It's a shame what's happened to radio
blog.jimgrey.net
blog.jimgrey.net
It used to be if you were driving down the road and heard a song you liked
Hearing a song you liked on the radio hit harder then playing it yourself because you knew that there was another human nearby at that moment in time that had picked it out and played it. You were physically tethered to them through invisible waves through the sky. Lonely road trips felt less lonely. Late night work shifts felt less alienating because there was somebody ELSE working late.
Nowadays it wouldn't appear particularly exotic (portable speakers are ubiquitous) and people playing loud music (from speakers or phones) seem to do this for themselves without caring about the surrounding people, that's just highly egotistical and self-centered. It's usually not music I personally like too.
That's not fun, it's just annoying. There's already too much noise in our cities.
But if you do it right, playing (singular) music for others, reading the room and all, I'm sure it can still work.
Not always a bike. Sometimes just a trolley or a handcart or a custom jerry-rigged contraption.
Okay, in all seriousness: boom boxes were a thing in the 1970s and early 1980s. There are still people who use the latest generation of them, but thankfully not nearly as many. These days people cranking music in a public place are generally doing it as part of a group that all want to hear the same thing. (and in back then the group wanting to hear the same music was the common case)
Second is probably motorcycles blasting it over the engine noise.
We've got a thing, and that's a-called radar love
We've got a wave in the air...
Radar love
https://blog.jimgrey.net/2023/01/10/connecting-through-the-e...
Many comments are focusing on music but the thing I tried to get across in the article was that good radio wasn't primarily about the music, it was about fun and connection. A good DJ kept you from just turning the radio off when you heard that same hit the fourth time today -- you wanted to keep listening because the DJ made it fun. It made homework and hobbies feel a lot less lonely. A Spotify playlist sure as heck can't do that.
Sounds like you should start listening to some community radio stations. They don't even have to be your local community, I promise that somewhere in your timezone there is a community radio station broadcasting something you want to listen to.
Try our local one in Brisbane (where Bluey is from) that has been running since 1975 and started as a university student protest station: https://4zzz.org.au
You might not like the show you hear when you click, but look at their catalogue of shows and you'll find something.
Community can always be rebuilt.
So far the closest thing I found was when Huey Lewis did a radio show on Apple Music. You couldn't call in and there were no contests, but it's a bit of talking from someone likable, separated by a couple of songs they introduce which you also like. That's basically the format of radio, in its most basic form.
I've searched a bit for that type of format on streaming. Sure there's always TuneIn or MyTuner apps which are interesting but those shows are always tailored to a specific faraway city that you don't know much about, or they're in a different language, or they're sports talk related which I'm not interested in.
I'm specifically looking for music I like and a likeable person talking and introducing songs, just like the clips you have on your web site. I just don't understand how that can be so expensive that big tech companies with deep pockets like Apple Music don't want to produce it. What's up with that?
People use podcasts for it now
I even subscribe to one for Metal for $10/months they’ll give you a new album every month like one of those old CD clubs. Interviews and listening parties too.
If you are looking for a sense of community like radio used to have, it’s a lot closer than podcasts IMO. Everyone has a podcast but this is something else.
I'm old enough to remember when radio was king, but if that's what a good DJ does, then I suppose I've never heard a good DJ. Personally, I preferred the DJ who talked as little as possible and had good taste and variety in the music they chose to play.
But yes, we are poorer for their passing. They've been gone for a very long time, but I've still yet to see anything that can adequately replace them.
Yes, I'm painfully aware. That was what got me to stop listening to music radio.
On the other side of the coin, I also had a 10am Saturday news slot, which was just a quick 10 minute read of my pick of the top stories off the AP feed. I was on the city bus discussing the slot with my buddy who did the sports right after me, and the bus driver overheard us and said he listened to the station on his bus route, and loved us on Saturday mornings more than the other news readers. He was my only known fan in my very short lived radio "career".
Maybe other colleges did it differently but we didn't have a program manager or anything. Everyone was free to do what they wanted outside of some FCC rules and what I previously mentioned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GRBn7Vn2U0&t=775s
Obviously it loses a lot if you don't speak German, but they were very funny and silly and interacted with their fans a lot, to say the least.
Dunno if they were "in tune" though, maybe I'm too literal, because in my mind, anything, even the coolest stuff, that was made by adults and/or legal was not the stuff. Actual youth culture can only happen among the youth, if you know what I mean, so there's at least always this lag.
In and around Bonn, in the 80ies. Guess there have been more, but they were out of reception range.
I miss the locality, the connection, the need to cope outside the safe zone for nothing other than lack of options. Despite the nostalgia, and sensing what is lost, I think I would make the same choice again. Mostly so I never have to hear Jump again.
Shouts to Pierre Robert (rip), John DeBella, Cyndy Drue, etc at WMMR and WYSP (rip). They still let Jacky Bam Bam play the real stuff sometimes; at least the bots take a break for his show.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/dioday
and this guy and another DJ were there with their own bands
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116954456921377276
Even though the station is run by remote control much of the time and the sales manager recently got poached by the Buffalo Bills it's so much fun to get to know these people in real life. (I appreciate it how Billy, pictured, plays alternative rock, kinda like Green Day, even if the station's playlist got closed out around 1992)
Elsewhere in this thread I poured out such joy and happiness about so many station that are so beloved to me, are just darling special places. I want so badly to imagine https://mountainchill.com KRKQ to be broadcasting from Telluride Colorado for a hundred, a thousand years. It's something so special.
