There’s a relatively new radio format making the rounds in the good ol’ US of A called “Jack.” This format has recently been adopted by a radio station where I live.

My strange and varied career has included three years working as an on-air personality at a small commercial radio station in upstate New York. For two and a half years, I worked primarily in the news department (although I also got involved in the music programming side of things, as the whim of the music director allowed), and then switched over to become a morning dj. So I am not an entirely disinterested party when it comes to radio (or journalism or pop music, for that matter).

Because I worked for so long at a rock-n-roll station, I was favored with a barrage of free albums and CDs. When I left radio, my appetite for new music remained, so I switched from getting free music to paying for it. A lot of it.

In recent years, my computer manufacturer of choice came out with a product called “iTunes”, and I finally decided to join the digital music age. I digitized my entire CD collection into one central disk drive, and now I can play anything in my collection with the click of a mouse. According to iTunes, I could play my entire play list for over 46 days and never repeat a track. (Of course, since several of my CDs are greatest hits and similar compilations, I’d hear the same *songs* more than once, but not exactly the same tracks.)

That kind of music library would be unmanageable, but iTunes includes a “rating” feature that allows me to assign a 1 to 5-star rating to any given track. When I digitized my CDs, I simply gave a 5-star rating to whatever track or tracks cause me to pick up the album. This allows me to set up a play list that randomly plays only my top-rated tunes. (8 days of music with, in theory, no repeats.) This makes for a very cool jukebox: all of my favorites, and only my favorites, spanning the breadth of my musical interests.

Now, along comes Jack.

The current range of music formats in the US highlights specific music genres and sub-genres. Any given station will tend to feature only R&B or classic rock (rock hits of the late 60’s through mid 70’s) or oldies (rock hits of the fifties through mid sixties) or “young” country or hip hop or top hits of the eighties or whatever. The Jack format does not recognize genre barriers. Jack could play the Clash followed by Suzanne Vega followed by Cake followed by Celine Dion. Depeche Mode followed by the Eagles. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear the Statler Brothers followed by Eminem on Jack. It’s a fascinatingly eclectic mix of the best (and the near-best) of most of the major music genres, going back to the mid-Sixties (albeit emphasizing more recent music).

In short, the music is right to my tastes. Not as edgy, certainly, but neither is my five-star mix on my iTunes. It’s all proven commodities. One doesn’t go to Jack to hear the latest. For that, I need to go elsewhere.

But Jack is different from other formats in another way: there are no djs. None. No personalities at all. Just a random selection of clips from a voice-over guy saying things like, “Playing the music we want” or “We’ll play anything, except your requests.”

Good music jockeys in a good format do more than simply announce the title of the song you just heard. They also have a little bit of influence over the order in which the music gets played. The degree of influence a dj can hold over the music mix depends upon how tightly formatted the station is, but most locally-owned stations still allow for at least *some* sway. The jock can rearrange the songs on his play list to highlight interesting connections lyrical or musical. This is what gives a radio show its flavor. It’s more than a random mix of music: it has a subtle theme.

Jack’s voice-overs claim that they play what they want. But to my trained ear, there exists no hint that any person holds any sway over what songs are being played. There are no clever segues between tunes, no thematic links to tie one song with the next – except as you would expect to occasionally pop up in a random shuffle, like my iTunes occasionally manages. So I don’t think “they” play what “they” want; I think “they” choose some songs and let a computer pick them at random.

I like my iTunes shuffle, don’t get me wrong. But it is, when all is said and done, a mechanical mix. Some songs simply don’t go well together, even though the songs are individually great. My iTunes is a fun back-up plan when I don’t have a specific CD in mind to listen to at the office. But as much as I try to cleverly set the parameters of my iTunes jukebox, the mix itself has no cleverness to it at all. Just like Jack. Jack has no soul. Great music spanning a wide variety of genres, yes. But personality? Voice? Character? No.

People respond to character. They respond to voice. I know several people who say that they don’t miss the patter of the djs. That may well be. But I am firmly convinced that people can sense the difference between a mechanical mix and a thoughtful presentation. The mind will grow to miss any kind of human connection with the music being played. This is what makes Jack less than the sum of its parts.

I believe that Jack’s approach to having an eclectic music base is a sound one. Now if a station were to adopt that kind of music format and combine it with a smart radio personality, *that* could be amazing.