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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Wow, so much to rage about.

Radio appears to deserve most of the wrath — or rather Corporate Radio™ as brought about by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. If radio is dying, it should and it deserves it.

I confess that I would so embrace the widespread emergence of pirate radio stations. Honestly, there is nothing worthwhile for me on the dial anyway.

And then there is the record industry itself that deserves so much blame. I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.

The post makes it clear what we all knew — the music industry was raking in the cash reselling us our albums at twice the price with little overhead.

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> We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.

Is this in the US? By the end of the 90s, before piracy truly took off, Best Buy and Walmart were regularly selling new CDs, big releases from big names, for $12-13, and they'd pretty quickly get discounted to $10 or less depending on age. Plenty of popular 80s CDs could be had brand new for $5.

As a music collector, Best Buy was amazing. Racks upon racks, seemingly endless selection of indie bands, I even talked up a guy to order in some imports for me (those were definitely $20+ though).

I do remember going to the mall during this time and seeing stores like Sam Goody sell the same stuff as Best Buy, but SG's CDs were all $18 and $20. It never made sense to me, and I don't know how they lasted so long.

Best Buy used to be an AMAZING media company!

To your point, they had everything! And it was all 30% to 40% cheaper than anybody else was selling it. The same was true for movies for a while. Then physical media collapsed. Don't know how Best Buy stays in business these days.

> Corporate Radio™ as brought about by the Telecommunications Act of 1996

What happened with that? I'm not familiar with this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

Under the heading “Later criticism” there is a bit of an explanation; I guess the ownership rules changed so stations were consolidated to fewer owners.

> The legislation eliminated a cap on nationwide radio station ownership and allowed an entity to own up to four stations in a single market. Within five years of the act's signing, radio station ownership dropped from approximately 5100 owners to 3800. Today, iHeartMedia is the largest corporation with over 860 radio stations under its name across the nation.

Clear Channel happened, or as they're called these days, iHeartMedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHeartMedia#Market_share

The Communications Act of 1934 stipulated that one entity could own one and only one radio station. Every radio station was an independent business. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 eliminated this limit, and instead stipulated that one entity was limited to owning four radio stations in any given market. It brought about massive consolidation. Prior to 1996 every single radio station was its own independent company; since then, there are huge corporations that own a shitload of radio stations. And they will have 2-4 programs; they play their hiphop program on their 300 hiphop stations, country on their 100 country stations, rock on their 150 rock stations, and talk radio on their 200 talk stations. And that's it. You have those 4 stations.

For the most part, prior to 1996, at any given radio station there was just some idiot kid who was just playing what he wanted to play. And sometimes he put on something that was...out there. It was at least interesting. After 1996, for the most part, music on radio stations is organized by market research groups that picks what to play based on some sort of wide consensus. You'll never get an interesting radio station that just plays weird random interesting shit. Everything has to be approved by a boardroom full of old rich people.

Radio is dull as dishwater these days. I mean it's always been bad, but at least sometimes it was interesting.

If Clear Channel hadn't consolidated AOR and Modern Rock radio, would you still be listening to linear radio today, and not Spotify or Apple Music? And that because you don't have linear radio, and primarily because of that, have you switched from rock to hip-hop or to not listening to music?

Probably? Because now I listen to a few streaming "radio" stations when I am in the car or doing work around the house. They are "linear" and human-programmed. Some pay for licensing and some likely do not.

My current go-to was called Devil's Night Radio but they now stream under the name KPJK (a Twin Peaks ref) in addition to running a quirky cabin rental place in CA. Lots of garage rock, punk, classic Americana, old country/western, TV and movie soundtrack stuff...it's an odd mix but I love it.

I use Youtube Music to look something up if I am on the road and I really just want to hear something I uploaded from my personal collection, but for discovery and just letting someone else take the reins, streaming "radio" is still my fave.

Who stopped?

> have you switched from rock to hip-hop or to not listening to music?

