The death of radio is a damn shame.
Ads. It's all ads. Like 10 minute blocks of ads interleaved with radio hosts reading promo weather and promo traffic, followed by ads, then maybe a song. Then more ads.
I haven't listened to the radio in years because they closed down my stations! WBRU and WBCN!
Plus every listener powered station I've ever listened to has tons of shows I don't care about or even tolerate. Streaming doesn't have the same issue. Just as an example: your KEXP appears to play country, jazz, and electronic, reggae, and metal. I think a lot of people aren't going to be interested in all of those options.
On Friday afternoons KUTX has had a old school dance show.
I don't really listen to funk or disco but I always enjoyed the energy of that show on Fridays, and have come to associate it with the weekend and get excited when it's on
I'm not interested in everything KUTX plays, but I'm way more interested in the variety they offer and the chance to discover new artists like Adrian Quesada, JUNGLE, or Khruangbin, who I otherwise never would have discovered, than I am in whatever twenty year old mainstream dreck is on iHeartRadio's single-genre no DJ shuffle broadcast
I had the same experience when I regularly listened to wfmu. The human connection is a really wonderful quality of broadcast radio.
Weirdly enough Canada seems to have better and less grating radio, anecdotal from my experience in BC.
Sounds like the internet. And TV.
Not when you have an ad-blocker.
And as far as college radio goes, I'm don't need a new pothead to tell me how revolutionary Kind of Blue is every time the old one graduates.
Even public radio has ads. They use a fancy word instead of "ads" though back when I dumped any form of media from which I could not banish ads Archer Daniels Midland was one of public radio's largest sponsors... for... reasons.
Quite a few public radio stations in Europe don't have ads. They're paid by taxes and you receive them ad-free.
I found one about the nutritional benefits of pork rinds and another about the versatility and utility of duct tape and just read those. Many of them were clearly commercial in nature. I forget if we were allowed to make our own.
lol. yes. I am a dj on college radio and i hear & see this all the time. It's mildly amusing, but it also makes me the "wierd critical guy," because I have a deeper knowledge of music than them.
But you might be missing the fact that college radio isn't all college students. It's just public radio.
Independent/college radio was full of music (even if you didn't care for it) that was curated by people that gave a damn. They are/were better than whatever your algo thinks it can do.
Really weird for me to see people talking about how bad "the algo" is. Do people just open up Apple Music or Spotify and tell it "find stuff for me to play"? I know that's a thing it will do, but it never occurred to me that I'd actually want it to do that.
I do this with Apple Music.
And, to be honest, "the algo" has been really good. The "create a station" feature has introduced me to a few dozen artists at least.
If you want human curated music, you can have that. If you want an algo-driven mix, you can have that too. I flip between both and playlists I put together for myself.
Radio does convey a sense of locality and connection that nothing else quite replaces for me (including web radio).
There's something unique about browsing the FM (or AM, where still available) in an unknown place, seeing whether you can still get the same station the next day on a road trip etc, and knowing that some people in the general area are listening to the exact same thing at the same time.
Long distance listening on shortwave can also be quite fun, although fewer and fewer countries are still active there. It's still fascinating to hear your home news an ocean away with just a small wire, a handheld radio, and no network whatsoever!
Obviously I wouldn't trade Spotify for it, but I'd still be sad to see it go.
Personally, Spotify has replaced CDs and MP3s much more than radio, also.
But that's not how it works. Even I, a single person, can very frequently listen to Spotify and occasionally listen to radio. I don't have to trade one for the other completely!
> If enough people disagree, the crappier thing will survive regardless. I don't think they do, though, which is why terrestrial radio is dying.
Is it really dying, or stabilizing at a lower-than-before-Spotify-but-non-zero rate? Listening rates in Germany and Austria have been pretty stable over the last 20 years, for example.
Compared to that. Or listening to any Youtube or podcast instead of listening to the radio station hosts prattle on instead of playing the next track.
Nostalgia for radio is like nostalgia for the winter I worked at a cozy cafe at age 17: I have some good memories and every once in a while when I'm stressed at work I yearn for those simpler times... but there's a reason why I will never go back. No need to glorify it just because of some fading attachment to the yesteryears.
But to be honest, now they got the grips on Spotify. And all the fake views on YT (like the making of "Despacito"). The music moguls are ruthless.
ie: I want a techno beat radio. The traditional radio will keep cutting with ads and worse with someone who thinks I want to hear his voice announcing the song; or cutting to talk about something related/unrelated but that's not what I am looking for.
And for long trips, streaming beats terrestrial radio. After an hour or two, you'll have to search for new stations as you leave the range or the previous tower. Then you'd better hope there would be a station you could tolerate in some places.
Podcasts are superior to talk radio. As they're curated by you.
Etc, etc.
The major thing we've lost is the specific curation done by some stations. Top 40 radio is what it is, but some stations existed to play things outside the charts.
Ok, sometimes it's nice to begin the day with a friendly voice. Like a companion, unobtrusive. But you can get that from podcasts.
American Graffiti is the movie that first made me think about it. The DJ (Wolfman Jack) is a central character in that movie.