[wrp]

Something I'm honestly curious about....I can understand the need for advertising, but why do DJs talk so much? I would much prefer radio to have only music and ads. Living in Japan in the 1990s, I completely gave up on radio because the talking:music ratio was about 2:1.

[fibonachos]

My uneducated guess: To keep you listening while minimizing royalty payments for playing music?

[Mister_X]

Not likely, since the ASCAP reporting period is only one week, twice each year.

ASCAP = American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers%...

I used to game the system by playing little known/independent artists I had a personal connection with during each reporting window.

[valleyer]

I hadn't heard about this sampling strategy, and I don't know much about music licensing, so I did some reading to learn more.

https://www.ascap.com/help/royalties-and-payment

> Each year, ASCAP processes trillions of performances of ASCAP music. Whenever it makes sense economically, we conduct a census survey, or complete count, of performances in a medium. For media that fall under our census surveys (for example, the large majority of network TV performances and over 2000 broadcast radio stations monitored by Luminate Data, LLC, formerly MRC Data, LLC), ASCAP seeks to pay on every surveyed performance.

> Where a census survey is impractical, we conduct a sample survey, meaning that we pay royalties based on a representative cross-section of the performances on that medium.

This suggests to me that for major radio stations, the strategy of "more talk, less music" will reduce royalties—and that your strategy might only work at a smaller station.

Also, ASCAP seems to govern only the rights to the composition. Most radio stations play from recordings. Do the record labels (or whoever collects for them) also utilize a similar sampling strategy?