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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think the article explains it nicely: they generate steady losses, and he's getting older; if he dies, he doesn't want his successors to have to unwind the liabilities.

It's ~2025. What is a popular music terrestrial radio station at this point other than a vanity project?

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Terrestrial radio: an immensely effective political propaganda tool. (May involve more than just music, but music is good earbait.)

"The Divided Dial: How Conservative Talk Radio Came to Dominate the Airwaves"

(6 part podcast, transcripts available, originally published Nov-Dec 2022)

<https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial>

Something that can be received without a data plan

Before we had data plans we had MP3 players, CDs, tapes.

I guess what I'm getting at is - for a lot of us the radio was already dead before streaming was an option.

Yes yes, you can find any little thing to add as an argument to support "I don't listen to radio", but a lot of us still listen to radio.

Sometimes, you want to find something other than what's in your mp3/CD/cassette collection. Growing up, there were very specific shows that I would listen to specifically for being introduced to something (whether it was new or old and just new to me). Radio did not become a bad experience to me until Clear Channel/Comcast bought up all of the non-indies and made it greater than 80% chance that you'd hear a commercial whenever you tuned into any given station.

I'd also suspect that your "a lot of us" sounds really big in whatever echo chamber you find yourself

You listen to it, but presumably you don't support it, since it's dying, right?

Your presumptions are almost as bad as when you assume. Actually, they're better since you can leave the "me" out of the assu prove to be. I've supported my community station KNON since I was in high school. Might have missed here or there, but I've contributed to them longer than anything else.

The only thing dying in this thread are the 3 stations King runs, and whatever notions you thought you had on me.

You can just go look up the numbers. There's a large Pew study about it.

There's a Pew study on how I don't support my local radio? Interesting.

For the salient definition of "you", yes.

> a lot of us still listen to radio.

For sufficiently qualified values of "us", perhaps. But I do not believe that is true for the general population.

I have 15 year old vehicles. I listen to the radio in all the cars I drive as does my spouse. The receivers in our vehicles are too old to have Carplay and with the removal of the audio jack in phones there's no way to connect them to the audio system. We do have one vehicle that can stream over Bluetooth but it can be a hassle and distracting in traffic so we usually only use it on road trips. Locally it's easier to turn on the radio and use presets (you can feel them!) to change the channel when it gets annoying. It just works mostly.

USB FM broadcast dongles exist. They transmit at ultra-low power, usually with the option to switch between broadcast frequencies (in the event of interference), and permit your digital device (smartphone, tablet, laptop) to transmit audio directly to your car's stereo. Playback controls are on the device, you can of course vary volume or toggle playback on or off from the vehicle's sound system.

It's not fully-integrated bluetooth or audio-in, but it does work and is an option.

KEXP

So happy they expanded to the Bay Area after living in Seattle for a few years!

I've been listening to them on KEXP.org for a decade or more now.

It's a little odd tuning into "the morning show" in the afternoon, but it's good radio, and so much better for discovering music than any of the alternatives here.

6 Music can be as good, but it never quite got over the "death" of the UK indie music scene and sometimes feels more like a tribute act to it's former self. As I speak the heaviest tracks in rotation are from Bon Iver and Doves, and while both are great acts, they're not new bands. Overall the discoverability is way down, and fairly often I'll find new music, even music from UK+Ireland, via KEXP, rather than from the media here.

give Do You Radio a try, former NTS guys went out on their own, all available on mixcloud so you can flick through bits you don't like

https://doyou.world/

Radio Paradise is also still pretty good for discovering new music..

XRAY.fm in Portland is another

And KMHD for Jazz

With radio on the internet, there's a ton of great worthwhile stations available.

WTMD, Colorado Sound, WEQX, Koto.fm, Mountain Chill, WETA, WMRW, 102 Cue, KCRW all get a lot of play around here.

Radio feels dead because most places have been taken over by a couple major broadcasters. Radio is awesome when people care about it, is still a fantastic institution of lots of small local shops doing amazing things for great good.

KFJC, WREK, KXLU, WWOZ, WFMU...

Each is not always good 24x7 but when they are good they are so much better than any playlist I've ever heard. You're just not going to get a Firebunker(RIP) or Cousin Mary or Alma de Barrio without the humans.

I love them, discovered when I lived in Seattle. Now I've got a crazy little one WJOP-LP but some of the DJs play local little bands and more obscure artists. Must be a teaching/training type thing.

An institution of culture. something the new money tech elite dont seem to understand. modern society is desperately missing the concept of noblesse oblige

There might be a better way to implement noblesse oblige than provide 30,000 people a 39th option for hearing rock n roll music.

FM radio is dead and has been for years. I haven't seriously listened to FM radio since I got a portable CD player and that was in the late 90s. I can't imagine anybody trying to get into it now.

Why would I subject myself to obnoxious ads every few minutes and music I don't like when I can just listen to what I want, when I want, ad-free?

AM radio is still going with conspiracy talk and maybe sports radio? I honestly don't know, I've never given AM radio a real listen.

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the radio. I remember calling in to stations and requesting songs, contests, morning zoo hosts, and so on. But it's probably not coming back.

I’m not trying to argue the point, but I listen to FM about every day, or at least every day I’m in the car. It’s much easier for me than getting music from my phone going, even with Bluetooth.

And I have come to the conclusion that I like talk intermixed with music, even if the talk is an ad. It’s weird, I never thought that’d be the case, but I do. In fact, I wish I could easily mix my music library into my podcast library— specifically, interrupt podcasts with music (maybe replace the ads with a single song).