Yet the story, the sadness you tell here, identifying forces eroding us, our great Society, with nothing of substance and meaning in its place: it's just getting so much worse, in so many ways and places.
The mechanized take-over of the airwaves, the public's airwaves, that the FCC has congressional mandate to use and protect & make good for the public, is ongoingly getting so much worse, on and on. The takeover by right wing aligned outlets like Sinclair has been so bad, so ongoing, has so few hopeful counter-examples if things going right at any scale. Lots of small positive lights, but this chewing up of the world by hostile above-human quasi-immortal corporate super orgs is on full display in radio, in broadcast.
Trump I's FCC overturning congressional media ownership requirements has been part of this. There are only three major players in radio left, since these rules, and two of them are trying to merge right now, for a $6.2B merger. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15716219 (2017), and excellent article today, https://karlbode.com/local-u-s-tv-news-will-soon-be-entirely...
Meanwhile that same Carr run FCC is doing everything it can to chill and ruin free speech, to terrorize anyone with speech they find disagreeable. Orban style totalitarianism, right here at home. Ghastly ghastly anti-democratic, anti freedom, anti-liberty, just the smallest possible weasel stuff, shame beyond shame to these weak spirited cowards.
> "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
Meanwhile this same administration has all but destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts. Countless radio stations have had to make drastic efforts to stay afloat, as both a miniscule yet vital source of funding for such great public service has been cut, by these same foes of everything you've written of.
I want more than a memory. In the comments below I've shared some truly great amazing stations I love, that folks can tune into from anywhere and enjoy. I an a proud supporting member at multiple stations. Yet, with forces like this, big, scary, corrupt, evil, un American, in my view demonic forces like this, with Powell Memorandum operations to corporate and own the airwaves for private and increasingly political interest, I fear writing like this will serve all too strongly as a necessary vital remembrance of a past, one that few people would otherwise have any ability to connect to. With a tear and with thanks, let me say I really appreciate this write up, and I hope it will not be so very necessary for so very long into our future. With apologies for being a bit pointed, obviously, but for hopefully reasonable or understandable, good spirited cause... May there be better times ahead, may the people enjoy the airwaves & making special places of them together again.
Most of the time songs were played randomly from a huge list, there were no “hits”, and this was exactly what I wanted.
If there was a song I liked, I had to quick record it to tape, because otherwise I likely wouldn’t hear it again for days or weeks.
There would at times be people DJing for time segments, but it was relaxed and music focused, not person focused. I’ll take some dead air and a soft spoken young adult just giving the name of the next song vs bombastic “personalities” any day.
Another big key to it, was my college radio station didn’t have advertisements. Radio ads are grating and repulsive and I simply cannot tolerate that shit. Same thing with TV ads, which is a big reason I basically stopped watching TV in my late teens as well.
I cherish and miss the radio experience that I personally had, but when I hear what others subject themselves to I simply cannot fathom why.
These days my tastes are mostly adjacent to doom or psych-rock, and my modern day radio replacement is following some curators on YouTube whose hobby/side job is to find new releases in these genres and dig up old gems. Which makes it easy for me to quickly find and add (mostly through Bandcamp) new songs into my own collection every so often, which I then self host and further rate/curate via navidrome.
Basically I’ve always been a very active, rather than passive music enjoyer.
I suppose anything thing to bring up, is if I was listening to people on the radio doing something interesting, then I end up either needing to be randomly cut off from it to do something else, or try to constrain my schedule to their show. Not fun at all.
A few questions, as I'd like to hear your take on this.
First, a premise, I think the audience is still out there, as there 10,000s perhaps 100,000s of people that would enjoy the experience you describe and would even pay for that, so it can be sustainable.
Anyway here's the questions:
1. Why not doing that yourself through the internet? Your own radio station, your rules. What usually stops one from accomplishing this?
and
2. What/why do you think the essence of what you describe does/would not translate to the online model? (if you think that's the case)
Thanks!
A counter to radio remaining relevant is “I can listen to whatever I want, via this digital technology”.
Fine - but young people don’t yet have a complete mental map of what culture they enjoy.
In the UK, funding for libraries and the arts (public radio, the BBC) has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity. I think that’s true in the US too.
Despite this, young people have an unprecedented amount of access to culture. Or, at least, any form of culture that can be digitally replicated.
Soulseek and Anna’s Archive are wonderful projects. But they only have as much utility as the person using them can put into the search bar.
We’re increasingly entrusting cultural education - what to put into the search bar - to algorithms that are designed not (as the BBC’s mission statement is) to “inform, educate, and entertain”, but to retain attention.
Even worse: many of these (eg, Spotify) hide real access behind subscription fees. If you grew up broke, like I did, you will understand how inaccessible this real access is.
The most motivated young people will continue to find the workarounds piracy offers, and to find other routes for cultural education.
