There’s a human connection element to old radio that streaming will never replicate. And I worry that it’s gone from modern automated radio too.
It used to be if you were driving down the road and heard a song you liked
Hearing a song you liked on the radio hit harder then playing it yourself because you knew that there was another human nearby at that moment in time that had picked it out and played it. You were physically tethered to them through invisible waves through the sky. Lonely road trips felt less lonely. Late night work shifts felt less alienating because there was somebody ELSE working late.
But some weird happenstance I've only recently started listening to radio, and I find it pretty good? The commercial stations are basically all unbearable, but my metro area has a half-dozen public/community/campus stations that can be enjoyable or interesting.
I just drove home, and spent 20 minutes listening to a host on the radio talking to a researcher about evolved preferences for non-mates in humans. It was pretty interesting, and not something I'd have stumbled upon otherwise.
Most people today can hardly remember when radio was curated live. Perhaps if you were near a small station you might have had the experience. Most major markets were completely corporate by the early 90s.
I know, my first career pick was radio, and by the time I was in college at a college radio station in the late 90s. That career path was dead unless I wanted to be in marketing or sales, which I had no interest in.
Little factoid about my username, it was my pirate station call letters from when I was running my own small station with a hand built FM transmitter in the 90s.
I'm reminded of Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog with her late night radio station in a lighthouse, or Lily Tomlin in Prairie Home Companion saying "Now radio's just a bunch of people yelling at each other and computers playing music". Although I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a GenZ girl doing something I had forgotten about: channel surfing.
You don't necessarily need to be near a small station these days, college stations can stream online. I listen to WXPN (UPenn) that way regularly: https://xpn.org/ (player at top of the page).
I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone, except purely to test out whether it worked. I wouldn't make phone purchasing decisions based on whether or not it had a FM radio. A regulation requiring it in the ostensible name of safety would make phones somewhat more expensive and I'm skeptical that it would even help improve safety in an emergency significantly.
The only radio show I ever particularly liked was Jeff Gilbert's "Brain Pain" in the late 80s, on KCMU 90.3. He played metal music, particularly from the local Seattle bands.
What was fun about it was his irreverent sense of humor, the silly contests he'd run, the ads that made no sense, and all the drugged out band members he'd invite to the station.
I still have several cassettes of Brain Pain. Lost treasures, I presume. I wound up buying many of the albums he spun.
I am too young to know about US radio in the 80s or 90s, but I enjoy some of the local and independent stations. I even collected some of their streams after I gave up Spotify: https://yaky.dev/radio/
I treasure Radio On Internet (thanks Russ (Silicon Valley joke)) so much. There's so many less but still so many independent/community/college radio stations all over.
Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org jazz/blues/local is incredible (so help ye who has to listen through the local music announcements though!) and also with a hd2. https://ksjd.org has some fun variety. https://coloradosound.org is great rock, as is https://koto.org in CO. There's nearly nothing that makes me so happy as https://mountainchill.com in telluride co; a station that makes it clear how narrowly grouped together most stations are & that just is so good.
I also listen to a bunch of others, which i'd characterize more as tier 2; good but often more ads or less reliable a win for me. weqx, wmrw-lp, kozo-lp, weru, wmpg. wsri and wwod (both "the river" 93.9, and occasionally from the right elevation in NH overlapping in signal amusingly enough).
A lot of these stations have good track listings too, broken down by the DJ, sometimes that you can play on demand. It's incredible how much excellent interesting fantastic music you can scout out or listen to.
I used to listen to endless endless reams of shoutcast stations online. But man that has really really died out something fierce. There used to be so many interesting niche stations there. It still got me started looking widely at radio stations, as a decent fraction were just regular radio stations too. Realizing how badly commercial radio would never give the goods, would play the same pop stuff all the time, and have lots of ads? Man it was sad, but there were so many excellent other things to tune into! Alas on the dial, it's largely been couple massive corporate and political/religious (all very right-wing, Powell Memorandum on and on) titans taking over as much radiowaves as they can, as stations fold and go under, in the hard times of keeping your head up in the world today, getting the building, gear, and staff's bill's payed. (Especially with the administration trying to destroy the arts broadly, gutting National Endowment for the Arts!)
I'd absolutely love for folks to throw more stations they enjoy out here. https://radio.garden is of course wicked fun to browse generally! Gets submitted every so often, often garnering some significant love. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=radio.garden
And a very American/mainstream-centric view of things. Radio (especially from the view of things in 2009) in more niche/underground circles was and in some regards still is a driving force of music curation and community in other parts of the world like the UK, parts of the EU and beyond.
