The difference between a music personality and a jukebox:
With a jukebox, the music always comes out the same.
But a music personality does something to add value to the music.
It’s what I call Contextual Radio Programming. 
Casey Kasem created the countdown show, which is simply putting current music into a context: The 40 most popular songs, presented backward from 40 to 1!
“American Top 40” plays the same music you hear on all its affiliate stations; the only thing different is the context in which it’s presented.
A good countdown show (or, as our UK colleagues say, “chart show”) presents familiar music in a different context.
I remember many years ago reading an interview with Art Garfunkel in which he talked about how when he was a kid he’d eagerly await each new issue of Billboard magazine, to see which records moved up and which moved down the chart. And he mentioned how exciting it was on the rare occasions when a record that had begun to slide down the charts suddenly moved up again.
That was context.
A number of years ago I flew Lufthansa to Europe, and the in-flight video included a number of five-minute films made by the BBC.
Each one consisted of a series of images with accompanying music, no voiceover, and just a few words of text on the screen at any time.
The one that really stands out in my memory was about the Czech composer, Antonin Dvorak.
It told how he came to the United States in 1892 and how lonely he was, how homesick he was for his native land.
But he also was overwhelmed by the physical beauty of America, which is what led him to write one of his best-known symphonies, entitled “From the New World.”
They told that story just a few words at a time, over a slowly changing series of pictures, with his music as the only sound.
I had barely heard of Dvorak. But after being exposed to that very brief film, his music meant something to me. It had meaning, because it had been placed in a context for me.
In his morning show in Hartford, J.D. Houston created a context for an especially upbeat music sweep that began each day at around 6:30.
But he didn’t call it “20 minutes of upbeat dance music.”
He called it the “20-Minute Morning Workout.”
The songs were on his playlist, but the context he created for them was that people could do their morning workout to the music before getting ready for work.
What a brilliant context!
If you’re a music jock who just plays the songs and throws in a smooth, “professional” intro or backsell but doesn’t ever add anything to the music….
Well, there’s an iPod ready and waiting to replace you in your listener’s life.
