Radio Rant
Posted the below in response to this post over at BlogCritics about podcasting. College Radio = independant radio, BTW, for the purposes of the discussion below.
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I'm not sure if Lisa was bating us, or what. But, come on, Lisa, you can't be serious. The only good radio out there right now is independent radio or college radio. NPR too, of course, but I know the NPR station in Kent, OH (at least the last time I listened to it)plays only classical music all day long. There is so much better public radio available out there. (WKSU was the only NPR station that I could receive).
But I got off on a tangent. Mainstream radio sucks. And for the very reason you give in your post complaining about podcasting: the DJs have no say.
A DJ at the station where I work recently left for a paying job (we are all volunteers) at Clear Channel. Who could blame him? Jobs are tough to find in Missoula, MT. But he has less than 5% say in what he plays. And the programming is heavily weighted with commercials. Very little time for music.
Yes, DJs like Kid Leo, Wolfman Jack, B.B. King and Little Steven were great. Little Steven STILL is great, and for those of you, like me, who can't catch his radio show on a radio near you, you can catch it at Little Steven's Underground Garage. It rocks.) But the days of great DJs are over. Never again will a DJ "break" a band. Never again will a DJ like Kid Leo bring so much awareness to someone like Springsteen that his shows in Cleveland became legendary in the late 70's/early 80's. Never again will a DJ like Eric Olson who did "Cool Tunes" on Cleveland radio back in the late 80s/early 90s (yo, Eric! --and, no, not a suck-up, just true) play the music that he enjoys, exposing audiences to a wide variety of programming.
Maybe you're too young to remember, Lisa, the days when WMMS won the Rolling Stone magazine "Best Radio Station of the Year" award. Repeatedly. For seven years or something like that. And then it was discovered that WMMS was stuffing the ballot box. That was when I began to lose faith in radio.
And, having traveled the country literally coast to coast in a van over the past 2 years, I have heard radio in almost every state in the lower 48. I'm here to tell you, Lisa, it's all the same. And it all sucks.
And satellite radio? A decent alternative, but, as the Master of all Things mentions, it won't get you away from the same stuff you listen to all of the time. And even satellite radio is repetitive if you listen to it long enough.
No, the future of "radio" is podcasting, streaming radio done by independents, and other forms of pirate radio.
posted by Marc at 6/29/2005 07:36:00 PM
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