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It's a shame what's happened to radio

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Re: It's a shame what's happened to radio

#21

Post by pixl97 »

stackghost wrote: post #3

>I signed off the air for the last time in 1994 [...] radio has changed drastically, and it just wouldn’t be any fun for me today. I don't agree with this premise. FM Radio is definitely more corporate today, but I grew up in the 90s and my memories of FM radio are not fond. For my whole life it has always been materially the same, shitty, experience: occasional good songs interleaved with mediocre ones and a hefty d…

Most stations sucked, but there were some more fun counter culture stations.

I remember KGLE (KEGL?) Out of DFW pulling shit on their radio shows like saying the city banned smoking in cars and people flooded city government phone lines with complaints and rants, which had a lulz component that we wouldnt see again till the 4chan days.

Re: It's a shame what's happened to radio

#22

Post by stackghost »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #8
stackghost wrote: post #3

>I signed off the air for the last time in 1994 [...] radio has changed drastically, and it just wouldn’t be any fun for me today. I don't agree with this premise. FM Radio is definitely more corporate today, but I grew up in the 90s and my memories of FM radio are not fond. For my whole life it has always been materially the same, shitty, experience: occasional good songs interleaved with mediocre ones and a hefty d…

Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-) Nowadays I have a USB drive, though I understand that's rare. Can hardly find a (car) radio that supports modern sizes these days, probably by design.

>Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)

Yes, that's an accurate description of the hassle of trying to avoid unskippable ads.

Re: It's a shame what's happened to radio

#23

Post by jauntywundrkind »

nicksergeant wrote: post #5

Still a few great ones hanging around, like WBER in Rochester: https://wber.org/

I treasure Radio On Internet (thanks Russ (Silicon Valley joke)) so much. There's so many less but still so many independent/community/college radio stations all over.

On the west coast, https://kexp.org of course. https://kcrw.com and their HD2 channel.

Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org jazz/blues/local is incredible (so help ye who has to listen through the local music announcements though!) and also with a hd2. https://ksjd.org has some fun variety. https://coloradosound.org is great rock, as is https://koto.org in CO. There's nearly nothing that makes me so happy as https://mountainchill.com in telluride co; a station that makes it clear how narrowly grouped together most stations are & that just is so good.

Coming closer to me, https://wtmd.org rock in Baltimore md, https://xpn.org in Philly for more. https://wzum.org jazz in pittsburgh pa. https://wdvx.com in knoxville tn.

I also listen to a bunch of others, which i'd characterize more as tier 2; good but often more ads or less reliable a win for me. weqx, wmrw-lp, kozo-lp, weru, wmpg. wsri and wwod (both "the river" 93.9, and occasionally from the right elevation in NH overlapping in signal amusingly enough).

A lot of these stations have good track listings too, broken down by the DJ, sometimes that you can play on demand. It's incredible how much excellent interesting fantastic music you can scout out or listen to.

I used to listen to endless endless reams of shoutcast stations online. But man that has really really died out something fierce. There used to be so many interesting niche stations there. It still got me started looking widely at radio stations, as a decent fraction were just regular radio stations too. Realizing how badly commercial radio would never give the goods, would play the same pop stuff all the time, and have lots of ads? Man it was sad, but there were so many excellent other things to tune into! Alas on the dial, it's largely been couple massive corporate and political/religious (all very right-wing, Powell Memorandum on and on) titans taking over as much radiowaves as they can, as stations fold and go under, in the hard times of keeping your head up in the world today, getting the building, gear, and staff's bill's payed. (Especially with the administration trying to destroy the arts broadly, gutting National Endowment for the Arts!)

I'd absolutely love for folks to throw more stations they enjoy out here. https://radio.garden is of course wicked fun to browse generally! Gets submitted every so often, often garnering some significant love. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=radio.garden

Re: It's a shame what's happened to radio

#25

Post by olsondv »

parpfish wrote: post #2

There’s a human connection element to old radio that streaming will never replicate. And I worry that it’s gone from modern automated radio too. It used to be if you were driving down the road and heard a song you liked Hearing a song you liked on the radio hit harder then playing it yourself because you knew that there was another human nearby at that moment in time that had picked it out and played it. You were phy…

Or at a stop light and the car next to you is listening/singing to the same song. Never happens anymore.

Re: It's a shame what's happened to radio

#26

Post by sien »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #15
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #10

(2009)ish And a very American/mainstream-centric view of things. Radio (especially from the view of things in 2009) in more niche/underground circles was and in some regards still is a driving force of music curation and community in other parts of the world like the UK, parts of the EU and beyond. Does radio have to be on the FM band? Do we count streaming like via YouTube, twitch and other platforms the same as Rad…

I grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1. Literally the entire population of UK teens listened to that one station for ~20 years (though individuals would listen to different shows - John Peel's famous indie/punk/whatever show in the evenings was very different to the daytime mainstream stuff). In Australia it was ABC's Triple J - similar story. Everyone tu…

Community radio is still alive and well in Australia too.

RRR and PBS in Melbourne are still excellent and seem to still be a fairly big deal if bumper stickers are anything to go by.

Re: It's a shame what's happened to radio

#27

Post by kazinator »

In my neck of the woods, Vancouver, Canada, nothing happened to radio. It was shit in the 1980s and it's the same today.

Wait! Except for one major improvement. There is a station CJNY ("The Journey") at 106.3 FM, which is run by Indigenous people:

https://www.cjnyfm.ca/about/

Re: It's a shame what's happened to radio

#29

Post by graymalkin »

kxrm wrote: post #4

Good radio died in the mid 80s. Most people today can hardly remember when radio was curated live. Perhaps if you were near a small station you might have had the experience. Most major markets were completely corporate by the early 90s. I know, my first career pick was radio, and by the time I was in college at a college radio station in the late 90s. That career path was dead unless I wanted to be in marketing or s…

It died mid 80s for me too. That was when the monoculture, where everyone was listening to the same thing, just disappeared. I was just a kid so I never knew what happened. All I knew was that when I was itty bitty, I could turn the dial and find mostly the same stuff everywhere. Mid 80s onwards and it was all fractured. That fracturing continued to the point where it’s like there’s a genre and a band for every taste…which is cool, but now we don’t have a broadly shared cultural experience anymore. Ditto for television. Basically, the scarcity is gone. On the one hand, cool, but on the other, society weirdly suffers.

Re: It's a shame what's happened to radio

#30

Post by psvv »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #23
nicksergeant wrote: post #5

Still a few great ones hanging around, like WBER in Rochester: https://wber.org/

I treasure Radio On Internet (thanks Russ (Silicon Valley joke)) so much. There's so many less but still so many independent/community/college radio stations all over. On the west coast, https://kexp.org of course. https://kcrw.com and their HD2 channel. Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org jazz/blues/local is incredible (so help ye who has to listen through the local music announcements though!) and also with a h…

I really appreciate this comment, so I'll try to return the favor (in small part) by sharing one pretty special to me: WYCE, https://grcmc.org/wyce. Hope you enjoy.
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