Careful…

Seth Godin has such an ability to get to the essence of things quickly, as he did when he asked the question: Does an orchestra need the oboe?

Gwynn Guilford makes the same case in a longer form article in Quartz.

And now, if you’ve worked in Radio for any length of time, you recognize what’s happened.

Maybe that first station didn’t really need an all-night talent. Maybe the talent available to that station was worse than not having any talent at all after midnight.

But that morphed into, “Maybe we don’t actually need a live person in middays. After all, we don’t really want them to talk. Why can’t we just have a voice from another of our markets record our liners and use that in middays?”

And if we don’t need live talent in middays, we sure as heck don’t need it from 7pm-midnight.

“But take away one more instrument, and then another, and pretty soon, we’ll stop listening.”

Especially when we have better mostly-music alternatives.