Does radio have to be on the FM band? Do we count streaming like via YouTube, twitch and other platforms the same as Radio? I'd say yes. And in that regard, the spirit of radio and the format/feel the author recalls still very much exists.
I grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1. Literally the entire population of UK teens listened to that one station for ~20 years (though individuals would listen to different shows - John Peel's famous indie/punk/whatever show in the evenings was very different to the daytime mainstream stuff).
In Australia it was ABC's Triple J - similar story. Everyone tuned in to the annual top 100 tracks of the year.
That reach has not happened since with any media that I'm aware of. It was very unifying - we were all aware of the same songs, even if we didn't like the same songs. I can sing along to Duran Duran even though I was very scathing of them at the time, in part because I was force-fed Duran Duran every day on the radio.
I never got into the habit of listening to "the radio", in the sense of an AM or FM station broadcasting over the air on some frequency in a general metropolitan area. I remember listening to the radio stations my parents liked to listen to in the car as a kid. But by the time I was old enough to drive myself, I had already owned an mp3 player for a while, and if I wanted to listen to music in (my parents') car I could plug it into a cassette deck adapter - it's not like any local radio station near me was gonna play the Final Fantasy VII OST or a mix that went from Eve 6 to Jethro Tull to Blind Guardian to an bluegrass version of the Bubble Bobble theme I found on OCRemix. Plus, no commercials.
And if I wasn't actively driving a car at the moment, I probably had something I could be doing with a computer, perhaps involving a YouTube video, or just listening to my own extremely idiosyncratic music choices, that was more interesting than a local radio station, even if I technically owned some kind of device that could receive an FM signal.
Soon enough I had a smartphone and then a smartphone with a mobile internet connection whose cap was generous enough that I didn't need to think hard about how I was using it. And it turns out that having the entire internet available to me on a handheld device subsumes everything I might get out of listening to a radio station - including the modality of listening to audio while I'm doing something else, which might well come from an internet radio station anywhere in the world.
It occurs to me when I listen to a podcast while I'm working out at the gym or driving a car today (via my phone) that the actual auditory experience of this isn't drastically different than how people were consuming talk radio shows decades ago (down the fact that many of them have ads). The techniques for speaking in an engaging way to an audience, or having an engaging conversation between multiple people, are still valid; many podcasts I listen to address listener messages on the program, just like a weekly radio show might do - some even try to replicate the experience of a listener calling in live on a phone.
The business models that work today are of course drastically different than the ones that worked on radio decades ago, and the fact that audience isn't at all limited by physical location means that the sorts of audio content that gets streamed over the internet today are systematically different from what would've been the case on a radio show. I think this is mostly for the better though - more variety, more democratic access to the medium, and no FCC to regulate what you can and cannot legally say on regulated radio spectrum.
As far as I'm concerned, everything that's good about the content of AM/FM radio has been replicated on the general internet, and I have no particular reason to care if the radio signal carrying it to my ears comes from a licensed FM station or the 5G connection from my phone to a cell phone tower.
>I signed off the air for the last time in 1994 [...] radio has changed drastically, and it just wouldn’t be any fun for me today.
I don't agree with this premise. FM Radio is definitely more corporate today, but I grew up in the 90s and my memories of FM radio are not fond.
For my whole life it has always been materially the same, shitty, experience: occasional good songs interleaved with mediocre ones and a hefty dose of annoying unskippable ads.
The difference is that when I was a kid we didn't have streaming or even mp3 players so we just had to put up with the ads. Today I can just play songs locally off my phone via Bluetooth. No ads, no DJs, just the music I enjoy.
Most stations sucked, but there were some more fun counter culture stations.
I remember KGLE (KEGL?) Out of DFW pulling shit on their radio shows like saying the city banned smoking in cars and people flooded city government phone lines with complaints and rants, which had a lulz component that we wouldnt see again till the 4chan days.
Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)
Nowadays I have a USB drive, though I understand that's rare. Can hardly find a (car) radio that supports modern sizes these days, probably by design.
>Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)
Yes, that's an accurate description of the hassle of trying to avoid unskippable ads.
There’s a human connection element to old radio that streaming will never replicate. And I worry that it’s gone from modern automated radio too.
It used to be if you were driving down the road and heard a song you liked
Hearing a song you liked on the radio hit harder then playing it yourself because you knew that there was another human nearby at that moment in time that had picked it out and played it. You were physically tethered to them through invisible waves through the sky. Lonely road trips felt less lonely. Late night work shifts felt less alienating because there was somebody ELSE working late.
