Is it Live or is it…Voice Tracking?

By John Haer, Executive Director

At WAMO-FM on Penn Ave, it’s called “Scotty”. In Greentree, at the Clear Channel nest of six stations, it’s called “Prophet”. Some disk jockeys have another name for this wonderful machine: “the Pink Slip”. 

Digital technology in most radio stations today makes it possible to seamlessly integrate spoken word files, music files, and cut-in commercials, each originating from widely diverse points on the globe. Stations, of course, could always pipe in national or syndicated programs or, alternatively, replay a prerecorded program. What’s new now is that Scotty and Profit, um, I mean Prophet, make it possible to customize a remote broadcast to sound as if it were coming to you live from your local station. The stations want you to think it’s live.

Here’s how it works. An announcer in Austin reads his script of prepared music intros, promos, and events and notices into the machine. A typical 6-hour shift or program minus music and commercials and other fill-in stuff takes about 1.5 hours to do right. The machine does the rest. Click the mouse and now Mr. Austin is our afternoon personality in Pittsburgh.

Think of the savings to radio execs. You’re only paying for one-and-a-half hours of announcing rather than six or eight. You don’t have to pay Prophet anything. You can operate a station without any live announcers - just techies to keep Prophet RAM well oiled.

The only problem is that listeners are duped to believe they’re hearing live radio. They don’t know that the listener requests may be coming from Omaha. They don’t know they’ll never see Mr. Austin at the County Fair or talk to him on the phone. They don’t realize until they make an emergency call to the station that there’s nobody there to give a flash announcement and information about a tornado or flood.

Maybe that’s OK with listeners. Maybe they just want to hear the hottest music. Maybe they don’t care about live radio.

But I think listeners should have a choice in the matter. They should know that the voice of D J X is in fact Mr. X in Austin. Then they can decide where they want to tune the dial.

Did you know that several of our top 15 Pittsburgh stations have major daily shifts voice tracked? The Clear Channel stations notoriously lead the way. We have WKST-FM, 91.6, with a top-40 or contemporary hits format, ranked number 11 by Arbitron. Chicago personality Randi West voice-tracks the 10 PM – 2 PM program.  We have Clear Channel’s rhythmic hits WJJJ-FM, 104.7 (“the Beat”). Lori Bradley voice tracks 2 pm to 7 pm weekdays from Austin and Bill Simpson voice tracks in from Philadelphia 9 pm to midnight. Arbitron ranks “the Beat” at  #13.

What hurts is that WJJJ-FM in 1999 had eight live AFTRA announcers. Today it has three. WKST used to have ten staff announcers. Today the number is four.

In contract negotiations with Clear Channel for WWSW-FM (3WS), AFTRA has demanded that current live announcers be protected from replacement by imported voice tracking. While 3WS has no imported voice tracking, it refuses to guarantee it won’t in the future.  We expect a similar response in the upcoming WDVE negotiations with Clear Channel.

Is a “Keep Pittsburgh Radio Live” Campaign in the offing? Do you think all stations should be held to a “truth in labeling “ standard? If a program is voice tracked, why not identify it as such? Will Clear Channel and other station owners offer our members some measure of protection from imported voice tracking?

Stay tuned.