Do radio stations make agreements to synchronize their commercial breaks?

grrrrrr! Isn’t that incredibly annoying? I can’t stand commercials…probably why I have my iPod on hand, at all times! I have wondered the same. The last 4–7 mins before the end of the hour – always a big block of commericals and yes, then again at really weird times in the hour.

I think it is coincidence. The songs are around the same length usually, and there are only so many was to divide the hour up. I hate that about TV too.

I think lefteh is right, it’s an agreement – or they’re all using the same tactic so it might
as well be.

Great question. I think it applies to television ads as well.

I’ve thought so about tv commercials for a long time…supremely frustating.

It is the reason I went with Sirius radio. No more commercials. Entire channels of music by genre or artist. Today, I listened to Elvis in the car almost all day.

I think the setup for commercials was to do a major break at the top of each hour with mini breaks during the quarters of the hour. The top of the hour is when they also do traffic and top news stories on that terrestrial radio.

Yeah, that was my initial thought, but I started taking notice of the times and they turned out to be things like :19, :36, :53, etc.

@lefteh: If it’s :19, :36, and :53 then you have your answer! That’s not a random sequence of numbers.

I made those numbers up.
they turned out to be things like… they were merely examples of the random times they would happen.

”...I started taking notice of the times….”

I just thought perhaps you hadn’t realized that those numbers are 17 minutes apart.

Woah.

Bizarre. I honestly made those numbers up at random. Apparently my mind thinks in 17s.

I always knew you were a genius. ;)

Well, almost a genius. Everyone know real genius is thinking in 19s.

Those of us thinking in 17s, however, are proud of our subject-verb agreements.

You go, lefteh!

I’m afraid I only think in 3s.

However, lefteh, isn’t woah spelled wHoa?

Could Chuckie’s verb tense be correct if he’s British?

@augustlan: I think there’s quite a bit of latitude when it comes to the spelling of onomatopoeias and exclamations.

@breedmitch: Yes…but he’s not!

Did you just change “lalitude” to “latitude”, or are my eyes playing tricks? quite possible, as I am not wearing my glasses

Nope, no typo correction this time around.

I must be getting old :)

GQ lefteh! i have always wondered about this. too bad there isn’t a definite answer so far :(

Yeah, it is too bad. I was hoping that there was some radio executive lurking in Fluther.

Radio stations are rated by quarter hours. If a listener marks down that they listened to a station for the first few minutes of the quarter hour the station gets credit for the whole quarter hour. So stations by nature started running commercial breaks after the first song or two of each quarter hour. That is usually :20 :35 and :50. Stations to not make agreements to run commercials at the same time. In fact most stations race to get out of the commercial break quicker than their competition. Since all stations are rated by the same service (Arbitron) they most all follow the same start times for breaks.

Now that’s good fluther!

Ahaaaa. There we go! Makes sense! Thanks, iJimmy!

no.

The problem is solved by getting satalite and simply pause the program for about 15 to 20 minutes and simply fast forward through all commercials
charles