1. Radio Programme Review
For this assignment we had to create radio demos for different types of radio; Broadcast radio, In-store radio
and Internet radio.I decided to do a show for Friday night on a broadcast radio station at 8pm that plays dance
and house music as I know that a lot of people would be listening to the radio around this time before going
out that night. Although the show misses drive time a lot of taxis will be being booked around this time so it is
likely that the show will be played in taxis. This genre of music is very popular in clubs so these are the songs
they enjoy listening too. A lot of the songs in the show will be familiar to them but other songs are less known,
I chose to do this to attract a wider range of audiences. The main target audience were people aged between
18 and 24 that enjoyed going to clubs which is why I advertised events in town and festivals but the music
being played would also appeal to people younger than 18.
I listened to other shows on broadcast radio stations at the same time such as capital and key 103 so I could
understand the conventions for shows at this time and hear what songs were played. I also had to consider
how much speech to use along with the music, jingles and news. From doing this I found that most of these
stations played only mainstream music from the CHR which is why I chose to include some songs from the
underground scene. I also found that there is only a small amount of speech on the show, mainly introducing
songs with little or no information about them. Commercials used on the programmes were about local artists
and events.
We used a software suite provided by synergy broadcast radio to create and record our shows, we needed to
move our pre-recorded clips into the cart to include them in our show. We had to import the songs we were
going to use into a playlist in the order they would be played. To mix the tracks together we had to use the
soundboard to crossfade tracks and items from the cart which allowed us to play songs at the desired volume
as well as turning the microphone to live, this software made it easy for us to avoid miscuing songs or
jingles.When the microphone was live the sound would only play through the headphones to avoid poor
quality. There were lots of things that we had to check whilst recording our shows like checking the levels of
our speech and making sure there was no dead air. At the start of each song the programme shows how long
the introduction is on a song making it easy for us to know when to speak.
Our jingles were created using REAPER, we were able to add music and production elements such as pitch to
our recorded voice clips and change volume on separate parts of the jingle to make it clearer. I chose to use a
well-known song; DJ Fresh- Gold Dust as the bed of the jingle as it is a very popular song and suits the style of
my show well, the jingle included a small amount of speech and the station ID. I included some promos of
music festivals in my show which featured artists from the genre of music I was playing.
After recording my show I thought that it could have been a lot better in terms of the amount of speech used,
the show was shorter than I hoped too. I think the songs worked well together and I was happy with the mood
set by my show and believe that it would attract the intended audiences. If I was to make the show again I
would include more conversational speech between the DJ’s and talk over some of the less interesting parts of
songs by turning the volume down slightly and turning on the microphone. I would also make a more
interesting jingle that I could play more throughout the showand a separate jingle for the beginning and end.
Each song that was played was introduced either the same or very similar so next time I would like to vary this
by back selling some of the tracks as well as front selling.