Any young person who isn’t in that upper percentile of motivatedness might increasingly be left out. You can attribute that to a choice they have made - I think that’s wrong.
I think the joy of broadening one’s horizons is available to all, and is also difficult to learn and a strain to continue to practice. I think it must be taught.
I think this is especially true and important when everyone has a constantly-available option of algorithmically-selected pleasantness.
Human radio DJs are not optimized for pleasantness, or to serve you relevant ads based on your conversations with them. At their best, DJs are educators.
Anyone who grew up listening to radio knows that, and knows the pleasure that comes from learning not to change the channel when something new and uncomfortable-feeling comes on, just in case it ends up being something you fall in love with.
Focusing on one thing here, for convenience. The problem remains that costs are up far in excess of budgets - austerity be damned! We are forced to prioritise, cutting the generally useful but "non-essential". (There is often a legal duty to the essential things)
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/how-have-english-councils-fu...
Is a great breakdown. To illustrate my argument see Table 1. Real-terms spending per person by service area, various years (2024–25 prices)
> Within total service spending, per-person spending on children’s social care services [] increased by 11% in real terms. Spending on adult social care [] was also relatively protected, falling by only 2%. This meant much larger cuts to other services: more than 40% in the case of housing, culture and leisure, and highways and transport, and nearly 60% cuts to planning and development.
We cut what _could_ be cut, and that's a prioritisation call.
edit: now in https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/fixing...
Great rabbit hole for my Wednesday morning! :D
From what I can understand, these sources are saying: "because costs are up, those past cuts have not yet really been reversed, especially not in terms of real-terms funding per-capita, or funding for 'non-essential' services".
Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!
That it is! It will require an actual change to the societal contract to resolve as best I can tell - and it remains unclear to me what direction the change will take.
I would argue those 'non-essential' services - those which you actively notice benefiting from - are extremely important for building institutional trust in the state. For young people entering the workforce today, who (for example) are a demographic that have a lower requirement for the services of the NHS, it must be genuinely confusing and alienating to be paying (what I believe is) a historically high tax rate.
Citizenship, as an idea, does need to demonstrably benefit both the state and the individual. Otherwise, the state is basically asking people to draw on their reserves of empathy to have a reason not to act like a dick. That will, unfortunately, have much more varied results than empathy alongside tangible incentives.
The cost of not providing those 'non-essential' services may ultimately be larger, and more difficult to calculate, I think, than are calculable today. How you provide them without the cash to do so is a question I'm not smart enough to answer. But people have now - completely anecdotally - gone a very long time with low tangible incentives toward citizenship being provided by the either the state or local authorities, and the vibe is very, very bad.
I don't think this is restricted to the UK, either. The OECD’s 2024 trust survey found only 37% of respondents across 30 countries were confident their government balances the interests of current and future generations. [1]
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...
Now, purely by memory, I recall commentary over the years that 1) David Cameron was cutting taxes on various categories of land assets to benefit large land asset holders to the detriment of the budget, 2) the battle of any tax cuts are spending programs in disguise vs no they aren't and 3) May, Johnson, Sunak, Starmer etc have not reversed any of the tax cuts put in place by Cameron.
There's no doubt a more delicate story to what has happened, but a fact check of this into Deepseek before I posted this confirmed that the throughline is credible.
The BBC was a silly example of me to use (as was 'public radio'!) because you're right - it's mostly not funded by general taxation.
That said, the license fee is directly tied to inflation (via the CPI). Whether you see that as a correct measurement is another question. [1]
The BBC has also historically been funded partially by taxation. For example, taxation provided free television licenses to over-75s, until 2020, when that funding was cut, and the cost of doing this was passed to the BBC itself.[2]
But yes - quibbles aside, a sloppy example for me to have used there. Your sibling comment has some great sources which better illustrate changes to arts funding, compared to the off-handed ones I initially provided.
[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ23
[2] https://www.ageuk.org.uk/northumberland/about-us/volunteer-f...
Spotify and the likes will suggest new and different things for people to listen to. Apple has a special app just for classical music, which is the highest level of musical culture.
> Even worse: many of these (eg, Spotify) hide real access behind subscription fees. If you grew up broke, like I did, you will understand how inaccessible this real access is.
They have advertisements for those who don't pay the subscription. Radio has always had advertisements also. And nobody is too broke to afford Spotify. Every broke young person I've known have had a Spotify subscription, they're dirt cheap.
For the past 25 years, I've turned on the radio about once a year, and every time it's been just sewage. Whether that's government produced sewage or corporate produced sewage. The quality of podcasts and music streaming is on a quality level which radio never reached.
> I think the joy of broadening one’s horizons is available to all, and is also difficult to learn and a strain to continue to practice. I think it must be taught.
Very much agree.
Really? Why?
But not all classical music is great or even good. That hindered me for years from listening more to classical music, because I thought that I couldn't understand some works which I listened to. Then I realized some of it is just bad, and there's nothing more to it.
This means classical music is very badly organised in most streaming apps. Sorting by "artist" doesn't really work if the artist is listed as an orchestra, which has probably recorded the work of more than one composer.
Roon is another example of a streaming platform that treats this metadata with the same importance.