Less music, at least. I moved on to informational radio once the rock stations became unlistenable. The local public broadcaster produces some wonderful content about science, technology, and business.

These days, I do subscribe to a number of podcasts recorded from out-of-market radio stations that still have decent musical content. While, granted, distribution to me is no longer linear, these programs are originally produced for linear radio play. If I could readily tune in to those stations without the technical encumberments, I probably would.

I also use Spotify from time to time, but it replaced CDs, not the radio. That's an entirely different ballgame. I don't see it scratching the same itch.

College radio is the last bastion of reliably weird shit.

Find a station and listen at night. My local station WONC until some years ago had punk and metal shows after midnight which went through phases depending on who mainly ran those shows. The last gasp of the metal show was ~6 years of mostly European female-fronted orchestral metal occasionally taking forays into metal core, Gothenburg metal and screamo. Stuff these days you can explore to your heart's content on YouTube, but there is no assurance that what the algo turns up is any good.

I will never forget the one time I tuned into a college station on a whim and they were playing a jam session recording from my band; a band that had disbanded about a decade prior and biggest claim to fame was playing to like five people at a bar. What are the chances that it was played at all and I just happened to be tuned in? A pleasant surprise nevertheless.

I had no idea, I always wondered why radio was so bad compared to what my parents seemed to have had growing up.

Great example of industry consolidation hurting consumers, thanks.

Today the best music centered radio stations are all online. Frequencies, transmitters and repeaters cost a lot more than servers and bandwidth, so most online-only radios can still air what they want without being forced to surrender their play schedule to record labels.

I'm not sure if this was covered in the video, but the other conspiracy I heard a few years back now makes a lot of sense.

Mark Slaughter of the famous hair metal band Slaughter came out and said that there is a widespread misconception that grunge killed hair metal. He claims MTV hired a new president who was also a program manager at KROQ in California and he came out and said he wasn't going to play hair metal any more - and it was his decision not to play that music any more that killed that entire genre.

He readily admits there was an undercurrent brewing with people getting tired of the hair metal scene and labels essentially trying to create the next big thing, all in the image of these successful bands, but its interesting to note how one guy basically cratered the entire genre in the span of less than a year.

This is like an artificially created mass extinction event (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event ). Without it the ecosystem could maintain itself for very long time changing slowly and gradually. An extincting event wipes out most of the existing organisms, creating open niches to be populated with something new and maybe weird-looking.

Hard to say.

Was it Steve Dahl (Disco Demolition) that took down disco or was he merely the catalyst for the inevitable pushback of a genre that had come to be a parody of itself.

People didn't "backlash" against disco in the sense that people who used to like it started disliking it because of changes within the genre. People who culturally identified with rock never liked disco and never would, to a significant extent because it was very black and pretty gay. And as popular music it was already in significant decline. Dahl harnessed lynch mob energy to allow people to do something they had always wanted to do.

"Last straw that broke the camel's back" might well describe this whole thread and original post. Rather than the one thing that did it.

Yep. Rock's dominant days were numbered when MTV decided to go all-in on rap at a time that rock was still outselling it. I thought it was a smart move because it was clear that that was the way things were heading, anyway. Grunge didn't stop rock's inevitable decline. It was more of a signpost. "Exit".

> I remember when CD's came out and started to displace vinyl. We were told the high price of the CD would come down to the price of vinyl. Records were about $8 or so at the time, CD's double that. Yeah, no, that never happened.

What are you talking about? CDs today are about $16 on Amazon. If they were $16 back in the 1980s, that's pretty remarkable, because inflation should make them much, more more now. CDs really have come down in price.

They used to be $20 at Borders in the early 00s, so they got more expensive in nominal terms for a while. I remember the early days of the iTunes store, buying whole albums for $10 felt like a great deal.

I'm guessing that the rise of streaming music has probably pushed their price down finally.

But the production costs fell much more

Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this.

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