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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

I miss the experience of having career professionals 100% dedicated to the music world curating a list of what I would hear. Of course, it was not perfect, there were ads, most stations played pop slop, but most of the time there was a few stations for your taste, your knew your preferred DJs times and there was a certain sense of community in being a regular fan of a show.

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What fills that void for me: https://www.nts.live/

I have a list of "Shows" I follow, with regular updates from star guests (Tim Reaper for jungle music [1] , Lena Raine for video game OST [2], ...)

Their "NTS Guide to..." [3] is really great to peek into a new genre as well.

I highly recommend.

[1] https://www.nts.live/shows/tim-reaper

[2] https://www.nts.live/shows/lena-raine

[3] https://www.nts.live/shows/the-nts-guide-to

There is Internet Radio --- livestreams of radio stations broadcast over the Internet. Many of these are terrestrial broadcasts, and many of them play music. There are also dedicated online-only Internet stations.

This means you have access to the best terrestrial stations, as well as some (often quite niche) Internet-only options.

I find BBC (1-4 + world), Deutschlandfunk (numerous stations), Radio Swiss Classic (available in German, French, and Italian), France Inter / France Culture, and a number of other broadcasters (usually public, and hence with little or no advertising) generally appealing, and preferable to most of what I can tune in locally (OTA AM and FM are all but dead). Tastes run to classical, jazz, and blues, though you can find other options as well.

How much of that do you think is rose tinted glasses and nostalgia? On paper that doesn't sound too different than Apple Music Radio for example where there's radio shows with local DJs or hosts that talk, play music and have curated play lists by a human editor.

I'm sure other streaming services have the same and curators can pick from a much larger set of music, from any part of the world. More than they ever could at a radio station where they had to order and ship CDs around.

There's also many independent internet radio stations or music podcasts these days which can be launched for little money, don't require a broadcasting license and can be listened to from any place in the world.

I understand the nostalgia angle, but objectively it seems like what we currently have is better and more open on all counts.

> There's also many independent internet radio stations or music podcasts these days which can be launched for little money, don't require a broadcasting license and can be listened to from any place in the world.

Indeed - radioparadise.com is a quite nice Internet Radio

Yep. It is mostly nostalgia as there isn't anything better than an AI curating a million songs based on our like/dislikes, but on a macro level, we are at the mercy of people who tune these algorithms.

Are we being 'nudged' to like certain genres or musicians because they are being promoted? Of course, this could happen with a DJ or traditional FM station too, but with centralized AI, you impart that 'nudging' on literally millions of people.

Eh. I still listen this way. I subscribe to a streaming radio provider in my genre, and there's also a local high school station that plays my genre of music most of the time.

It's much better than what I've experienced with spotify and similar and it's way less effort. I had built a pretty big launchcast preference profile, but it took years of active listening, and in my genre remixes are preferred over original recordings but radio on demand doesn't have them ... you need currated collections, and I'd rather not be the curator.

I do worry about the longevity of the subscription service though... at least some of the channels are very repetitive, it feels like someone set up a currated rotation a while ago that just continues to repeat. They did the sec crowdfunding several years ago and there was a lot of related party transactions that looked too squishy for me, and after the offering expired they did the required years of reporting and its a blackbox again.

It was different as we might listen together to the same station across town. There were TV shows too. Many stations had sort of countdowns of the week's top songs. It was just a different vibe.

The Ed Sullivan Show American Bandstand Soul Train

Top of the Pops BBC

One of the guys from Nirvana wrote a good essay on how Billboard destroyed music in the 1980s by consolidating the number of radio markets feeding the chart and allowing ways to trick the top seller lists. Before the MTV modern billboard era there used to be local artists on local radio and eventually one might break out onto other markets and eventually break nationally. Then artists became famous simply due to being good looking, having a catchy producer driven sound and a corporate machine getting them into everyone's ears. Things were a little different from the late 60s to the early 90 and some artists broke out organically.

Here is an example of a station that was independent an influenced early MTV programming during their first couple of years. WLIR documentary, 'New Wave: Dare to Be Different,' chronicles the rise and fall of one of the coolest '80s radio stations.

A funny example of a non-corporate act was the group KLF who hacked the Top of The Pops formula and got onto TV with absurdity. A documentary about them is called "Who Killed the KLF".

I run a LPFM radio station here in Los Angeles.

https://www.kpbj.fm/

There are many more LFPMs out there too!

I harvest the playlists from a variety of music shows hosted on public radio stations around the country and create Spotify playlists from them. Code is on GitHub: https://github.com/lawlesst/spotify-bot. This allows me to listen on demand and still get the curated content.

I also added a script to put the hourly NPR news update into my queue while I'm listening, which makes it seem like a radio station in a way.

https://cfcr.ca/

Lots of community radio still out there! I assume bigger cities would have a solid live music and radio community too.

I miss that as well but more than likely (at least in the US) that "curated" channel you use to listen to was probably owned by Clear Channel and probably the same exact content played in every other city where everyone else felt like it was for them as well.

I never experienced but I've heard universities used to have the best curated radio stations.

Around NJ and the adjoining cities we have many College stations.

A curious one is truly independent as it's parent University closed WFMU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WFMU

WSOU Pirate Radio a heavy metal and hair metal focused station at Seton Hall U.

Timing and audience age matter here.

Clear Channel didn't really expand in a major way until about the mid-1990s, owning 43 radio stations in 1995, following legislation relaxing station ownership limits (for both radio and television) in 1992.

For those recalling 1980s or earlier radio in the US, the situation was rather more diverse, particularly in ownership, though fairly narrow segment programming was becoming the norm as professional "programmers" entered the field.

More largely, the history of popular music has run through multiple phases of diversification and consolidation as new performance, recording, and distribution technologies emerged. I covered this referencing the work of Charles Perrow some years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24930562>.

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