We definitely exist. It's pretty tight out there right now. The £10.99/month I see quoted buys quite a few kilos of dry pasta.
In any case, the core argument I was making specifically is that I believe human curation can provide more friction for the audience than algorithmic curation tends to, and that this is a net-good for cultural education.
I would contend with classical music being the highest strata of musical culture (and the deeper idea of culture having 'levels'), but that's subjective. So, that aside, if classical music is your thing, and you believe:
> "The quality of podcasts and music streaming is on a quality level which radio never reached."
I'd recommend Glenn Gould's The Idea of North, which is one of my absolute favourite pieces of music. It's considered pretty innovative and important:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5MUnZoeGI
Glenn Gould wrote it specifically for radio, as it was commissioned by the CBC. So "government produced sewage". :-)
I'd also strongly recommend you give BBC Radio 3 (still often excellent, especially late at night) a try. NTS has some great classical shows, too. Perhaps you're already familiar with all of these, but - if not - they might give you a reason to turn on your radio more frequently than annually.
I just drove home, and spent 20 minutes listening to a host on the radio talking to a researcher about evolved preferences for non-mates in humans. It was pretty interesting, and not something I'd have stumbled upon otherwise.
Most US commercial radio is very bad. I don’t really understand why the playlists are so small, and why they don’t even occasionally play lesser-known songs by the big acts. Like, why don’t classic rock stations play deeper cuts by Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, etc. instead of the same hit singles over and over for decades? How can that be what listeners want? People who work in retail environments with a repeated playlist usually say they hate it for obvious reasons.
It’s as if those TV stations that show The Office and Seinfeld every night showed the same five episodes every week.
Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.
People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.
And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.
I also learned that that said station is owned by the same company as a station in my hometown, which is as bland, boring, and repetitive as radio gets. Still has me wondering what that market has that my local market doesn't. Perhaps the true death of radio is hinged on urbanization coupled with limited channel space? Maybe a channel like that can survive there because the small overall audience doesn't invite someone else trying to encroach on the available frequency? Whereas, as you noticed, where frequency space is at a premium someone else with formulaic programming in hand will soon come to buy out anyone who tries anything interesting.
At least my hometown classic rock station would do a bunch of Zeppelin at 10pm, so I got exposed to their broader range.
Lately I have been getting back in to internet radio, mostly via Elisa in KDE. Here is my favorite internet stream: https://hawaiireggaenetwork.com/
Ha!
Who told you this? They are wildly different frequencies and encoding.
https://www.mediatek.com/press-room/mediatek-announces-world...
https://pccentral.net/q1-2026-smartphone-soc-market-share-me...
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/03/mediatek-leads-glob...
Even the OG Motorola Droid, of 2009, had the parts inside for an FM radio. They just weren't connected to an antenna and the default software stack didn't include any access to those parts at all.
Flagship Qualcomm-equipped Samsung phones up to the S20 or so tended to be ~similar: The FM tuner guts were usually in there, but they often weren't available to use, and even then they sometimes lacked an antenna.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. :)
---
In my time, I've enabled FM radio on a few different phones that weren't advertised to have that function, sometimes with root-only hacks from grimy corners of the internet, and sometimes by just installing some software that just happened to have the right hooks.
I'm not here to argue, nor to support claims that I have not made.
Also, I believe that is exactly the reason why FM tuners are being phased out.
Streaming services will nowadays give you uninterrupted playback pretty much anywhere, even in places like large buildings or subway tunnels, where radio coverage is nonexistent. Basically it all boils down to the fact that cell network coverage is much better today.
"somewhat" as in the ballpark of a few cents, definitely less than $1, because it's already there in the reference designs and deliberately removing it would actually take extra work and cost far more.
I remember all the no-name/generic MP3/MP4 players had an FM radio, while Apple's iPods did not. They deliberately chose not to include one, and definitely not because of cost.
One killer feature for phone-sized portable FM radios is live sports!
Some sports that have TV broadcasts but no radio broadcast will pipe the broadcast audio over an FM channel within the stadium.
Of course for sports that have a radio broadcast, you can tune directly to it.
Depending on the sport, it's really nice to get player background info, or some sports have mics on players that get piped through the radio in your ear.
My Bluetooth pods have it. I'm not sure how well it's supported, I don't think I've ever entered a place that uses it (or I didn't notice), so I could never try it.
But every time I try it out, the stations are playing a loud advertisement.
Do flagship Snapdragon SOCs still have radio? Thinking about next GOS compatible Motorola-branded device, the first device GOS will support with Snapdragon.
Of course, it is a Chinese brand who haven't forsaken FM radios. Apparently, Europeans still prefer a FM radio on their smartphones that Chinese brands that sell in Europe still retain them.
Here in USA, people don't seem to care about radio.
FM radio support is a part of a Bluetooth chip, an audio codec chip, or even a standalone IC.
In modern high end SoCs, even the 5G modem is largely evicted from the SoC itself. Only the digital processing happens in the SoC - while ADC/DAC and anything analog lives in its own IC.
Cellphones got cellphone emergency broadcasts before they lost FM radio, so they still show emergency broadcasts.
Cellphone emergency broadcasts turned out to be not reliable during the Hawaiian Island fires.