Or at a stop light and the car next to you is listening/singing to the same song. Never happens anymore.
[delayed]
But some weird happenstance I've only recently started listening to radio, and I find it pretty good? The commercial stations are basically all unbearable, but my metro area has a half-dozen public/community/campus stations that can be enjoyable or interesting.
I just drove home, and spent 20 minutes listening to a host on the radio talking to a researcher about evolved preferences for non-mates in humans. It was pretty interesting, and not something I'd have stumbled upon otherwise.
Good radio died in the mid 80s.
Most people today can hardly remember when radio was curated live. Perhaps if you were near a small station you might have had the experience. Most major markets were completely corporate by the early 90s.
I know, my first career pick was radio, and by the time I was in college at a college radio station in the late 90s. That career path was dead unless I wanted to be in marketing or sales, which I had no interest in.
Little factoid about my username, it was my pirate station call letters from when I was running my own small station with a hand built FM transmitter in the 90s.
Boston has a whole bunch of live and college ratio stations still.
I'm reminded of Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog with her late night radio station in a lighthouse, or Lily Tomlin in Prairie Home Companion saying "Now radio's just a bunch of people yelling at each other and computers playing music". Although I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a GenZ girl doing something I had forgotten about: channel surfing.
You don't necessarily need to be near a small station these days, college stations can stream online. I listen to WXPN (UPenn) that way regularly: https://xpn.org/ (player at top of the page).
The removal of FM radio from cell phones was a big mistake. It should never have allowed. Radio is very useful in emergencies.
Lately I have been getting back in to internet radio, mostly via Elisa in KDE. Here is my favorite internet stream: https://hawaiireggaenetwork.com/
I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone, except purely to test out whether it worked. I wouldn't make phone purchasing decisions based on whether or not it had a FM radio. A regulation requiring it in the ostensible name of safety would make phones somewhat more expensive and I'm skeptical that it would even help improve safety in an emergency significantly.
The only radio show I ever particularly liked was Jeff Gilbert's "Brain Pain" in the late 80s, on KCMU 90.3. He played metal music, particularly from the local Seattle bands.
What was fun about it was his irreverent sense of humor, the silly contests he'd run, the ads that made no sense, and all the drugged out band members he'd invite to the station.
I still have several cassettes of Brain Pain. Lost treasures, I presume. I wound up buying many of the albums he spun.
I am too young to know about US radio in the 80s or 90s, but I enjoy some of the local and independent stations. I even collected some of their streams after I gave up Spotify: https://yaky.dev/radio/
Still a few great ones hanging around, like WBER in Rochester: https://wber.org/
Discovered WITR not too long ago, their selection is right up my alley (although it is arguably "millenial radio" rather than "college radio")
I treasure Radio On Internet (thanks Russ (Silicon Valley joke)) so much. There's so many less but still so many independent/community/college radio stations all over.
On the west coast, https://kexp.org of course. https://kcrw.com and their HD2 channel.
Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org jazz/blues/local is incredible (so help ye who has to listen through the local music announcements though!) and also with a hd2. https://ksjd.org has some fun variety. https://coloradosound.org is great rock, as is https://koto.org in CO. There's nearly nothing that makes me so happy as https://mountainchill.com in telluride co; a station that makes it clear how narrowly grouped together most stations are & that just is so good.
Coming closer to me, https://wtmd.org rock in Baltimore md, https://xpn.org in Philly for more. https://wzum.org jazz in pittsburgh pa. https://wdvx.com in knoxville tn.
I also listen to a bunch of others, which i'd characterize more as tier 2; good but often more ads or less reliable a win for me. weqx, wmrw-lp, kozo-lp, weru, wmpg. wsri and wwod (both "the river" 93.9, and occasionally from the right elevation in NH overlapping in signal amusingly enough).
A lot of these stations have good track listings too, broken down by the DJ, sometimes that you can play on demand. It's incredible how much excellent interesting fantastic music you can scout out or listen to.
I used to listen to endless endless reams of shoutcast stations online. But man that has really really died out something fierce. There used to be so many interesting niche stations there. It still got me started looking widely at radio stations, as a decent fraction were just regular radio stations too. Realizing how badly commercial radio would never give the goods, would play the same pop stuff all the time, and have lots of ads? Man it was sad, but there were so many excellent other things to tune into! Alas on the dial, it's largely been couple massive corporate and political/religious (all very right-wing, Powell Memorandum on and on) titans taking over as much radiowaves as they can, as stations fold and go under, in the hard times of keeping your head up in the world today, getting the building, gear, and staff's bill's payed. (Especially with the administration trying to destroy the arts broadly, gutting National Endowment for the Arts!)
