These are award-winning radio stations, many with multiple voting members in the weekly music meeting. This lends a great diversity as to what programmers can consider playing, and gives a broad palette of music a fighting chance to be heard and played, somewhat regardless of history, label and genre. Many of these stations are raising $300,000 to $500,000 numerous times a year. And that's from about 10% of their actual listeners. They are also in many cases stations with lengthy hours of time-spent-listening, and with cumes in the hundreds of thousands listening per week. They are the first stations to report listener response to a record, the stations that the local clubs rely on for driving patrons to the shows, and in most cases the first station to welcome an artist to visit and play live on-air. Many of these are the stations that play music to serve listeners first, not advertisers or shareholders. It's a freedom that not everyone enjoys.

And their freedom and power does not go unnoticed. Billboard recently did a front page story on the growth and reach of NPR radio programming.
"For them [record companies], NPR provides unrivaled publicity and air time for non-mainstream acts that translate into exposure of important music--and increased sales.
The nonprofit network, founded in 1970, remains a Camelot for those labels... The network's tradition...sets NPR apart from any other entity in US radio, placing it more alongside cable-TV music-show counterparts".
wncw.org
It is a privilege to work with the very best stations in the format. Programmers who take their work seriously and gleefully, are award-winning people operating award-winning facilities, raising huge amounts of money for something you don't have to pay for, and who marry artists to listeners in a still magical way. Yes, despite all the goofyness, consolidation, research, BDS, syndication and overcrowding, records can and still do break.

The avenues for breaking records remain essentially the same as they have for many years. Radio. Radio is on its' way to the "fastest growing year in radio's history" according to RAB President/CEO Gary Fries. Despite the arrival of TV, mp3.com, the Internet, VCR, mediaplayer, video games, Liquid Audio, MTV, cable-TV, winamp, TV, and every other diversion, radio is experiencing its fastest growing year. Amazing resilience.
In a recent survey of 8,000 music consumers nationally, radio airplay was still overwhelmingly the best way to reach them. Almost 43% of respondents listed radio as the #1 means for awareness of their most recent music purchase. And when Strategic Record Research asked consumers what influenced them to buy records, hearing a song on the radio was clearly the number one response by 80% of those surveyed. Of course video is also very strong, as is in-store visibility, favorable press, the most volatile combination of word-of-mouth and the Internet, and as always and forever, touring where cost effective. The Internet is creating some distribution options that have already changed the way the music business is conducted. While all of that is going on, I think hearing a song on the radio, and falling in love with it, is a contextual thing that will not change for a long time.