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> But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed?

This is just my personal opinion, but I (and most of my friends) absolutely hate having to listen to FM radio for those exact reasons. All of my in-car music is played from my smartphone. I don't even remember when I last heard the radio.

For new artists, there's nothing that can beat online music services giving personalized recommendations based on your own preferences (or even based on what's popular). A generic radio presenter can't even come close.

As for the news, what's happening, closed roads, etc. I can get all that info online and skim across it in seconds, rather than having fragments of information trickle down from a radio presenter between songs and commercials.

I understand it's your area of work, but there is no way FM radio will ever survive in it's current format as we move forward.

I think the days of generic local and national radio services, which play a mix of popular music carefully chosen to be as inoffensive as possible, and provide a diet of celeb gossip, political squabbles and local roadworks, are numbered. The era when half of, say, London listened to Capital Radio every day is long gone (and Capital itself now resembles an iPod on shuffle with the hits of Rihanna, Adele and Katy Perry all day and night with almost no speech). If being bland enough that no one switched me off was my business model, I'd be filling out my application for unemployment right now.

Where radio still has a significant role to play is in the discovery of new content, new information, things you might not already know you're interested in, and that might be so far outside your sphere of influence that the computer hasn't been able to guess you'd like them yet.

I work in the community radio sector these days; small, non-profit local stations staffed by volunteer presenters passionate about what they play. In my own opinion, all the algorithms in the world can't replace someone who knows their specific style of music and has the enthusiasm to present it to the world. This, I believe, still has a bright future.

I guess we're looking at two different approaches to the same problem of discovering new information and content. There are those who advocate an automated approach--you like X, lots of people who like X also like Y, try Y, here's an automated feed of Y--and there are those, like me, who prefer the more curated experience of broadcast radio, from a studio, with a presenter.

I don't sit still, sticking my head in the sand and pretending everything will be the same forever, with people gathering around the wireless to listen to the latest Bob's Country Music Hour on 1170AM. It's my job to reconcile this stuff, and make sure we move with the times, give people what they want, and leverage this new technology to benefit communities for years to come.

I listen to the radio for music when I'm driving (no particular reason other than I'm lazy) and I can not remember any time I heard something introduced that was new to me.

My greatest period of musical growth was college. This was years ago (Win XP was just released) when Napster was still around (briefly) and we had a campus-wide filesharing system[1] (also briefly).

1: http://ostatic.com/buzzsearch

"But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room"

Pitchfork.com and Wire magazine serve my music recommendations, Songkick and Facebook keep my social calendar full and Google Maps has fine traffic indications. Podcasts like WTF, Superego, Econtalk and the Indoor Kids provide better "company" than any radio DJ I've heard.

> But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs...

You can listen to pretty much any radio station (local/national/international) online though.

Good point. I have the fantastic Pure One Flow[1], a radio which looks like any other old-fashioned set, but which picks up local stations on FM, the national and regional stuff over DAB digital, and then connects to wi-fi to receive internet streams from all over the world.

It's a brilliant device, and so seamless. Switching from the FM community station two streets away to a broadcast from Seattle takes seconds. It'll also connect to a uPnP server and play your own music collection over the LAN.

I prefer a converged solution like this, rather than just picking up live radio online all the time. Listening on FM and DAB saves bandwidth, and a lot of local stations are broadcast in better quality than they're streamed. FM is, to all intents and purposes, lossless.

This is the kind of thing 'everything-in-the-cloud' advocates forget. Broadcasting is just so efficient for sending one programme service out to millions of people. It'll never go away.

[1]: http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558...

Yeap. I listen to KRTU all the time, since there aren't any decent Jazz radios around here.

Websites like Turntable.fm are great for discovering music. They let other people be the DJ and you don't have to deal with the terrible FM radio commercials.

Community radio stations like ALL FM (allfm.org), Sheffield Live! (sheffieldlive.org), and Resonance FM (resonancefm.com) to name just a few I'm familiar with are great for discovering music, let local people passionate about music showcase their skills and their passion, and don't have commercials.

On radio, I agree: I enjoy the wit of certain hosts. You can stay on the cloud however - most radio stations have net radio so I can listen to my favourite hosts all over the world. I switch between NPR's awesome SandBox [1] and various student radio stations during the day.

1. http://www.npr.org/sandbox/conplay/

Rather than shelling out £12 a month for a broadcast TV licence for my new house

Could you explain this for those of us not familiar with the UK? You have to pay to watch TV that is already broadcast OTA?

In the UK (as in South Africa incidentally), the public broadcaster (BBC) gets its money via a license fee that tv owners pay rather than out of the government budget as happens in Canada (CBC).

Not owning an actual TV set doesn't exempt you from buying a TV license. If you own a computer or mobile phone you need to buy a license for £145 per year. It's basically a flat tax imposed on every household.

You are correct in pointing out that a license is required no matter what device is used to watch or record broadcasts. However, just owning such a device does not mean that you have to automatically pay. If you use your TV only to watch DVDs, or your computers to only watch on-demand material, you don't have to have a license. The key word here is "broadcasts".

The tricky part is convincing the TV Licence goons that you either don't have any receiver, or that you don't use it. It used to be that you could have the RF unit specially mangled as proof you don't watch broadcasts, but now with set-top boxes and TV tuner cards and iPlayer and whatnot, it's a lot harder to demonstrate conclusively that you don't use any BBC services.

So they just keep sending you threatening letters.

Same in Italy, for 2012 is 112 Euro for a year (145$). According to this chart http://www.abbonamenti.rai.it/immagini/grafico2011.gif this kind of fee is quite common for public tv in Europe.

Comic illustration of topic: http://www.smileecards.com/card/living-in-the-cloud

Radio 'still' works in the UK. It worked for me when I lived in London. Radio in the US is a joke - payola and playlists.