On-demand audio passes linear audio | Hacker News Reader

On-demand audio passes linear audio

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Free-form radio is still alive and well. https://wfmu.org is a monster in the field as well as a leader in live radio innovation. Their live commenting, archive, and multi-headed station broadcasts, are all remarkable achievements in both technology and community building. I'll give a shout for my two favorite shows, but there are dozens worth tuning in for:

Serious Moonlight Sonatas - https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/MJ

Techtonic - https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/TD

And a bonus: Radio Ravioli - https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/OB

WFMO out of Tuft's has some great stuff as do MANY Northeast colleges.

Even tiny schools like KUPS have some interesting shows.

The days of WBCN from the 60s-70s will be missed (if they are gone), but there's no reason why these things can't happen again. It isn't like there aren't great things to share and talk about it.

Love wfmu but due to time zones I spend most of my time listening to clay pigeon on wake and bake

I think the closest thing to live audio I listen to is the lofi girl channel on youtube, and even then I'm not really listening as it's more just on in the background. Otherwise I have my own music that I listen to.

Check out synthwave girl!

I find it distressing how centrist streaming services are. Whatever seed I ask for, there's like 60 bands that are very likely to populate half the generated playlist.

Most commercial radio is very boring & normative. But gee there are so many stations out there that are independent or community run, where people are out there with interesting vibes & picking select music styles to play. So many stations that try to increase exposure. Which is so unlike what I find on streaming services.

I also deeply miss shoutcast being a vibrant place. Chromewaves Radio had amazing surf/punk vibes. Amazing reggae and electronica stations galore. There's still some life yes, but it's a mere glimmer of what it was.

Use Pandora in discovery mode, and add variety to the station with multiple artists. You'll probably find something new that you like.

I miss radio streams though. there's value to the idea that thousands of others are listening to the same thing in realtime. Damn those personalized streams, i dont want to listen to music alone

I'd rather have been at Glastonbury listening to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POTjcZGLKuY for the whole immersive crowd vibe, but watching it on TV wasnt bad.

I prefer Norman's sampling and MC'ing to David Guetta's.

Armin still does live streams all these years later! https://www.youtube.com/@arminvanbuuren/streams

And the BBC Essential mix https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006wkfp is now streamed online around the world every Friday night and thats been going since 30 October 1993 via the radio!!!

Funny, I've been listening to Essential Mixes since the late 90's and I don't think I've ever listened to them 'live'.

Yeah it's funny, after what feels like at least a solid decade of on-demand audio I'm finding myself seeking out more live audio wherever I can find it. Miss the feeling of at least passively participating in something. I think the isolation of the pandemic kicked some of that into gear.

I guess I can understand the desire to be a part of something, but I can't see that feeling ever driving me back into the clutches of the commercial FM/satellite radio. I think I'd rather track down some popular pirate streamer or better yet just start going to concerts.

I like the Apple Music radio stations for this reason. Not the personalized stations, they have 3 live stations: Hits (generic pop), 1 (modern pop), and Country (obviously country).

I love tuning in to whatever local station I can find while road tripping through some obscure part of the country. With radio I feel connected. Isn't that supposed to be a big part of what music is about? I'll go to any live show at a bar, it doesn't even have to be that good or my kind of music for me to appreciate it.

As someone who lives in an obscure part of the country, almost all of our radio stations come out of the same building which has maybe one actual on-air personality for the ~7 stations broadcasting. What makes our stations "local" is the extensive advertising.

But, how do you know that anyone else was ever listening to the same thing in realtime? Maybe you were the only one every time. Unlikely, but possible. I honestly don't see the difference. If it makes you feel better, try pretending in your mind that thousands of other people are listening to your personalized streams in realtime. Functionally it is the same thing.

You re probably not old enough to remember radio

Which phrased that way sounds as if radio would be dead.

LOL. I was born in the early 70s. I still don’t see a difference between radio and Spotify, other than Spotify is much better since there are no ads, no people talking over the beginning of songs, I can listen to whatever I want, etc. Anytime I’m in the car listening to the radio (my cars are so old that I can’t use Bluetooth to listen to Spotify from my phone) I’m reminded how bad it is. Flipping through stations to find something I want to listen to sucks.

I think the main advantage of radio for music is human curation. Spotify is still far from being able to give me a high quality playlist of music I'm likely to enjoy but would be unlikely to find on my own. However, podcasts and DJ mixes mostly fill this role for me. Internet radio still exists (KEXP is great) but I don't find myself using it much anymore.

For the live element, it seems like Twitch streaming still has a lot of potential if they can figure out the copyright issues.

For conversations and news, I think a well edited long-form podcast is superior to radio in every way.

I don't miss the ads. Every time I listen to the radio it seems like there's 10 minutes of ads for 5 minutes of music. I know that's not actually the case but it doesn't usually take me long to find something else that doesn't have so many ads.

I love on-demand, but I'll never stop listening to Radio Paradise - at least while Bill is still around. They've got better taste in music than I can ever come up with.

Bill will have a superior AI version.

My GOTO for steaming too.

I'm amazed to hear about the podcast numbers. I find I'm incapable of paying attention to podcasts, I can't do anything else while listening, yet I struggle to sit still during the slog that is an external conversation. I'm much more attuned to reading.

But there are hundreds of millions of people, I probably walk by them frequently, who are listening to podcasts every day while doing other activities.

I'm a fan of garden radio for anyone who hasn't used, always fun to tune in to radio stations from other side of the world.

