What’s the Difference between a DJ and A Radio Announcer?
Posted by jaybeacham on 28 Dec 2017 | Tagged as: blog
I love to sing and have recorded songs on several online Karaoke sites for a number of years now.
I try to intro all my songs and sometimes even outtro them much like I did when I worked at a radio station.
Many people comment that I sound like a radio DJ.
Bella said of my recording of “Our Day Will Come” :
“You know you have a wonderful “Radio” speaking voice! I could just imagine you being a DJ on a classic song station.
You sang this beautifully!” Well I was an announcer on an old time station in the late 1960s. I recorded it November 3, 2013.
I answered her on 12/27/2017 thusly:
A few years ago you said this when you commented on a recording of mine:
“You know you have a wonderful “Radio” speaking voice! I could just imagine you being a DJ on a classic song station.”
Well I was an announcer on an old time station in the late 1960s.
The songs from then and the older ones we played are classic now I suppose.
I’ve attempted to make my SingSnap studio just that, a classic song station.”
Once in Austria as a missionary, an lady asked my companion, Reiner Essyer, who’d been a DJ in SLC, the difference
between a “DJ” and a “Radio Speecher” (announcer). I glossed over the question as he didn’t know that I had been an announcer.
The difference?
A DJ just announces and spins records much like Mary Collins in the movie “Something in The Wind”, a movie about
a DJ, played by Deanna Durbin.
An announcer, like I was, does everything at a station: plays records, is a partial engineer, speaks commercial ads,
writes copy, reports the news, Station Ids, etc. He does everything at a station. A radio DJ doesn’t. Nor does a dance DJ.
That’s the difference.