re: re: radio is cool, actually
this post is in response to this post by lwgrs and this post by donthave2sting.
I am also not going to talk about shortwave radio in this post as it's outside the scope of these two but historically speaking it predates FM radio and was crazy. Google it. It's crazy.
I have probably mentioned this before when I talk about listening to podcasts in the car. I am the same age as lwgrs so I grew up with the world of radio that he describes. We listened to the radio in the car every morning because that's where the local news was. If there was bad weather we turned on the radio to find out if we needed to take shelter. If we wanted to listen to something new we would turn the knob through the static to discover music we would otherwise never listen to.
Now, we did have tapes and later CD's in the car but you have to buy those and they were expensive then so you only had stuff that you already liked on hand to listen to that way. It wasn't until 2003-ish that I had a car with a CD player that could play burned CD's. And yes, after a while you get tired of the same songs so what did you do while driving to/from work? You flipped on the radio.
Growing up in a small town we only had access to maybe three really strong stations. One was in town and played contemporary (at the time) country music, so 80's and 90's country is what I heard up until middle school when I had my own radio to mess with. At that point I listened to a station about 25 miles away that played the latest pop music. A good old fashioned MIX station. "The 80's 90's and Today!".
If you wanted classic rock, talk, or classical you had to dial into the Dallas area and unless you were in the car and on a hill that connection would be spotty. You could listen to it but only in certain conditions. The station would cut in and out constantly. Then after high school I went to college for a bit in Dallas proper and was able to get.... everything. Crystal clear stations that played stuff like live techno on the weekends, talk radio stations, rap and hiphop, everything.
I got hooked on a talk radio station program called The Pugs and Kelly show that aired around lunch. I had to make sure I was in the car or back at my apartment to listen to it. Every portable walkman or CD player came with an AM/FM tuner because listening to the radio was such a common thing.
When I moved away from Dallas I would listen to the radio in my car on the way to work or school in the mornings in the Austin area. Just like every other pop station the ones around there had a morning show. From like, 7am to 9am a crew of 2-4 hosts would talk about the news or what they did the night before, run contests live on air, and promote whatever event the station was going to be at later in the week. Imagine your favorite podcast crew doing a live morning show but they gave out concert tickets and t-shirts during it.
Because radio was live, all the time, you had the option to call in and interact with the DJ's. You could request a song, play in trivia games, be the 9th caller and win something, etc. I know todays radio stations are more automated and disconnected from the listeners, like if you listen to a Jack FM station they use clips between the songs rather than a live DJ telling you what is coming up.
You can still do this with independent manned stations, or NPR. During 2009-2016 I used to listen to NPR from San Antonio because I had a San Marcos -> San Antonio commute every day. That was the only station that constantly gave local news like when wrecks or closures for roads were happening or when weather was bad. This is about the time most of my friends were listening to things like Pandora or I <3 Music apps from their phones.
And this live local aspect of the radio station is what I really miss from it. I'm back here in East Texas so we have the one station in town and a handful of others that are either automated or in Spanish. I think most people listen to Spotify or podcasts in the car these days, but both require - in general - a data connection.
We have a large family phone plan with shared data and once in a while someone will go out of town and eat all the data over a weekend because they aren't on wifi. When this happens our phone company throttles our data to unusable levels so phone apps go out the window. I'll give up and switch the radio back on until we get data back.
The one thing the kids notice is how much louder the music sounds on an FM station vs Spotify or Apple. It's EQ'd differently so the V shape makes everything sound so much more intense, they love it. Voices are boomy, there is bass in every song. We can't get too many stations well but it's still nice to be able to get a staticky stream of classic rock when nothing else works. (Our car doesn't have a CD player or aux input, just SD and USB connections with a big dumb screen.)
If we lived in a bigger centralized city we would have much better access to radio stations. But even back in the day the radio would play songs on repeat quite often. Which was great if you wanted to record a popular song to tape later. But these days I think it's not an issue of the same songs being on repeat as the lack of ability to call up the station and request something. I'm also under the impression that most stations are owned by a handful of companies that use common popular repeat programming across the board.
I also only used SiriusXM etc the few times we bought a new car and it came with a month or three of free access. Those stations were similar in that you couldn't call in or get local info, just an automated playlist based on the genre it was under. Back when I listened to NPR in Austin they had two stations, a channel for news and a channel for music. The music one was run by a local college so the music was really all over the place and cool. They would have artists come on and talk about a show they were going to be doing that night or later that week, then the station would give out tickets to callers.
This made it really fun to discover new music. The DJ had more control over what was played and the station would change up the DJ's based on the time of day. The only thing I've seen similar to this experience in todays environment is Derrick Gee, who used to work in radio and now curates his own live music and playlists for others to discover new stuff.
But that's the thing, what he does is a taste of what radio stations once were. (As far as curated music is concerned.) But we still don't have the local news or live information aspect that radio once had. I know internet radio let's you listen in on stations from other states and towns, and every NPR station has an app that let's you pick whatever you want to listen to on the fly but it's just not the same.
I do see a future in curated music being a thing people jump into. Following DJ's or a youtube channel that plays what you want to hear. But that's still online. The FCC rules and licensing the music for public broadcast would have to make major changes for this type of thing to really take off again.
Bonus
Alright, I put on the radio to go pick up the kids from school to see what was on. A 50/50 split between Country and Christian stations, then about 3 Spanish stations, two classic rock stations, and a whisp of KERA. There was a sports talk station going over the latest high school softball scores. Two were playing commercials, one for GLP-1's and another for supplements. Back in the day the commercials were for things like laser hair removal, LASIK, and car stereo installers. Very much aimed at 20 somethings with disposable income.
But it's the commercials that had us dip out of listening to the radio in the first place. A popular station would play maybe 2 songs before an ad break, not counting the DJ introducing the song or making a note of something between them. With ham radio we are required to say our call sign about every ten minutes while being on air, I assume it's similar for commercial stations as well. And it's when commercials become too prevalent that we skip to another station. We pay for a Spotify subscription ONLY to get rid of ads. It's like a minute long ad between each song. We used to pay Youtube for the same issue. Switching from cable to streaming fixed our issue with commercials for a while as well.
But we all know how that ended up. Every streaming service puts in ads unless you pay extra, and even then will play ads before popular shows. Prime shows ads between stuff, Apple tv does an ad block before a show, mostly for their own content but still. The radio is free because of the ads, they need the money to run the station because of license fees, electricity, workers, etc. Nobody should be working for free.
Which is where I see the online live music curator aspect becoming more popular in the future. An online DJ who does a live show you can listen to like a podcast, call in, chat, whatever, and it just costs you a Patreon pledge or something similar.
Radio is way cooler of an option because it's always available for free, as long as you put up with the ads or quarterly pledge drives. All you need is a little electrical box with an antenna that can convert vibrations you can't hear into vibrations you can hear. But I do feel like the new interest in "offline mode" for media these days is really a "phoneless mode" since we decided to cram everything we do into one black rectangle.
I did the whole switch back to Zunes/iPods during the pandemic but that only really works when I'm here at the house. Not so much in the car which is where I end up listening to things the most. I like seeing people who never grew up with physical or offline media discover it. I'm currently waiting on parts to come in for a DIY mp3 player because I get angry about the current MP3 player market being trash, but that's for another post once it works and I can show yall.
Anyway, outside of your car stereo or finding an old boom box, I almost bought one of these FiiO radios at Christmas because they look so good but were outside my budget. That would be super good for someone who wants a more portable option.
And I do miss just flipping through stations to find something fun.