I also like how easy it is to switch channels to something different. I could do that with CarPlay or something too with my own music, but then I probably have to actually think about it (when I should be thinking about driving).

And for people who care about live music events (shows etc) it’s a great way to find out about those things, particularly if your city has a good public radio station and not just iHeartMedia.

I’m not sure I Love radio, but I would probably really miss it if it wasn’t in my car.

Dunno where you are but local radio programming disappeared in most markets years ago. Even in the Bay Area. All of what you've said about radio content was true a decade or more ago, but much less true now.

  And for people who care about live music events (shows etc) it’s a
  great way to find out about those things

Big stations promote big acts, sure. But that's easy enough to find information on elsewhere (e.g. Youtube). Smaller stations (e.g. KXSF, KPFA, KZSU) out here promote smaller venues but I'm typically out of range and end up listening to their content via the good old internet.

  I’m not sure I Love radio, but I would probably really miss it if
  it wasn’t in my car.

There was a time I would (late 90s, early 00s) but now? Not so much. The ratio of music to ads has gotten awful. Even stations that have ostensibly gone back to their roots like KITS are a pale imitation of their past glory. Like they'll wear the meat suit of genres that were previously popular but make sure to mix it with plenty of mediocre top 40 and a suffocating amount of ads.

I don’t really listen to radio while traveling so I’ll take your word for it. In Minnesota we gave The Current, part of MPR family of stations which is pretty good from what I hear (about its status nationally, though always some one will say it “used to be better”). And yeah, that’s ONE station.

Probably another part of it for me is that most of drives are probably considered short, the longest trip is usually 20-30 minutes depending on traffic and that’s only a few times a month.

If I was doing hour long commutes, it’d be podcasts all day.

That "most markets" does a lot of heavy lifting.

In the MSP area my two main radio stations are both public radio. The state's MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) station and The Current, which is basically what the GP described for the Twin Cities region.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that I'd miss them if they were gone. OK, I really like listening to Terry Gross and Kai Ryssdal but besides that it's just nice background audio.

A real quick check of "top radio station owners" showed that the top ten all picked up more stations going from 2020 to 2021. Yes there are still a ton of small stations doing god knows what (on the order of 10,000 AM+FM commercial), but there's been a ton of consolidation. Your examples of Terry Gross and Kai Ryssdal kinda highlight that. Neither MPR nor WHYY are local for most of their audience (and arguably neither are focused on local content).

Some time in the early 2000's I heard a Microsoft ad, on FM radio, for FAT32. I turned off the radio and basically never turned it on again (and made sure my next car had mp3 player support.)

As someone who doesn't listen to the radio in FM or AM, does it really make sense to comment on your thoughts regarding how often and why it's listened to by most people? You're not one of them.

I've owned CDs since the early 90s. I e owned several good MP3 players. I have several USB drives with music on them. I haven't touched any of those in about a decade, and instead listen to the radio every day.

Give monthly donations to your local NPR affiliate. Most of them have decently middle-of-the-road biased news, and a few have really good music programming (looking at you, KUTX).

Excellent, agreed. Nothing is sacred except "the grind", it appears, yes. No value exists outside viewcount, or listenercount, or whatever metric the media uses.

Your comment reminds me of something I read yesterday, an allusion that mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota made to what he called "Kultur", in this remarkable interview https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326965.pdf. The context is different, but I think your usage is in line with his in the interview.

You can write as many paragraphs of this stuff as you like but I don't think that's going to get people to retain long-term 7-8 figure liabilities on their books. If there's even a notion of a system of "noblesse oblige", everybody has been defecting from it except for King.

When you say "everbody", you're referring to a modest percentage of people, and even for those people, it's only true some of the time.

The real world is full of people doing stuff that is not explained whatsoever by notions like increasing profits in account-books.

People do economically disastrous things like have dogs, go on holiday, they get their nails done twice a month, waste half their Sunday doing their Gran's hedges, and etc etc. They have babies, and often someone stays at home with the baby, losing boat loads of money in many cases if you calculate what they could earn if they worked full time and put the child into a cheap daycare.

Not to mention all the hours spent in amateur sports clubs, and ukulele groups, and pipe bands, and sometimes, they even run radio stations, and blogs, and maintain software, and make little robots, just for a laugh.

The notion of everyone going around calculating everything to maximise income all the time is a fairytale certain people tell themselves to convince themselves they're the real mavericks, the hard ones who don't flinch from reality. The motivation for the deception is clear, but unfortunately, it's patently false.

There are plenty of cultural institutions in the modern world that are basically run as a charity. I think the elite understand this just fine they just don't view some random rock radio station as a cultural institution.

Heritage project, source of joy and soothing, an opportunity to ply your intellect on radio tech?

Vanity project seems like such a misnomer. When I think of vanity project, I think of Bender building a tomb in his honor a million cubits high with fire eyes saying 'RE MEMBER MEEEEEE'

A valuable community service appreciated by thousands of people? The opposite of vanity.

Given how people consume music today, I stand by "vanity", and I think King agrees.

I think he'd agree more with Passion Project not vanity.

Sure. Either way: not a thing sustained for its utility. I think running independent rock radio stations is admirable. It sounds fun. But if it's losing him millions of dollars, obviously, he should immediately stop doing it.

Depending on the market it is still possible to be profitable. There is still a market even though it is narrow and most stations solve the problem like how Stephen King did- you have multiple stations to increase inventory.

> What is a popular music terrestrial radio station at this point other than a vanity project?

More's the pity.

Ah yes. If he dies.

And if he remains dead...

Let's just hope we're not on his "People to Haunt" list.

WFMU

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