RDS in FM has a special mode for emergency broadcasts and some countries use them. As FM signals easily cover a 50-75 mile radius, the coverage area is huge versus cellular emergency broadcasts requiring the towers to be powered on which have also failed during natural disasters.
Which, if the motivation is to provide emergency notification, I also assume means mandating that users carry wired headphones?
Sliding down this slope looks fun...
Something-something antenna 1/4 of the wavelength physics. And FM wave is roughly 3 meters long.
When people carried antennas (headphone cords) around it was handy, but not a lot of people would carry antenna now
The main channel "RNZ National" is a mix of news bulletins [1], panels featuring interesting people [2], and episodes of the numerous high-quality podcasts they produce [3].
The really channel one is "RNZ Concert" through - it's just msuic. They have a best-in-class audio team who record concerts (e.g. choirs, orchestra, or anything else) as well as getting famous artists in to their studio to record their own music or a cover. Played for free all the time with no ads! It was super exciting as a kid in a community choir when we got the chance to be recorded by RNZ, and then find out roughly when it would be on so we sat by the radio in anticipation all day waiting for it to play. It also made getting to the finals of choir nationals [4] extra exciting knowing your performance there would be played nationwide.
[1]: Interestingly, despite us having reasonably good private competition for news here, the government-funded news source was recently votes the most trusted in the country - I reckon it's because they aren't beholden to advertisers: https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/17/rising-trust-should-keep-p... [2]: Regularly including top politicians like the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, top academics, CEOs, investors, and the like [3]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcasts [4]: Yes competitive classical choir is a thing here, and it's treated just as seriously as rugby or any other code. You might travel will your high school choir all the way across the country to perform at Finale. https://nzcf.org.nz/events/nzcf-events/big-sing
I can receive RNZ on shortwave on the East Coast of USA! About 10,000 miles away if we count the signal bouncing multiple times between the ionosphere and the ground.
The BBC often does as you say and even if the interview is down a phone line they will play a record. Some shows have the musicians playing live. Other UK stations do similar.
I just Googled and it turns out it was https://wkdu.org/ 91.7 FM, Drexel University college radio! Woohoo something is alive out there !!
And I just found the playlist of the exact show I listened to, on Thursday July 16th - https://wkdu.org/playlist/71388
I listen to Radio 4 through the day when I'm working on things that don't need my full concentration.
It's the alarm that wakes me at 0630 and I often listen to the news before bed.
Adverts drive me insane. It's a national treasure and I'd pay the licence fee again just for R4 + Sounds.
Wait! Except for one major improvement. There is a station CJNY ("The Journey") at 106.3 FM, which is run by Indigenous people:
The last sports radio station in Vancouver literally closed this month!
This article also claims that radio is slowly gaining listeners.
https://www.vancitylookout.com/p/in-the-face-of-algorithms-a...
It’s great because they stream online so when I’m back home and don’t know what to listen to, it’s always an option.
For those interested - https://itapemafm.com.br/
The local NPR backed station the Current is good but their audio quality is terrible, even their HD stream is muffled and wonky. They also eliminated many of the DJs I had grown to like and I never got that same connection with their replacement, which definitely impacted how I listen.
And a very American/mainstream-centric view of things. Radio (especially from the view of things in 2009) in more niche/underground circles was and in some regards still is a driving force of music curation and community in other parts of the world like the UK, parts of the EU and beyond.
Does radio have to be on the FM band? Do we count streaming like via YouTube, twitch and other platforms the same as Radio? I'd say yes. And in that regard, the spirit of radio and the format/feel the author recalls still very much exists.
In Australia it was ABC's Triple J - similar story. Everyone tuned in to the annual top 100 tracks of the year.
That reach has not happened since with any media that I'm aware of. It was very unifying - we were all aware of the same songs, even if we didn't like the same songs. I can sing along to Duran Duran even though I was very scathing of them at the time, in part because I was force-fed Duran Duran every day on the radio.
RRR and PBS in Melbourne are still excellent and seem to still be a fairly big deal if bumper stickers are anything to go by.
I didn't. Apart from John Peel, many of the DJs were naff and the station was behind the curve (as the BBC nearly always is). The BBC was faintly ridiculous and banned groups like Runrig (informally because they considered them too Scottish) and songs like Split Enz's "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" (formally, because of the Falklands War). Both of which were inoffensive...
But apart from Peel, the BBC was way behind when it came to metal (except pop/hair metal), hip hop, indy/alternative/shoegaze, rave/trance/techno etc. I think they picked up on the Pixies and grunge but not much else.
Recently a DJ with excellent music taste and a deep radio-perfect voice died. I was devastated when I got the news. The two remaining radio shows in his slot were something I'll remember forever. One unbelievably raw, as it was only two days since he died, the other beautiful, as everyone came with music and stories to remember him.
You don't get this connection over streaming.
RIP Bob Rusche
What was fun about it was his irreverent sense of humor, the silly contests he'd run, the ads that made no sense, and all the drugged out band members he'd invite to the station.
I still have several cassettes of Brain Pain. Lost treasures, I presume. I wound up buying many of the albums he spun.