I can't remember the last time there was something actually worth listening to on "live audio".

At the same time, not knowing in advance what the content will be is sort of a killer for me...on-demand has a bit of social proof through reviews and comments, whereas live audio is sort of a crap shoot.

NPR is still pretty fun to listen to occasionally.

Fresh Air has become an audio tranquilizer for old black ladies and their old white “allies”. There is a clumsy attempt to shoehorn race-baiting into nearly every story, followed by a commercial for neuropathy medicine.

I can’t even begin to imagine how one can have a positive reaction to that gruel.

Sometime in the past decade NPR became unlistenable for me. I'm not sure if they changed or I did but I rarely feel I get anything out of listening to NPR other than annoyance.

I was just talking to someone about this exact same thing yesterday and I also made the comment "I'm not sure if they changed or I did".

For twenty years I consumed hours of NPR content per day and was even a contributor, but now I can't stand NPR.

Seems like an unpopular opinion, but I am in the same boat.

A few years ago I got a job where I could listen every morning again after a few years without. The virtue signalling was so intense that it came off almost like a comedy.

To be fair though, I am talking more about the local affiliate station (WNYC) than NPR itself. However, NPR still doesn't stray far from the core demographics of their member stations.

I was just listening to On Point they were talking about music's effect on physical health (heart rate, blood pressure, inflammation, etc)

I listen to NPR all the time. Through my podcast app. Very rarely do I listen to them live (mostly if android auto is temporarily on the fritz)

> NPR is still pretty fun to listen to occasionally.

Agreed but with heavy emphasis on "occasionally."

I grew up listening to NPR. It's not the same any more - and not just compared to way back when but even when compared to a mere ten years ago. The amount of (relatively subpar) content that is purely picked and broadcast for the purpose of showcasing <instance of behavior or existence of person meeting certain carefully selected bullet points determined by the political policy of the broadcasting station> makes the signal-to-noise ratio for non-agenda-sharing listeners rather poor.

It's a real shame because there are such treasures on there that drown in the sea of subpar content picked only because it serves the agenda of the station in question, and doubly-so because the national NPR w/ independently run regional stations model is absolutely terrific for promoting local journalism.

I haven't listened to it in some years, but IMHO the best of NPR was the pre-recorded programs like Radiolab. Live segments were mostly just yammering, in one ear and out the other, nothing said in such segments has persisted in the conscious portion of my brain.

>I can't remember the last time there was something actually worth listening to on "live audio".

https://kexp.org/

>... whereas live audio is sort of a crap shoot.

Crap shoots can be fun, though!

There's an interesting court case happening in Dallas right now between two former radio hosts and their former employer. Basically, the hosts were unsatisfied that they didn't own their own material and that they couldn't get corporate to bump the pay of the producers and board operators who helped make their show work. So they proposed a solution where they would record additional content in the form of a podcast and use a subscription to that material to pay these other guys more money. While the hosts were slated to make ~$250K each for 3 hours of airtime a day, producers usually make around $35K, and board ops less.

The corporate side said no, and thus the hosts resigned. This began the enforcement of a non-compete agreement that the hosts thumbed their noses at, immediately starting up a podcast in the same format as their radio show, with a similar name. They were promptly sued for violation of the non-compete and currently have a TRO until they have mediation next Monday. They had accumulated around 4000 subscriptions at $6.90 a month in about a month's time.

Twitter-adherent people might be familiar with one of their lawyers Matt Bruenig, who is a socialist lawyer with a strong internet presence and has been involving himself in NLRB related matters since he was in college. He's a friend of one of the hosts and is apparently using this as a test case to try to at least limit what non-competes in the entertainment industry can enforce. At one point, two of the drive-time show hosts went to corporate and asked to have their current contracts rewritten to have their contracts end at the same time as the proposed new contract of these hosts. They were shot down. This will be brought up in court as a strike against collective bargaining.

For example, it's standard in radio non-competes that you do not broadcast within the listening area of your market for the duration of the non-compete. The format and name of the show is owned by the radio corp. And should you decide to negotiate with any third party during the course of your contract or non-compete for better pay, you are required under the terms of the contract to disclose these to the company because they have the right of first refusal. The argument of these hosts is that they are not technically competing with the radio station because they took their show online and do not release the show until late in the evening after the station's unsyndicated content has run its course.

The hosts claim that the non-compete is unfair. The station claims that they've spent considerable money promoting the hosts and would suffer financial injury if hosts could just roll off of a contract and directly into a podcast. IMO they both have valid points.

"Live"? The article says "linear". Listening to a recording being played over some one-to-many distribution system is not "live".

Is playing a recording "linear" or "on demand"?

Context. I can say the sentence “I’m playing this record for you live on air now”, and everyone knows what is meant. So did you when you read the headline, presumably. These are not mathematical terms.

That's a model that belongs to the past, when there were live DJs. Broadcast radio today is mostly automated. Much like streaming sites and satellite radio. They even use much the same software playout systems. Even if it sounds like a DJ, it's probably just files of pre-recorded announcements.

It's a media industry-specific use that generally means "the broadcaster picks what to play and when" or "the opposite of on-demand."

That makes sense for "linear". Calling something "live" when it's a remote one to many system just playing out a playlist is a bit much.

Even more insular audio bubbles than programmed radio stations of the past?

I'll stick with WFMU to get some weird in my ears, thanks.

I love radio

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