July 18, 2026

Why We Still Log Every Track by Hand

Most stations our size have moved to automated playout systems that log every track automatically for royalty reporting. Sideband still logs by hand, on paper, in the booth — partly institutional inertia, but mostly because it forces whoever’s on air to actually think about sequencing rather than trusting a rotation algorithm.

The tradeoff is real: hand logging is slower and occasionally wrong. We’ve decided that’s an acceptable cost for keeping programming decisions human.