The only band I can remember hearing on WITR, then hearing anywhere else, is Neon Indian. They also sponsored a concert with Viva Brother, which briefly got some airplay on other stations, in spite of never (to my knowledge) having played them.
On the west coast, https://kexp.org of course. https://kcrw.com and their HD2 channel.
Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org jazz/blues/local is incredible (so help ye who has to listen through the local music announcements though!) and also with a hd2. https://ksjd.org has some fun variety. https://coloradosound.org is great rock, as is https://koto.org in CO. There's nearly nothing that makes me so happy as https://mountainchill.com in telluride co; a station that makes it clear how narrowly grouped together most stations are & that just is so good.
Coming closer to me, https://wtmd.org rock in Baltimore md, https://xpn.org in Philly for more. https://wzum.org jazz in pittsburgh pa. https://wdvx.com in knoxville tn.
I also listen to a bunch of others, which i'd characterize more as tier 2; good but often more ads or less reliable a win for me. weqx, wmrw-lp, kozo-lp, weru, wmpg. wsri and wwod (both "the river" 93.9, and occasionally from the right elevation in NH overlapping in signal amusingly enough).
A lot of these stations have good track listings too, broken down by the DJ, sometimes that you can play on demand. It's incredible how much excellent interesting fantastic music you can scout out or listen to.
I used to listen to endless endless reams of shoutcast stations online. But man that has really really died out something fierce. There used to be so many interesting niche stations there. It still got me started looking widely at radio stations, as a decent fraction were just regular radio stations too. Realizing how badly commercial radio would never give the goods, would play the same pop stuff all the time, and have lots of ads? Man it was sad, but there were so many excellent other things to tune into! Alas on the dial, it's largely been couple massive corporate and political/religious (all very right-wing, Powell Memorandum on and on) titans taking over as much radiowaves as they can, as stations fold and go under, in the hard times of keeping your head up in the world today, getting the building, gear, and staff's bill's payed. (Especially with the administration trying to destroy the arts broadly, gutting National Endowment for the Arts!)
I'd absolutely love for folks to throw more stations they enjoy out here. https://radio.garden is of course wicked fun to browse generally! Gets submitted every so often, often garnering some significant love. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=radio.garden
Fiercely local, fiercely independent. Has been great for new music discovery for me for years.
Automation / machines tend to make things more efficient and we shouldn’t shy away from automation, but they can also reduce the human connection. I think the same thing will happen with AI generated art - l human generated art can be a spiritual experience meaning you can connect with another human through art - but if a masterpiece like Cypress Trees in Wheat Fields is AI generated, there isn’t a connection with the human artist. Consequently we must consciously turn to other places to keep human connection strong.
There's definitely still demand for quality radio shows but I guess it just makes more money if you play whatever the big studios pay you to play. But its the same thing with television as well; many indie channels on YouTube produce MUCH better content than anything you can see on the traditional TV or Netflix.
Most people today can hardly remember when radio was curated live. Perhaps if you were near a small station you might have had the experience. Most major markets were completely corporate by the early 90s.
I know, my first career pick was radio, and by the time I was in college at a college radio station in the late 90s. That career path was dead unless I wanted to be in marketing or sales, which I had no interest in.
Little factoid about my username, it was my pirate station call letters from when I was running my own small station with a hand built FM transmitter in the 90s.
I live in Austin and there's a pretty good station (I think it's actually a group of stations across Texas) called Sun Radio. I pretty much only listen in the car, but they are usually playing something I'm interested in.
The greats - in my opinion, WBCN and WFNX - are long off the air. They were powerhouses of culture, both local and national. WFNX was the first to play Nirvana's Nevermind; Bono of U2 once said that "...without BCN, we'd all be (expletive)'d, let's face it."
Oedipus, a well-known Boston DJ since the 70s (who got started at 88.1 WMBR, MIT's station) and program director at WBCN, said of it: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed radio... Corporations were now allowed to own multiple stations in the same market and across the country. Stations were no longer programmed locally."
Meanwhile, WAAF went online-only in 2020. WBOS got delegated to an HD2 subchannel in 2004. Likewise, The Boston Globe picked up many of the radio personalities for the online-only RadioBDC, now Indie617, but that seemed dead by the mid-2010s. I hear the former WFNX DJs Henry Santoro and Julie Kramer may still have some limited presence on 89.7 WGBH.
I was recently happy to find Adam 12 (formerly of WFNX (formerly of WBCN)) still DJing on 105.7 WROR.
88.9 WERS (Emerson College's station) is doing a great job of carrying the helm of Boston music culture. Occasionally I'll also tune into 90.3 WZBC (Boston College's station), which is a more "traditional" and less "commercial" college radio station.
Just outside Boston are likewise some public and community stations with good programming - 88.3 WRPS (Rockland's public radio station) and 101.3 WFNX (Scituate's community station - love that they picked up the WFNX callsign!) are pretty good, if you're in range.
My goto was WUMB, which is out of UMass Boston, and played a consistent format (folk and Americana, I guess?) throughout the day. Blues Hangover on WHRB (Harvard) was always worthwhile when I caught it.
The playlist was set by corporate (or by a consultant). You could maybe change the order of the songs, but you were not allowed to add / subtract any songs.
