A McDonaldização da rádio (as clássicas queixas)

«Historically, commercial radio programming is safe, inoffensive and mass market to maintain advertisers and to build and maintain the largest possible audience. To programmers this is consistency, whereas to audiences it is predictability. MacFarland [MacFarland, D.T. (1997) Future Radio Programming Strategies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates] describes this philosophy as the McDonaldization of radio with predictability and familiarity being guiding factors in programming strategy. It could be argued (and evidence of student listening bears this out) that it is predictability in commercial radio that has created the fall in listening by the ‘wirefree’ generation and the movement of audiences (in the UK) from commercial radio to BBC

national radio or to streaming web stations and Podcasts» (Berry, 149)

A culpa é (também) da programação:

«If radio serves to meet basic human needs at a variety of different levels [«All five of Maslow’s basic human needs can be fulfilled through the act of radio listening, the level of need being dependent upon the individual’s hierarchical position at any given moment in time.  Radio meets physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem and self-actualization needs in a variety of different ways and listeners can engage fulfilment simply by selecting the format type that meets their requirements at any specified period of time»], then it is important that radio provides the necessary variety of programming to fulfil the needs of all listeners.» (Radio Listening as a Function of Basic Human Need: Why Did Maslow Listen To Radio? By Morris W. Shanahan1 , New Zealand Broadcasting School, and Nicholas Brown, The Radio Network, New Zealand , 2002)

«McDonaldization of radio» será uma derivação da expressão McJob, sinónimo de trabalho sem qualificação na indústria do fast food, popularizada no livro «Generation X» de Douglas Coupland, de 1991.