Do Endings Matter?

What would you think if you were reading a story to your children and when you turned to your last page, it looked like this?

A little crazy, isn’t it?  But hang on…

There is a Christian radio station in the Atlanta market that plays CCM.  I listen from time to time, and have noticed in the past few years that they have started doing something new.  At the end of each song, they fade the volume a bit in the last five seconds and do a voice-over that announces the song title and artist(s).

In other words, they are doing the same thing as I did to “The Three Little Pigs” above. 

Remember, songs are stories and artists are story tellers.  You would think the ending of a song is fairly important, but someone has apparently decided that it isn’t.

I am not an expert on such matters, but I do not know of any other genre where this is done.  You would not for example hear that on a country station or an oldies station. 

That being said, I know why it is done.  It allows stations to play more songs and helps them avoid having a live DJ all of the time.  It also gives the artists some credit they might not have otherwise received and provides some information to the listener that they might find useful.

Those are all good reasons, but this practice still annoys me because it tells me that someone does not think the ending is really important.  And if they don’t believe that the ending is important, it makes me wonder if they believe the music itself is really all that important (except for a way to fill time and sell commercials).

I would hate to believe that CCM has become so commercialized that the music itself takes a back seat to economics, but this kind of thing makes me wonder. 

If radio stations did that to your music, would it bother you?  What do you think it means?