By 1980 over 1/2 of the stations were "automated". Music was provided by a service, on Reel to Reel tape (played by Revox B77's).
Path to a radio job in 1980? A Third Class RadioTelephone License with Broadcast Endorsement.
The automation machine at one station I worked at had 2047 programmable steps. (well, 2048, 0 was a step)
As a 16 year old, I could not fathom why it was not 2400. With 2400 steps, you could program each hour the exact same; not so with 2047.
Editing was a dream on the ASR33 teletype. Seems scissors and tape are very effective.
* If you're in your 50s and listening to the radio you're probably rich and we want you!
* More live DJs for sure
That said, if you're going to listen on your iPhone there are plenty of good DJs there too. dandelionradio.com for me.
I don't agree with this premise. FM Radio is definitely more corporate today, but I grew up in the 90s and my memories of FM radio are not fond.
For my whole life it has always been materially the same, shitty, experience: occasional good songs interleaved with mediocre ones and a hefty dose of annoying unskippable ads.
The difference is that when I was a kid we didn't have streaming or even mp3 players so we just had to put up with the ads. Today I can just play songs locally off my phone via Bluetooth. No ads, no DJs, just the music I enjoy.
Nowadays I have a USB drive, though I understand that's rare. Can hardly find a (car) radio that supports modern sizes these days, probably by design.
Yes, that's an accurate description of the hassle of trying to avoid unskippable ads.
I remember KGLE (KEGL?) Out of DFW pulling shit on their radio shows like saying the city banned smoking in cars and people flooded city government phone lines with complaints and rants, which had a lulz component that we wouldnt see again till the 4chan days.
They also had an ad-free (or at least low as, I don't think I've heard any) version of The Edge on their HD2 stream.
Opposite here in Blighty.
There has been an explosion in the number of local community FM stations, frequently playing music from local bands and chat with local figures. Factor in the national BBC radio stations (who's charter is to “inform, educate, and entertain”, not to retain attention) and we are onto a winner.
Yes there are still some 'corporate' commercial stations, but we also have plenty of quality to choose from.
Most of them are indistinguishable, don't carry local news (apart from boasting about charity fundraising they do), or local bands. Pure pap
A bog standard Sony radio would run for a long, long time on a few AA batteries. Back then, you could also pick up the audio portion of UHF and VHF analog TV too. It was the main lifeline for news and local updates.
Radio is a fantastic technology that is being wasted. Cheap to transmit, cheap to receive, and covers a wide area. It would be great to see a radio renaissance. Maybe the Zoomers reconnecting to older technologies will revive it.
8 Ball Radio - https://8ballradio.nyc
Radio Free Brooklyn - https://www.radiofreebrooklyn.org
Who else has favorites to share?
Like as in spinning discs.
Can someone be a disc jockey and not know they are not disk jockeys? Not sure. Or maybe I'm mistaken
Human DJs at still around on college radio.
I don't really know how successful they are but since their inception 13 years ago I've probably listened to them more than all other stations combined. And I donate to them.
Compound that with heavy advertising (for some stations) , and the "duty cycle" is even lower. It reminds me of those billboard trucks that drive up and down las Vegas, just burning gasoline, creating traffic, so you can see their ads.
Efficiency is up, more in the upper 70%'s now days. (of course broadcasters will use a transmitter until it is unfixable, so there are some 50 year old units still on the air). Each user requires a 9 volt battery to listen (maybe a bit more...)
Compare that electricity with the streaming cost. The streamers computers and routers. The infrastructure cost for the internet (not all amortized to streaming, of course). The desktop / laptop / phone electricity for EACH user / subscriber.
Once you hit a certain audience size, broadcasting is more efficient.
Note: I agree with you on the billboard trucks. A waste.
I know it's more complicated than that, if they shut off the transmitter at night, they would lose listeners in total. I just think it's wasteful compared to other forms of communication.
My solution is a small, self hosted PWA that simply has a list of a few dozen of my favorite internet radio stations. Loads quickly, no sign in or subscription, no add, just music. In the past month I have hardly even opened Spotify!
Well, that's where a lot of this type of content is (seemingly, at least) alive and well right now. Satellite appears to be here to stay, and can provide tremendous value on long drives. Particularly if you're doing a lot of them.
I'd love to see more FM stations return to human DJs, and human curated playlists. But until/unless that happens, we still need somewhere for those skills to be utilized and refined.
What if there was a radio station that was entirely listener supported?
What if there was a radio station that let its volunteer DJs play whatever they wanted to play, and say whatever they wanted to say? Within FCC laws, of course.
WFMU is the answer. 1 terrestrial broadcast, 3 internet livestreams, 20 years of archives online and available for listening.
Today there’s KCRW locally and it’s good though getting blander.
I also saw him when he toured with Roger Waters for “Radio KAOS”. “Good night Jim.” “Good night, Billy.”
I really enjoyed him when he was at KMPC/KEDG with JJ Jackson. That station struggled to find its way, starting early on with Pat “Paraquat” Kelly and Cynthia Fox, along with Guy Kemp at night (kind of a comedy/zoo shtick — I found his show really funny). I remember calling in once when Joe Satriani was just getting airplay, and the guy who answered was yelling “Are you hearing this? Are you HEARING THIS!?”.
