Hang the DJ

My brother asked me the other day why music sucks now. "Where's the next Nirvana? How do we go from Nirvana to Jessica Simpson being popular?" Why is music so sucky? The Answer: Radio.

The fact of the matter is (well, fact as I see it, which isn't necessarily fact but moreso opinion, but why split hairs?) that good music is still out there. But even in this age of social networking and "music 2.0" sites, you still have to go out of your way to find it. Spend a few hours of your time a week tooling around Last.fm, MySpace, Haystack, et al and you'll discover some good stuff. Spend another view hours a week combing through blogs (fluxblog, 3hive) plus your local town's "alternative" newspapers (Citypages, The Rift) and finally tune in to the local public radio station when you are in their broadcast range (The Current) and you'll end up discovering a ton of good music. And people who are into music don't really mind doing all this stuff. But - totally unscientifically here - maybe this is at most 20% of the population? The vast majority of the general public learn about music from two sources. 90% = radio and 10% = movies/TV. So, if you believe that most of the "other" people in the general population have sucky taste in music - and let's face it, there is no way it is better than yours - it has to be blamed on radio.

Music 2.0 zealots will tell you that radio is dead. Radio sucks tremendously, but it is not dead. There is no other medium that is so easy to consume content in a passive way, playing in the background, piquing the interest of the listener when something interesting is detected in the brain. Music 2.0 in its current form - and all the other tasks listed above - require too much of an active audience. Because of that, they will never replace radio.

So, why is radio so sucky? Consolidation and commercialism.

• A Future of Music Coalition study indicates that it's not your imagination, but radio stations basically play the same songs over and over:

  * The top four radio station owners have almost half of the listeners and the top ten owners have almost two-thirds of listeners.
  * The "localness" of radio ownership – ownership by individuals living in the community -- has declined between 1975 and 2005 by almost one-third.
  * Just fifteen formats make up three-quarters of all commercial programming. Moreover, radio formats with different names can overlap up to 80% in terms of the songs played on them

• A Washington Post article discovered via Hypebot sadly showcases a radio station's reduction of playlist building to market research. Radio is undoubtedly a double-edged sword - it has gotta play what people like so it can attract listeners and therefore sell ad time. But, the radio station business model isn't about music, it's about selling shit. Experimenting with content that doesn't fit tried and proven is not way to entice big media buys done on the behalf of companies looking to sell shit. Warning: you will be depressed after reading this article.
  

So what is the solution to this? I believe radio will experience a renaissance as soon as universal wi-fi becomes a reality (within 10 years???) Why? Because then anyone can run their own publically "broadcast" radio station, without the need for investment into broadcast infrastructure or FCC licensing. The diversity of music that is streamed on the internet can be brought to the worksite, to the car - to anywhere where terrestial radio entertains people today. People can listen passively as they always have, but now there will be a much greater diversity of music to choose from.

The question which then arises is: will people be willing to sift through the myriad of stations and try out new formats, or simply tune into the internet version of the same crappy stations which are out there now???