Jingles are brief, bright pieces of choral music that promote the station's call letters, frequency and sometimes disc-jockey or program segment.
Jingles and stingers (liners) help to give the station a branded sound in a pleasant, minimal amount of air-time.
An emerging trend is to use the radio station's web site to provide in-depth coverage of news and advertisers headlined on the air.
Fewer radio stations (except on medium and major market, depending on daypart) maintain a call-in telephone line for promotions and gags, or to take record requests.
DJs of commercial stations do not generally answer the phone and edit the call during music plays in non-major markets, as the programming is either delivered via satellite, or voice-tracked using a computer.
In a large market, a successful radio station can pay a full-time director of promotions, and run several lotteries per month of vacations, automobiles and other prizes.
Though practices differ by region and format, what follows is a typical arrangement in a North American urban commercial radio station.
This block usually includes news bulletins and traffic and weather advisories for commuters, as well as light comedy from the morning DJ team (many shock jocks started as or still work on drive-time radio).
The countdown show, ranking the top songs of the previous week, has been a staple of weekend radio programming since 1970; current hosts of countdown shows in various formats include Rick Dees, Ryan Seacrest, Jeff Foxworthy, Kix Brooks, Bob Kingsley, Crook & Chase, Randy Jackson, Walt Love, Al Gross, Dick Bartley, and (via reruns) Casey Kasem.
The longest running radio program in the country, the Grand Ole Opry, has aired on Saturday night since its inception in 1925.
In this radio format, disc-jockeys would select one of a set of the forty best-selling singles (usually in a rack) as rated by Billboard magazine or from the station's own chart of the local top selling songs.
Top 40 radio would punctuate the music with jingles, promotions, gags, call-ins, and requests, brief news, time and weather announcements and most importantly, advertising.
However, to succeed, the approach requires genius jocks, totally in-tune with their audience, who are also committed to the commercial success of the radio station.
Conventional wisdom in the radio industry is that stations will not get good ratings or revenue if they frequently play songs unfamiliar to their audience.
The ideal "classic" station (of whatever format) finds the balance between playing listener favorites frequently enough to develop a base while at the same time cultivating a playlist broad enough not to breed contempt.
The oldies and classic rock formats have a strong niche market, but as the audience becomes older the station becomes less attractive to advertisers.
This left them with no choice but to adopt more youthful formats, though the Standards format (also known as the Great American Songbook from the series of albums produced by rocker Rod Stewart) has undergone something of an off-air revival, with artists such as Stewart, Tony Bennett and Queen Latifah putting their own interpretation on the music.
Easy listening and adult contemporary are related formats that play largely down-tempo pop music of various styles.
Two very well known smooth jazz stations are WNUA in Chicago and 94.7 The Wave in Los Angeles, both of which were introduced in 1987, and still continue to enjoy tremendous success in the format today.
Dance music radio focuses on live DJ sets and hit singles from genres of techno, house, electro, drum and bass, UK garage and big beat.
In the United States, public radio is typically confined to three formats: news/talk, classical music, or jazz, the last of which is declining rapidly as of the late 2000s.
Community radio often relies heavily on the music format because it is relatively cheap and generally makes for easy listening.
The wide reach and selective, non-broadcast usage of the internet allows programmers access to special interest audiences.
As a result, both mainstream and narrow-interest webcasts flourish; in particular, electronic music stations are much more common on the Internet than they are in satellite or broadcast media.
Music radio stations pay music-licensing fees to licensing agencies such as ASCAP and BMI in the United States or PRS in the UK.
In the U.S., Congress intervened with a royalty structure that was expensive to small independent operators, but easier than the RIAA's standard scale.
Both XM and Sirius provide commercial packages allowing exclusive license-free use (though not rebroadcast) of their music programming by businesses.
Most popular internet radio networks such as Pandora and Digitally Imported were paying royalty fees annually to SoundExchange.
It was enjoyed mostly by rural blacks, with notable exposure in Memphis, Tennessee due to the all African American programming of WDIA.
Indeed, one-size-fits-all programming is no longer seen as tenable by some, as the diversity of musical tastes among the listening public has created a proliferation of radio formats in what some might call a form of narrowcasting.