4 Ways I’d Change the Way Radio is Taught in College

I worked in radio for nearly 8 years at CHRY Radio (now Vibe 105) in Toronto. During that time, I worked with many interns from the local college radio program. Many of them were bright, serious and engaged students who worked hard at mastering the nuances of the medium. Many still work in broadcasting currently and I consider it a privilege to have mentored and worked alongside many of these people.

 

As I spent more time at CHRY, I noticed that our younger interns enjoyed working at the radio station, but didn’t engage with the medium outside of their job. It wasn’t their fault; by the end of the first decade of this century, podcasting, satellite radio, Internet radio and on-demand music streaming had displaced terrestrial radio. It had become the media your parents consumed in the car. The result of this shift was a group of students that were checked out of what they ere at school to study. Students suffered, the industry suffered and the medium suffered because schools hadn’t caught up to the new reality.

 

College radio courses need an overhaul. Here are 4 ways I’d change the way radio is taught in schools to yield more engaged college radio grads that are smarter and more competitive. 

 

1. Teach Musicology and Music Appreciation

In preparing this post, I did some research on four large college radio programs around the Greater Toronto Area. Not a single college teaches basic musicology as part of its media programs. I began realizing this was a problem when I was teaching interns how to edit bars and beats to cut music tracks. Many college students couldn’t identify the downbeat, the backbeat or the post in a song to line up a VoiceOver track. I couldn’t really blame the students; this was a generation that grew up with gutted music programs in public schools, the ubiquity of software like Garage Band and no collective experience of having to learn an instrument in junior high whether they had an aptitude for it or not.

 

Graduate better students by providing one mandatory course in popular musicology where students are trained to recognize and identify basic musical concepts such as tempo, meter, key, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, timbre, texture and form. Students should also know how to recognize and identify the studio techniques that accompany pop music production including: reverb, echo, delay, compression, gating, EQ and so on. Students should be able to apply this musical knowledge to any genre and understand how these elements can be programmed on air to create musical flow. 

 

2. Teach Music History

Out of the four colleges I researched in or near the GTA—Humber College, Seneca College, Durham College and Fanshawe College—only one, Fanshawe, had a music history course for its radio students.

Students today are taught to front sell and back sell their announcing with the ubiquitous music scheduler that serves up a station’s tracks for the day based on rules. Many of the students I worked with were not invested in the music they played out in the commercial world, but came alive when they were the ones responsible for selecting the music for a show at CHRY.

Radio schools can make better graduates by teaching the history of pop music starting with the blues and working their way forward through rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, pop and all of the other genres that exploded onto the airwaves over the past 70 years—including international genres. In addition to the music, students should be exposed to the role of—and advances in—technology, social, commercial and economic factors as well as political factors that affected and changed music  history. Radio itself played an important role in shaping the sounds that were the backdrop to generations of people. Students should complete the course and be able to apply this knowledge to music programming and on air delivery. 

 

3. Teach Entrepreneurship

Today’s media landscape is very different from the one I entered after I left high school in the 90s. While terrestrial radio struggles to stay relevant amidst audience segmentation and a variety of offerings, there are unprecedented opportunities for innovation, growth and new ideas for programming both mainstream and alternative content.

Colleges like Fanshawe College teach students how to generate new programming ideas, but I propose going further by developing techniques for pitching sustainable ideas including content for syndication, monetized Internet content, audio architecture and branded content as well as other types of audio programming. Each of these can have a terrestrial broadcast component or blaze new trails. Tied into this, students should be taught how to pitch and the role of sales beyond filling avails with 30s and adjacencies.

 

4. Graduate Smaller Classes

I was shocked to hear radio colleges graduated classes of around 50 to 60 students, depending on the college. Multiply this by the number of colleges offering radio programs across Canada and the US. Then, look at the current job openings in radio.

 

Today’s music radio station can run with less than 10 staff, not including salespeople who are usually out hustling up leads. Combine this reality with diminishing revenues, automation and local management arrangements (LMAs) and a lack of opportunity will make perfect sense. Reducing class size is one way to ensure only the best make it out of radio college and that there are opportunities in the industry. 

 

Having said this, there are opportunities as mentioned in the third point. Students who leave college with the ability to do new things with new media are the ones who will be rewarded in the future while legacy media looks on and wonders how they did it.