In the commercial radio business, stations strive to differentiate themselves in their broadcast markets through creative programming. They depend upon the skilled labor of disc jockeys and hosts as well as participation from listeners; yet, as American radio reorganized itself in the latter half of the twentieth century, station managers became increasingly alert to the risks these dependencies posed. Risks were regulatory as well as commercial: the FCC could fine or revoke broadcasting licenses from stations that aired obscene material, and advertisers might abandon a station if its broadcasts veered outside the bounds of professionalism or of the demographically tuned formats they had been promised. The payola scandal of the 1950s—stations and deejays accepting bribes from record labels in exchange for airplay—sparked congressional inquiries and set off a particularly paranoid dynamic between radio labor and management.
The papers in this panel move across four decades examining three approaches the American radio industry took toward labor and liability: consultancy, automation, and insurance. Each of these approaches took on unforeseen momentum that would shape the radio’s industrial conventions and its capacity to represent audiences. Sadie Couture analyzes the technical and financial interventions that responded to regulatory risk in talk radio shows that aired live calls from listeners: a niche form of insurance and a tape-delay device that insurers required their clients to use. Alexander Russo shows how programming consultants, hired to insulate stations from payola accusations, disrupted the relationship between radio and popular music by holding rock-n-roll at bay. Andy Kelleher Stuhl identifies automation as a response to similar concerns about unchecked deejays and as a technology that entrenched a new, management-friendly version of creativity in media industries. In all cases, radio’s business leaders inserted deliberate distance between labor and the live broadcast, with enduring implications for creative work in media.