"You're 'bout to go downtown, bitch right here on the station that plays only platinum hits! That's 187.4 on your FM dial. If you're lickin', that's WBALLZ!"
— DJ Suck T. Nuts, Doggystyle
An album where songs and/or comedy routines are interspersed with Witty Banter, Parody Commercials and station ID breaks. Also scheduled may be inane news/weather/traffic reports, obnoxious callers, and embarrassing studio mishaps.
Compare Studio Chatter.
Examples:
Rock- For the most part, Cotton Candy's Top Notch And First Rate is set up to sound like a radio station's broadcast of a battle of the bands. Instead of parody commercials though, the album alternates original songs with covers of actual advertising jingles. There's also the track "Mark Robinson", consisting of excerpts from real radio program Unshackled!, a program dramatizing real life stories of people's conversions to Christianity - along with going with the radio theme, it has some fun with the fact that the subject of one episode of the program shares his name with Cotton Candy member Mark Robinson.
- Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys has this throughout the album- "Look Alive, Sunshine" is Dr. Death preaching on his pirate radio station as the intro to Na Na Na, about halfway through the album we get "Jet Star and the Kobra Kid/Traffic Report", and at the very end we have "Goodnight Dr. Death" as the final transmission.
- Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (which pretends to be various obnoxious modern rock radio channels)
- "Do You Remember Rock 'N' Roll Radio?" from End of the Century by The Ramones. kicks off the album with a radio announcer voice saying: "This is rock 'n' roll radio. Let's rock 'n' roll with the Ramones" and closing off by saying: "This is rock 'n' roll radio. Stay tuned for more rock 'n' roll."
- Spliff, who in those days were the Nina Hagen Band minus Nina Hagen, made their debut album The Spliff Radio Show somewhat to sound like this.
- The Weeknd's Dawn FM uses this approach as a metaphor for purgatory (hence the album's name), featuring fellow Canadian star Jim Carrey as the DJ of Toronto's CIDC-FM.
- The Who's The Who Sell Out, purporting to be a broadcast from Wonderful Radio London (only Jingles and Parody Commercials in this one, though)
Electronic
- Bomb the Bass' Into the Dragon pretends to tune through a variety of radio stations, sometimes even ending up on another station right at the end of playing a different song. There's also DJ banter introducing the songs— in one case, in Japanese.
- Daft Punk's first album Homework has second track WDPK 83.7 FM.
- Junkie XL has Radio JXL: A Broadcast from the Computer Hell Cabin. The first disc is titled "3PM" and represents daytime radio, thus being a wildly varying Genre Roulette. The second disc, "3AM", is a continuous mix ranging from ambient to progressive house and trance. Both discs contain radio channel jingles every now and then.
- Vylet Pony's Carousel (An Examination of the Shadow, Creekflow...): The end of "How to Talk to Your Shadow?" has a radio host for the fictional station 32.7 The Creek announcing the next track:
From the heart of Ponyville
Spinning our next track
The one and only DJ Pon3!
Let's spin this shit! - Yellow Magic Orchestra's ×∞Multiplies is depicted as a radio broadcast by Snakeman Show, with the comedy troupe providing a DJ-style intro and various radio skits interspersed between YMO's songs. The last of these skits outright takes the form of a group of DJs arguing about the state of modern music at the time of the album's 1980 release.
Rap
- Little Brother's debut album, The Listening, was centered around the fictional radio station, "WJLR".
- The premise of TD Cruze's TDTV is that the listener is watching Video Soul, an actual music video program that aired on BET from 1981 to 1996, and that each of the songs are different videos interspersed with sampled dialogue from Donnie Simpson, one of the hosts from Video Soul, in between each song. TDTV also included a "Commercial Break" track, with samples from early 90's TV commercials.
Jazz
- 11 tracks into Victor Wooten's Jazz/Funk unaccompanied bass album A Show of Hands, a dry classical radio announcer cuts in to announce that "You have just been listening to a medley of Jazz tunes by Victor Lemonte Wooten. We will now hear his performance of the Classical Thump Prelude in G-Major, written for ''Quatro Stringendo Solo Basso Profundo de Electronique''...on radio W-00-10," after which he jumps into Classical Thump, an adaptation of a couple of Bach pieces for Ludicrous Speed slap bass.
Steampunk
- The Cog Is Dead styled their first album, "Steam-Powered Stories" like an old-time radio show, complete with fake commercials and new breaks.
Novelty
- Da Yoopers did this on several albums, starting with Culture Shock.
- Dr. Demento's second album, Dementia Royale, is presented as if it were an episode of his radio show, including opening and closing theme songs.
- The Firesign Theatre did this a few times:
- "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" (which was the entire second side of their album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All?) and its sequels were parodies of old-timey Radio Drama, complete with advertisements, and an interruption for breaking news.
- Their album "Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death" is a fake radio broadcast with multiple shows, DJ commentary, and plenty of promos and commercials broadcasting on the last day of the 20th century.
- German comedian Mike Krüger's 1984 album 120 Schweine nach Beirut is one of his few studio albums and made to sound like a broadcast of the fictional radio station Quickborn Radio. That is, the album starts with a spoke intro that ends in a short piece of Studio Chatter before embracing this trope.
- The compilation album Smashie and Nicey: Let's Rock! has a couple of intros by Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield's (respectively) DJ characters, but is otherwise a conventional compilation.
- Stevens and Grdnic
, who are well acquainted with mass market commercial radio and have served as morning zoo hosts, parodied the "wonderful wacky world of radio announcing" in the Grammy-nominated Somewhere Over The Radio. You can find the entire album on YouTube.
- The P.D.Q. Bach albums P.D.Q. Bach on the Air and WTWP: Classical Talkity-Talk Radio.
- The German acapella group Wise Guys did an album called Radio, which included two jingles, three news segments and a horoscope.
Other Examples:
Anime- Music for Freelance is an album of remixes and covers of various tracks from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, interspersed with several tracks/talk spots by a "pirate radio DJ" from "Radio Free Mars".
Comedy
- George Carlin's A Place for my Stuff included fake commercials, community "announcements", and a few full skits (like the fake game show "Asshole, Jackoff, Scumbag" and the "Interview with Jesus") between segments of his stand-up routine.
Film
- The soundtrack album to American Graffiti has several DJ bits from Wolfman Jack interspersed among the songs, similar to the movie itself.
- The soundtrack to Reservoir Dogs uses voiceovers from comedian Steven Wright to frame the '70s pop songs as part of a fictional '70s revival show, "K-Billy's Super Sounds of the Seventies". This includes station identification, recaps of play lists, and a call-in contest. The same technique is used during the movie itself.
Radio
- Dark Adventure Radio Theatre by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society is a series of CDs of Lovecraft story adaptations in the style of 1930s Mercury Theatre radio dramas, complete with studio announcements and mock-cigarette ads.
Video Games
- In-game radios in videogames. Some even reflect in the player actions, often resulting in News Travels Fast:
- The Grand Theft Auto series.
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City even had an actual album—in the shape of a 7-CD box with one CD for each non-talk radio station. Not only do you get one epic '80s music compilation, but the CDs also include intros, interludes and outros by the hosts, not to mention radio commercials.
- The Fallout series since Bethesda took over.
- Rebel Galaxy Outlaw
- Crash FM from Burnout Paradise
- The Grand Theft Auto series.
Western Animation
- SpongeBob SquarePants's album The Best Day Ever is presented as a broadcast from WH2O radio station, interspersed with song requests from SpongeBob characters, ads, and even radio hijacking by Plankton.
