My first two jobs in Radio were minimum wage and I had gotten them the way I had gotten all of my other previous minimum wage jobs: I walked in. Applied. And waited. Or in the case of WLOL, someone at the college station stopped me before I went over and applied at KQRS and said “You know Swedberg works at WLOL? Go there first.” I did and Gregg said, “I don’t have anything but Tom upstairs in Promotions might.”
There came a time when I decided that I was going to take off the training wheels and see if I could actually do this. I’d been unbelievably fortunate to have spent five years working with and surrounded by some amazingly talented people. Hopefully some of it had rubbed off and there was no way to know unless I took a big flying leap.
I’d watched hundreds, no, thousands of people apply for jobs at WLOL and their tapes and resumes ended up in this giant pile.
Piles suck. Except for this one time in Edmonton but that’s for another time.
I’d also seen labels and artists, unsolicited, inundate Programming with product. And most of it ended up in a pile.
I didn’t want to end up in a pile. I wanted just eight seconds of their attention. That’s all. Eight seconds. If I got eight seconds, I was going to be doing better than all of the people in the pile.
