Music radio is a radio format in which music is the main broadcast content.

After television
replaced old time radio's dramatic content, music formats became dominant in many countries.
Radio drama and comedy continue, often on public radio.
Music drives radio technology, including wide-band FM, modern digital radio systems such
as Digital Radio Mondiale, and even the rise of internet radio and music streaming services
(such as Pandora and Spotify).
When radio was the only form of entertainment, regular programming; mostly stories and
variety shows, was the norm. If there was music, it was normally a live concert or part of a
variety show. Backstage sound engineers who jockeyed discs (records) from one turntable to
another to keep up with the live programming were often called disc jockeys.
With the mass production and popularity of records in the mid 40's, as well as the birth of TV, it
was discovered that a show was needed to simply play records and hire a disc jockey to host
the program. One of the first disc jockeys (later called DJ's) was Dick Clark. Others followed
suit and today music radio is the norm

How it works[edit]
The radio station provides programming to attract listeners. Commercial radio stations make
profits by selling advertising. Public and community radio stations are sustained by listener
donations and grants. Young people are targeted by advertisers because their product
preferences can be changed more easily. Therefore, the most commercially successful
stations target young audiences.
The programming usually cycles from the least attractive item, to most attractive, followed by
commercials. The purpose of this plan is to build listener interest during the programming.
Because dead air does not attract listeners, the station tries to fill its broadcast day with sound.
Audiences will only tolerate a certain number of commercials before tuning away. In some
regions, government regulators specify how many commercials can be played in a given hour.
There are several standard ways of selecting the music, such as free-form, top-40, album-
oriented rock, and Jack. These can be applied to all types of music.
Jingles are radio's equivalent of neon signs. Jingles are brief, bright pieces of choral music that
promote the station's call letters, frequency and sometimes disc-jockey or program segment.
Jingles are produced for radio stations by commercial specialty services such as JAM,[1] in
Texas.
Jingles are often replaced by recorded voice-overs (called "stingers", also depending on region
more often "liners").
In order to build station loyalty, the station announces time, station calls letters and frequency
as often as six to twelve times per hour. Jingles and stingers (liners) help to give the station a
branded sound in a pleasant, minimal amount of air-time. The legal requirement for station
identification in the U.S. is once per hour, approximately at the top of the hour, or at the
conclusion of a transmission.
News, time-checks, real-time travel advice and weather reports are often valuable to listeners.
The news headlines and station identification are therefore given just before a commercial.
Time, traffic and weather are given just after. The engineer typically sets the station clocks to
standard local time each day, by listening to WWV or WWVH (see atomic clock). These
segments are less valued by the most targeted market, young people, so many commercial
stations shorten or omit these segments in favor of music.
While most music stations that offer news reports simply "tear and read" news items (from the
newswires or the Internet), larger stations (generally those affiliated with news/talk stations)
may employ an editor to rewrite headlines, and provide summaries of local news. Summaries
fit more news in less air-time. Some stations share news collection with TV or newspapers in
the same media conglomerate. An emerging trend is to use the radio station's web site to
provide in-depth coverage of news and advertisers headlined on the air. Many stations contract
with agencies such as Smartraveler and AccuWeather for their weather and traffic reports
instead of using in-house staff. Fewer radio stations (except on medium and major market,
depending on daypart) maintain a call-in telephone line for promotions and gags, or to take
record requests. DJs of commercial stations do not generally answer the phone and edit the
call during music plays in non-major markets, as the programming is either delivered via
satellite, or voice-tracked using a computer. More and more stations take requests by e-mail
and online chat only.
The value of a station's advertising is set by the number, age and wealth of its
listeners. Arbitron, a commercial statistical service, historically used listener diaries to
statistically measure the number of listeners. Arbitron diaries were collected on Thursdays, and
for this reason, most radio stations have run special promotions on Thursdays, hoping to
persuade last-minute Arbitron diarists to give them a larger market-share. Arbitron contractually
prevents mention of its name on the air.
Promotions are the on-air equivalent of lotteries for listeners. Promotional budgets usually run
about $1 per listener per year. In a large market, a successful radio station can pay a full-time
director of promotions, and run several lotteries per month of vacations, automobiles and other
prizes. Lottery items are often bartered from advertisers, allowing both companies to charge
full prices at wholesale costs. For example, cruising companies often have unused capacity,
and when given the choice, prefer to pay their bills by bartering cruise vacations. Since the ship
will sail in any case, bartered vacations cost the cruise company little or nothing. The
promotion itself advertises the company providing the prize. The FCC has defined a lottery as
“any game, contest or promotion that combines the elements of prize, chance and
consideration
Music radio, particularly top 40, has often acted as both a barometer and an arbiter of musical
taste, and radio airplay is one of the defining measures of success in the mainstream musical
world. In fact, the rise of rock music to popularity is intimately tied to the history of music radio.
Early forms of rock had languished in poor areas of the South. It was enjoyed mostly by rural
blacks, with notable exposure in Memphis, Tennessee due to the all African
American programming of WDIA. Rock music entered the mainstream during the 1950s
because of controversial white DJs such as Dewey Phillips, Alan Freed, Dick
Clark and Wolfman Jack with an appreciation for black music.[citation needed]
For many years, many listeners have been dissatisfied with the content of radio programming
since the decline of early free form rock radio. The popularity of offshore pirate radio stations in
the United Kingdom was an early symptom of frustration with the often overly safe and
occasionally politicized playlists of commercial radio.[5]
The growth of Internet radio from a small experimenter's toy in the mid-1990s to a huge
phenomenon allowing both small do-it-yourselfers and large commercial stations to make their
offerings available worldwide was seen as a threat to over-the-air music broadcasting, and was
nearly shut down by onerous licensing demands made by the recording industry. Meanwhile,
the rise of satellite radio services as a major competitor have brought many of the advantages
of Internet radio to an increasingly mobile listening public, including lack of censorship, greater
choice, a more eclectic approach to format programming, and static-free digital sound quality.
Indeed, one-size-fits-all programming is no longer seen as tenable by some, as the diversity of
musical tastes among the listening public have created a proliferation of radio formats in what
some might call a form of narrowcasting.