The Day Radio Stopped Curating Music

BridgeRatings: Dave Van Dyke, dvd@bridgeratings.com

Radio likes to describe itself as a curator.
I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

A curator does more than reduce a million available songs to a few hundred familiar ones. A curator creates context, emotion, surprise and momentum. A curator knows what belongs next.
Radio once did this exceptionally well.

Great programmers didn’t simply build playlists. They shaped experiences. They understood when listeners needed familiarity, when they were ready for discovery and when a forgotten song could suddenly sound important again. Listeners rarely knew the programmer’s name. But they could feel that person’s judgment every time they turned on the station. That kind of curation required something many programmers no longer receive:

Trust | Radio companies still hire talented program directors. They hire people with instincts, knowledge, experience and a genuine passion for music. Then too many organizations prevent them from using any of it. Every decision must fit a national template. Every local idea needs approval from someone who may never have listened to the market.

Management hires a curator, then asks that person to become an administrator.
That isn’t curation.
That’s risk management.
And listeners can hear the difference.
They hear stations that are technically correct but emotionally empty. The music is familiar. Nothing is obviously wrong.
Nothing is particularly alive, either.

The tragedy is that many program directors know exactly what’s missing. They know which songs could add dimension. They know when the station feels too repetitive. They know their audience may enjoy more depth than management assumes. They know when the music needs a human touch. But knowing isn’t the same as being allowed to act.

Imagine the job satisfaction these programmers might recover if they were trusted to program again. Imagine the energy listeners might hear if stations allowed talented people to use taste, timing and judgment—not recklessly, but meaningfully.

Radio does not need to become a million-song jukebox. It needs to become more thoughtful about which songs it selects from those millions. A playlist simply limits the choices. A curator makes those choices valuable.

If radio has a problem it isn’t that it lacks talented curators. It’s that too many companies hire them, surround them with rules, remove their authority and then wonder why every station sounds assembled and the same rather than inspired. The best radio station would never play a million songs. But it would hire someone capable of navigating those million songs—and then trust that person to do the job.