but certainly not in spirit. Fake enthusiasm and resentment pulse together through the airwaves. Once upon a time, they may have had talent. Now, they’re paid peanuts, and they work like monkeys.

If radio companies want to operate professionally – i.e. charge for commercial airtime - they need to start behaving professionally. That means hiring the best talent available, and paying properly for it. To do otherwise is to short-change the advertisers.