Live radio.
It was nice with Ladd because he had his freedom, but a wider playlist.
MARS-FM, KROQ, KNAC, Pirate Radio, 91X (from Mexico, when you can get it, but they had some power).
But, a notable memory was 1989. Tiananmen Square.
Geno Michelini, KLOS, Five o’clock funnies fame, announced the breaking news of what was happening in China, and followed it up with Rush’s “Red Sector A” from “Grace Under Pressure”. I still get a little choked up thinking about.
Live radio.
I wouldn't be surprised if people like you want me who want more variety are a majority - but we don't spend money on things advertisers want us to buy by enough to be worth advertising to us.
Like, think about how many stations are Christmas format, and how "Christmas music" is a very regimented set of about 20-40 songs from the 1950s. To paraphrase XKCD[0], radio embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Baby Boomers' childhoods every December[1]. Probably because they're the only ones who still even think about using radio anymore.
Next time you listen to the radio, pay attention not to the songs, but to the goods and services being advertised next to them. That will tell you everything you need to know about who is still listening to radio.
[1] don't forget.
Theres also a local christian radio station I am only aware of because the guy fixing my fence was blasting it on his stereo. They were taking donations the entire time. I am sincerely not interested but they seem to deliver what their listeners want too.
When I was digging through old VHS tapes, I digitized a couple TV spots and put them on youtube; passing them along to Jim.
Best advice I got when I got to San Jose was from an old recruiter - she must have been 30!
She said the Bay Area is big, but the Silicon Valley is small.
I think about her advice a lot.
The radio world is even smaller. I tried out at WZZQ when I was in high school, but didn't make the cut.
And if I wasn't actively driving a car at the moment, I probably had something I could be doing with a computer, perhaps involving a YouTube video, or just listening to my own extremely idiosyncratic music choices, that was more interesting than a local radio station, even if I technically owned some kind of device that could receive an FM signal.
Soon enough I had a smartphone and then a smartphone with a mobile internet connection whose cap was generous enough that I didn't need to think hard about how I was using it. And it turns out that having the entire internet available to me on a handheld device subsumes everything I might get out of listening to a radio station - including the modality of listening to audio while I'm doing something else, which might well come from an internet radio station anywhere in the world.
It occurs to me when I listen to a podcast while I'm working out at the gym or driving a car today (via my phone) that the actual auditory experience of this isn't drastically different than how people were consuming talk radio shows decades ago (down the fact that many of them have ads). The techniques for speaking in an engaging way to an audience, or having an engaging conversation between multiple people, are still valid; many podcasts I listen to address listener messages on the program, just like a weekly radio show might do - some even try to replicate the experience of a listener calling in live on a phone.
The business models that work today are of course drastically different than the ones that worked on radio decades ago, and the fact that audience isn't at all limited by physical location means that the sorts of audio content that gets streamed over the internet today are systematically different from what would've been the case on a radio show. I think this is mostly for the better though - more variety, more democratic access to the medium, and no FCC to regulate what you can and cannot legally say on regulated radio spectrum.
As far as I'm concerned, everything that's good about the content of AM/FM radio has been replicated on the general internet, and I have no particular reason to care if the radio signal carrying it to my ears comes from a licensed FM station or the 5G connection from my phone to a cell phone tower.
I recently went to renew my legal callsign, and apparently now email is a required attribute; if an email from them "bounces" then you get your callsign revoked.
My PO Box is no longer enough for them. I don't use email anymore. Radio silence.
>"Onair decorum prevents honest expression of how I really feel..."
>So I guess it's a gonna be a final:
>73//silentkeyKG5???//onmyfinalrogerALLCLEAR>>>rogerroger
----
Ya'll can go to hell, too.
That's a choice. Why no email? Why is it so hard to have an email account for the few things that require it?
To cite Paul Graham's 15+ year old essay on the topic, email is nothing more than "a to-do list that anybody can add on to."
I respect myself to not use an ineffective communication medium (beyond as-described, above).
Meanwhile the government still throws money at NPR on FM, but sadly they've quit playing classical music all day like they once did and are instead pummeling the airwaves with leftist crap. Supposedly CPB will cease funding NPR but I'll believe it when NPR dies.
I'd like a mostly-classical right-leaning FM station, please, to listen to before my pecker falls off from the leftist shite spewing from NPR.
There's so much good radio to be had since the arrival of the internet. Not even talking about online-only, but actual radio stations who also stream. Maybe there's less cool broadcast stations in any given area, but our overall exposure via internet is incredible. Just search for free-form radio. If you have a college in your area, you probably have interesting radio and DJs on the airwaves.
The article ends with giving up, ipod + KPFA news, which just seems wild. Never has there been a time where there's more music available.
Thanks to censorship and government interference, you can't listen to certain stations now, e.g. Turkey won't allow you to listen online outside Turkey, Russian stations are blocked thanks to the Ukrainian situation, and even some American stations are blocked. Search engines are near useless for most things nowadays.
Weren't they allowed to have "normal" names like anywhere else in the world?
Other countries have similarly arbitrary brands based on either band spectrum or regulatory regimes - eg Channel 4 / Radio 4