241–250 of 285 posts
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Hey, I can receive RNZ on shortwave on the East Coast of USA! About 10,000 miles away if we count the signal bouncing multiple times between the ionosphere and the ground.
I get it in the mornings here in Vancouver, BC.
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The problem is the people who advertisers want to target want to hear the same songs every day. I wouldn't be surprised if people like you want me who want more variety are a majority - but we don't spend money on things advertisers want us to buy by enough to be worth advertising to us.
If people who want more variety are the majority, I suspect the problem is just that those people don't listen to radio anyway. Like, think about how many stations are Christmas format, and how "Christmas music" is a very regimented set of about 20-40 songs from the 1950s. To paraphrase XKCD[0], radio embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Baby Boomers' childhoods every December[1]. Probably because t…
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I still work in radio and have for more than 30 years. Perhaps I'm an outlier, but I never cared about the DJs, never felt a connection, never wanted their Morning Zoos or their Tammy and Frankie in the Morning junk, with the fake callers, the forced laughs, the crappy contests, the gossip lifted from other uncredited sources. All I ever wanted was lots of unrepeated music. Or, failing that, lots of intelligent talk…
You might get all-music at night. But in the mornings radio listeners want to hear talking.
I'm the OP, and I'm surprised to find this article on HN at all, let alone the front page! Many comments are focusing on music but the thing I tried to get across in the article was that good radio wasn't primarily about the music, it was about fun and connection. A good DJ kept you from just turning the radio off when you heard that same hit the fourth time today -- you wanted to keep listening because the DJ made i…
Possibly controversial opinion, but radio stopped being relevant to me personally when congress removed the ownership restrictions for a single market. It's only gotten worse from there IMO. Radio is about catering to a very specific, and generally older, market at least where I am.
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In commercial radio, DJs haven't selected the music in 40 or more years. I used to show up for my shifts to find a printed playlist from a software product called Selector. I had to follow it.
Also, most commercial radio DJs would talk and talk and talk all the way up to the point in the song where lyrics started, and then right after the last lyric, they'd start yacking again. A lot of music that was on the radio in the 70s, 80s and 90s had great instrumental intros and outros that you just totally missed because some garbage DJ had to get in one last "TODAY'S HITS, YESTERDAY'S LEGENDS, ONLY ON IDIOT ROCK…
I'm the OP, and I'm surprised to find this article on HN at all, let alone the front page! Many comments are focusing on music but the thing I tried to get across in the article was that good radio wasn't primarily about the music, it was about fun and connection. A good DJ kept you from just turning the radio off when you heard that same hit the fourth time today -- you wanted to keep listening because the DJ made i…
I miss DJs with taste and encyclopedic knowledge of their music would challenge their listeners, educate them, expose them to new things. Variations on themes, new artists, connections with old ones. Now, I guess they read the blurb and hit the button on the canned program. Shouts to Pierre Robert (rip), John DeBella, Cyndy Drue, etc at WMMR and WYSP (rip). They still let Jacky Bam Bam play the real stuff sometimes;…
Radio is still cool! But it's just not really on the FCC-licensed bands anymore. Independent Internet radio stations keep the spirit alive. Look around, there very well might be a vibrant local music-and-more community right in your neighborhood! Two stations I listen to regularly here in NYC: 8 Ball Radio - https://8ballradio.nyc Radio Free Brooklyn - https://www.radiofreebrooklyn.org Who else has favorites to share…
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Also, most commercial radio DJs would talk and talk and talk all the way up to the point in the song where lyrics started, and then right after the last lyric, they'd start yacking again. A lot of music that was on the radio in the 70s, 80s and 90s had great instrumental intros and outros that you just totally missed because some garbage DJ had to get in one last "TODAY'S HITS, YESTERDAY'S LEGENDS, ONLY ON IDIOT ROCK…
Back in the later 70s a Chicago three-letter AM radio station used to speed up songs so they could stuff in more commercials. And the DJ would do the parent’s talking when there’s no lyrics, even to the point of talking through the entire Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Love’s Theme instrumental.
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I don't know about "most smartphones," but the FM bits were commonly a built-in with Qualcomm and some other chipsets for a coon's age. Even the OG Motorola Droid, of 2009, had the parts inside for an FM radio. They just weren't connected to an antenna and the default software stack didn't include any access to those parts at all. Flagship Qualcomm-equipped Samsung phones up to the S20 or so tended to be ~similar: Th…
This has absolutely nothing to do with similarity with BLE radio and it’s 2.4Ghz antenna. And a far cry from most smartphones.