Current affairs on an FM music station

30 seconds? That’s slightly more than the number of seconds 5 Live gives to Scottish football results at the end of sports bulletins, provided there’s no cricket.

Maybe so Arthur but to take a fairly complex subject and relate it to an audience that’s there primarily for the music, in 30 seconds, is a particular skill and it was nice to hear it. Should remind us all that it can be done and might encourage others to cast the net a little wider when it comes to sourcing content for their programmes.

If you can get the info across in 30 seconds, then bravo. Move on. This is what grates on me about people that come on here and say “Oh, DJs at Heart are told to have no personality” as if Richard Park has personally delivered that instruction at gunpoint. What they MEAN to say is that they’ve been told to keep their links short and concise. Just because a link is short doesn’t mean it’s got no personality in it.

If you require – or feel you require – 2 minutes to get your personality across, then you’re not doing your job properly.

The ideal length for a,link is between 45 seconds and 1 minute. Less than 30 seconds and you’re probably trying to squeeze too much into too short an amount of time, or you have no content in the link, just station liners and music announcements, which usually makes a link sound weak and without much personality. Over a minute, and unless it’s important information like travel or weather related, you’re probably waffling.

I also like to think of links as a sandwich, where the bread is the station liners and music announcements, and the meat is the content between them, whether its community information, interesting story, weather, travel, score update or some other information. For that, you really need about 30 seconds or so to deliver enough information to be informative, but not too much to bore.

It’s funny how so many people, even within the industry, don’t realise that producing a good link, is almost a science. Get it right every time, you will do well. Get it wrong consistently, you won’t do well.

The ideal length for a,link is between 45 seconds and 1 minute.

Sorry, Ian, but that’s rubbish.

US radio consultant Dan O’Day tells a story of a little girl who once told Abraham Lincoln how she was teased for being so short. She asked the President: “How long should someone’s legs be?”
“Long enough to reach the ground”, was his considered reply.

And that’s how long a good link should be.“Long enough to reach the ground”.

A 30-second link that rambles, or doesn’t make sense, doesn’t reach the ground. A well-crafted 10-second link that has a point – does. A five minute interview that is self-indulgent is unlikely to reach the ground, while an item that has someone turning the radio up to make sure they don’t miss a single word does.

There have been some excellent presenters who understand the art of ‘word economy’ – they don’t waffle but take just as much time as it properly needs to get the message across. The late Roger Scott was a master of that.

If there is such as thing as an “ideal length for a link” then it’s simply as long as it takes to say what needs to be said. Nothing more, nothing less.

I remember someone who was training me, back in 1978 in hospital radio said that “If you have not got anything interesting to say, then don’t say it.” By that he meant that unless what you are going to speak is relevant to the song you have played, or going to play or to the hospital or of interest to those in hospital, don’t both.

Aah – this reminds me of the time I was tuned into Scot FM, when they came out of a song, then played an ID that said “Presenters with personality … Scot FM.” They then played another song and afterwards went straight into adverts. Obviously the “presenter with personality” wasn’t in the mood to demonstrate the very thing that they were employed to use.

Also, I once heard Ally Bally on Radio Tay AM simply announce the time … nothing else, between two songs. I immediately wondered why he even bothered to lift the fader, more especially because the time-check was given in the middle of the morning (not breakfast). I did also think that being a radio presenter must be the easiest job in the world if they’re paid to do so little at times.

As for the comments about how long a link should be – somebody needs to tell the Radio 2 presenters that they’ve got it all wrong, even if they are the UK’s most listened to station – but that goes for nothing. Chris Tarrant was obviously useless and rubbish at his job as well. 30 seconds is all they REALLY needed (and don’t forget to mention the name of the station twice in each link, but three or four times is better because listeners are thick and won’t know the name of the station).

I personally think, based on the advice that’s obviously given by program managers of commercial radio and about speedlinks, station naming, comings-up and don’t-forgets, that commercial radio presenters should revert to mobile phone text-speak. It keeps things really, really short – because listeners are pigmies and won’t understand otherwise.

There must also be something wrong with me, as a listener. I need to go and see a psychiatrist or something because I keep forgetting to hit the off button or re-tune the radio whenever I hear a presenter talking for more than 30 seconds.

Oh dear, that’s a little DS-esque isn’t it, Art?

There’s no right or wrong way of doing it. If you need 2 minutes to deliver the information, then you need 2 minutes. I suppose one way to think of it is like a tweet. You have 160 characters to get across your message in. That encourages you to use word economy.

As for your other point, I do not believe it is possible to over-identify a station. The ratings system is based on product recall. If I mention the station name ten times in a link, I’m not even sorry. I don’t believe in being as anal as saying “Start the link with X and end it with Y every time” but I do believe one should use the name and strap in the first 10 or so seconds of the link, and then have the station name somewhere around the end of the link.

Well James, I’ve just had an e-mail from a radio presenter friend saying that he’s getting annoyed about me constantly making the same point about presenters and stations repeatedly identifying themselves. He’s finding it really irritating that I’m effectively saying the same thing over and over and over again.

Funny that!

From a listener’s perspective, for which I prefer to include myself, if you were to say the name of the station 10 times in a link, I really would switch off and not bother tuning into you again. I’d probably stick my i-pod or CD on instead.

However, if you were to say … something interesting, relevant and/or compelling …. in almost every link, then I’d make a point of listening to you instead of lending my ears to something else. It wouldn’t matter if you did it in 30 seconds or 30 minutes (LBC, Radio Scotland and Radio 5 presenters manage the latter quite well), I’d still listen.

I don’t buy this thing about recall – because that tells me that commercial radio stations consider me and the rest of the public to not be intelligent enough to remember something simple. The vast majority of us know what day of the week it is, we know when we’re next getting paid, we know what night and on what channel certain programs are on the telly, we know the names of magazines and newspapers, we know the names of our relatives and friends, we know the names of celebrities we’re interested in and we can certainly recall those things in most instances if we were asked and if we were interested enough. We’d not be able to answer those if we weren’t interested, which brings me to another point. If you want your audience to be interested and to be able to recall the station name, then broadcast something that interests them and makes them want to tune in, instead of having to remind them what they’re listening to. Trust me, they’ll get it …. remember how people used to stop in their tracks whenever Simon Bates did his Our Tune feature on Radio 1?

Paul Easton, even a well crafted 10 second link has no time for content. Just barely enough time for music identification and station identification. People may be attracted to a station by the music, but they stay because the spoken content also appeals, otherwise they feel the station isn’t talking to them. Links between 10 and 20 seconds in length, have no content to them. You need at least 30 seconds to do music identification, station identification, and the content. Otherwise, all the DJ is doing, is just inane waffle and no listener likes hearing inane waffle.

Funnily enough, I just did a demonstration programme for someone to review because they wanted to hear my style. I did my links in exactly the style I described in my earlier post, and their review came back to me recently, and they said it was a very listenable show, so I must have been doing something right.