Radio

I just heard on NPR's All Things Considered a letter from a listener. One line was, "It's not every day we hear our favorite band on the radio." I think that just about says all that needs to be said about American radio.


But I'm not the type to stop at "all that needs to be said," am I?

If American radio were any good, most people would be able to say they hear their favorite band(s) regularly on the radio. I am sure (going out on a limb here as I have no poll results to draw on) that amongst people who consider themselves music fans you will find very few who listen to music on the radio at all.

If you exclude the truly rich radio environments like New York, Atlanta, L.A., etc., and look at all the rest of the country you will find the music that is locally available is homogeneous and extremely limited. This means most Americans who are really into music will never hear their favorite band on the radio. All Americans everywhere can hear the vapid crap the music industry is marketing at us but few Americans can hear anything else... on their radio.

I'm a fan of radio. I think radio can be amazing. But I know that variety in radio is a thing of the past for those of us outside the major metropolitan areas. We have to move to our iPods and satellite radio but this removes that amazing touch of having this other person playing music for us.

I can remember listening to the FM radio late at night in the middle of nowhere in far eastern Kentucky and hearing some guy playing me some records he liked, and then tuning around on AM and hearing the voices of djs in Chicago, Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans. The strange blasts of Mexican radio. Now we have the same Clear Channel stations everywhere we go. If you're in the middle of Kansas you're going to hear the same thing you'll hear in the middle of Kentucky or anywhere else more than 50 miles from a big city. There was a time when those music stations would've been locally owned and operated by people who were playing music for the people around them. Now the music is a carefully manipulated blend of nauseating crap that the dinosaur music industry in this country understands how to "market."

There was a time when a song would be released, and hundreds if not thousands of djs would decide whether or not they were going to play it and then tens if not hundreds of thousands of listeners would call in and asked to hear it again and that's how a hit became a hit. Now the record companies ship a million copies of a song, negotiate with Clear Channel and its competitor(s) for "rotation" and "number of plays" and voila, you've got a number one single. The thing the record industry doesn't get: A hit is now meaningless.

I am developing a long screed about the fact that marketing as a business is the parasite that is killing its host. Look for it.