Why do radio stations all seem to go on commercial at the same time?

AbouBenAdhem , 4 hours ago (edited 3 hours ago)

I’m just speculating here… but suppose a station were deliberately out of phase with most other stations. When other stations go on break, frustrated listeners would search for different stations and find the out-of-phase one. They’d listen to that station until its next commercial break, at which point they’d repeat the process and return to their previous stations. The out-of-phase station would get a reputation as the station for listeners who always change stations at ad breaks, which would make it impossible for that station to find advertisers.

agamemnonymous , 3 hours ago

My local public radio stations were often out of phase. Makes sense, not really relying on advertisers the same way.

vacuumfountain , 4 hours ago

Some breaks are mandated by the FCC for station identification. These “Hard Breaks” are at the same time on all stations.

Fondots , 3 hours ago

I don’t know the specifics of commercial broadcast radio, but I know with ham radio hams are required to identify every 10 minutes while they’re transmitting including automated repeaters that will usually do it in Morse code

If you listen to some ham radio communications (sometimes it’s interesting, but usually it’s just old guys talking about antennas) every 10 minutes the repeater will beep out a bunch of Morse code and everyone rattles off their call signs

For commercial radio I think it’s every hour so at least that often they’ll have to cut to “you’re listening to WXYZ 99.9 FM blah blah blah” which also provides a good segue to a commercial break.

I’m sure most of them probably just schedule that at the top of the hour to make it easy for themselves

PrimeErective , 3 hours ago

I feel like the old guys in my area just talk about their health problems 😂

Something to look forward to, I suppose

Boozilla , 3 hours ago

My brother was a DJ in the 90s and this was the case for them. They had a pretty rigid schedule that required certain things at certain times and I don’t think even the station owner could do much to deviate from it. If memory serves, it was the FCC, some of their music and content providers, and state/local regs all requiring various things be done daily, hourly, weekly, etc.

Obviously things could be very different now, and I would guess there are some slight regional differences.

adarza , 3 hours ago

frequency of station id are mandated, i don’t think the exact times of them are.

the real reason they all seem to go on ‘break’ at the same time is there’s only a few companies that own most the radio stations. they aren’t dummies. they know if they all go on breaks at about the same time, then people switching stations still land on ads… and it might still be theirs.

themeatbridge , 4 hours ago

Probably a bit of both. Stations change personnel every few hours, typically on the hour. Depending on the programming, that may be more or less likely to be a commercial break.

Marketing research probably has strong indicators for when the most people get in their cars or turn on the radio at home. And they know that people tend to change the channel until they find music, and then are much less likely to change it during their commute. If your competition is on commercials, you can either also go to commercial, or you can try to steal those listeners with content.

I don’t know how common it is now, but I know stations used to have syndicated programming as well, so they would have a local DJ or prerecorded local identifyer between songs or other content, and then the content would come from a regional or national feed. I know PBS works this way, because there are places where you can tune into different public stations and hear the same content. But to do that, you would want standardized, predictable commercial timeslots. Modern network communications and automation could probably eliminate that need, though.

And of course there’s always coincidence. You remember the times when you happen to flip through stations and hear only commercials, but you quickly forget the times when you only have to change one station. You don’t even know how often every station you’re not listening to will go to commercials while you’re listening to music. So there is a significant confirmation bias.

Paraponera_clavata , 4 hours ago

Hotelling’s law

thagoat , 4 hours ago

All stations, TV and radio, get huge amounts of money from advertising. So they maximize commercial time to maximize revenue. Hence all stations go to commercial breaks around the same time. It’s a formula. If you look at TV shows from the mid 80’s and early 90’s, you’ll see 2 commercial breaks per half hour. Now you see 3 breaks per half hour and about every 7 minutes during hour-long shows. These same rules apply to radio, however they don’t really have “shows” anymore. Just hour long segments interrupted by ads about every 3 songs.

Ghostalmedia , 2 hours ago

A lot of them are owned by the same companies. And they want engagement with their ads.

quixotic120 , 2 hours ago

they’re almost all owned by the same parent network (iheartmedia, which was clearchannel) so it’s stupid easy to coordinate

guilhermegnzaga , 2 hours ago

After a lot of thinking I purchased an external antenna, a radio transciever and a QRM remover to listen to foreign radios from Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina and somewhere from the Carribean sometimes depending on the weather… Those are not corrupted… Every town or local radio are concentrating their efforts to get any money that not evolves curating good tunes. Hope you find a suitable radio station for you somewhere in the air or in the web.

andrew_bidlaw , 1 hour ago (edited 1 hour ago)

They base their broadcast around hourly cycles put onto this day’s frame, let’s say it’s a 12h circle like on analogue clocks, or a pizza. Each cycle starts with a jingle and ad, so you can divide it into equal 12 parts and eat a 5-minute slice from each. Then you have standardized blocks to peg into them, e.g. 2-3-minutes songs, ads, news blocks, longer blocks to occupy the whole hour like Car talks with Martok etc. Some of them (news, ads, jingles) repeat every hour or two making it trivial. There’s not many ways to slice this pizza, so many of their plans naturally overlap. Iirc on music stations it’s performed-semi automatically now, the machine can compile a plan to fit pieces from your music library and other components by itself.