About four years ago, tired of listening to the wasteland of modern rock radio, I purchased a subscription to Sirius Satellite Radio. I enjoyed the music they played. After the XM merger, Sirius eliminated a few of my favorite stations, this wouldn’t have been enough to make me cancel the subscription, but I started working from home more often and was only in my car for less than 20 minutes a day, so I did away with it. When I get in my car now, I usually listen to CDs/MP3 player, 88.5 XPN, or NPR. The last few weeks have been fund-drives for both stations (and I donate to both) so I started scanning. Nothing much has improved in four years.
I know you are thinking “tell me something I don’t already know”. I don’t just want to complain, I want to understand just what it is that sucks about radio today, and after listening for a week I discovered: there is no new(er) music on the radio. I listened from 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM every day for the last 10 weekdays and I don’t think there was song produced in the last 5 years played on my scans. What did I hear? Led Zepplin, Aerosmith, older Jay-Z (and radio sanitized), Radiohead (they play “Creep” at almost the same time every day – and that song is before they really became what Radiohead is today), Lifehouse (really?), lots of Bon Jovi (maybe because we are in New Jersey), and AC/DC. These station don’t even bother playing the newer stuff of their established line up of geezers.
Perhaps I should just stick with the college radio stations? My issue with the college stations is they either play really shitty lo-fi recordings of their friends bands or it is 4 hour block of vaginal bleeding. Don’t get me wrong, I love female musicians, but I don’t need to hear Beth Orton, Susan Tedesci, and Nora Jones back-to-back. The common complaint of college radio playing R.E.M. 24×7 is bullshit – I would kill for some R.E.M. The ladies aren’t the only ones to catch my wrath: Fuck Vampire Weekend. I can’t stand the new twenty-something rock star: Fragile, fraught with stage fright, making sad bastard music (and nothing else). If I wanted to listen to a funeral dirge, I would go to church.
Radio stations say they play what people want to hear; but how do people know if they want to listen to something they never heard? Finding new acts on the internet is exhausting. It takes me at least 2-4 hours a week to pick out a song of the week for Sunday Leftovers. I scour at least 15 different music blogs each week to find ONE song I like enough to share each week, so I don’t think most people would be that dedicated to finding new tunes. So how do you find new music (seriously, write back on this)? Listening to your iPod isn’t a solution as it only has the music you own and know about (unless you want to listen to terrible 2 hour music pod-casts hoping for a good song). Should you pay $14.00 dollars a month hoping Sirus/XM’s new wage/college/underground radio stations break the acts you want to hear? Internet radio stations like Last.fm take your listening preferences and make suggestions, but it hasn’t been too successful for me yet. What is a viable alternative?
Musicians need the radio to get their songs to audiences. Radio stations need musicians to make music so people listen to their shitty formats and sell advertising. The radio has ignored the current 13-30 crowd because they have abandoned the artists this generation listens to. People aren’t going to record stores to buy music anymore; the radio should have more influence than ever, but instead it chooses to “play it safe” and relegate itself to the currently diseased and inbred “Top 40” (how the hell can there be a Top 40 if nobody is buying music anymore?) [Let us all thank the 1996 telecommunications act that allows one asshole to own multiple stations in one market]
Should we get more proactive? Does calling radio stations really help? Should we try an experiment and call some local radio stations to see if we can make a change? Or should we try to take over a small AM station? Wheels are turning my friends, twitter back with comments, ideas, and shows of support.
JoeyLombardi on Twitter
Further Reading: The Contrarian