I'd absolutely love for folks to throw more stations they enjoy out here. https://radio.garden is of course wicked fun to browse generally! Gets submitted every so often, often garnering some significant love. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=radio.garden
I'll never forget Dennis Erectus on KOME 98.5 (the wet spot on your dial) in 80's Silicon Valley.
(2009)ish
And a very American/mainstream-centric view of things. Radio (especially from the view of things in 2009) in more niche/underground circles was and in some regards still is a driving force of music curation and community in other parts of the world like the UK, parts of the EU and beyond.
Does radio have to be on the FM band? Do we count streaming like via YouTube, twitch and other platforms the same as Radio? I'd say yes. And in that regard, the spirit of radio and the format/feel the author recalls still very much exists.
I grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1. Literally the entire population of UK teens listened to that one station for ~20 years (though individuals would listen to different shows - John Peel's famous indie/punk/whatever show in the evenings was very different to the daytime mainstream stuff).
In Australia it was ABC's Triple J - similar story. Everyone tuned in to the annual top 100 tracks of the year.
That reach has not happened since with any media that I'm aware of. It was very unifying - we were all aware of the same songs, even if we didn't like the same songs. I can sing along to Duran Duran even though I was very scathing of them at the time, in part because I was force-fed Duran Duran every day on the radio.
Community radio is still alive and well in Australia too.
RRR and PBS in Melbourne are still excellent and seem to still be a fairly big deal if bumper stickers are anything to go by.
I never got into the habit of listening to "the radio", in the sense of an AM or FM station broadcasting over the air on some frequency in a general metropolitan area. I remember listening to the radio stations my parents liked to listen to in the car as a kid. But by the time I was old enough to drive myself, I had already owned an mp3 player for a while, and if I wanted to listen to music in (my parents') car I could plug it into a cassette deck adapter - it's not like any local radio station near me was gonna play the Final Fantasy VII OST or a mix that went from Eve 6 to Jethro Tull to Blind Guardian to an bluegrass version of the Bubble Bobble theme I found on OCRemix. Plus, no commercials.
And if I wasn't actively driving a car at the moment, I probably had something I could be doing with a computer, perhaps involving a YouTube video, or just listening to my own extremely idiosyncratic music choices, that was more interesting than a local radio station, even if I technically owned some kind of device that could receive an FM signal.
Soon enough I had a smartphone and then a smartphone with a mobile internet connection whose cap was generous enough that I didn't need to think hard about how I was using it. And it turns out that having the entire internet available to me on a handheld device subsumes everything I might get out of listening to a radio station - including the modality of listening to audio while I'm doing something else, which might well come from an internet radio station anywhere in the world.
It occurs to me when I listen to a podcast while I'm working out at the gym or driving a car today (via my phone) that the actual auditory experience of this isn't drastically different than how people were consuming talk radio shows decades ago (down the fact that many of them have ads). The techniques for speaking in an engaging way to an audience, or having an engaging conversation between multiple people, are still valid; many podcasts I listen to address listener messages on the program, just like a weekly radio show might do - some even try to replicate the experience of a listener calling in live on a phone.
The business models that work today are of course drastically different than the ones that worked on radio decades ago, and the fact that audience isn't at all limited by physical location means that the sorts of audio content that gets streamed over the internet today are systematically different from what would've been the case on a radio show. I think this is mostly for the better though - more variety, more democratic access to the medium, and no FCC to regulate what you can and cannot legally say on regulated radio spectrum.
As far as I'm concerned, everything that's good about the content of AM/FM radio has been replicated on the general internet, and I have no particular reason to care if the radio signal carrying it to my ears comes from a licensed FM station or the 5G connection from my phone to a cell phone tower.
>I signed off the air for the last time in 1994 [...] radio has changed drastically, and it just wouldn’t be any fun for me today.
I don't agree with this premise. FM Radio is definitely more corporate today, but I grew up in the 90s and my memories of FM radio are not fond.
For my whole life it has always been materially the same, shitty, experience: occasional good songs interleaved with mediocre ones and a hefty dose of annoying unskippable ads.
The difference is that when I was a kid we didn't have streaming or even mp3 players so we just had to put up with the ads. Today I can just play songs locally off my phone via Bluetooth. No ads, no DJs, just the music I enjoy.
Most stations sucked, but there were some more fun counter culture stations.
I remember KGLE (KEGL?) Out of DFW pulling shit on their radio shows like saying the city banned smoking in cars and people flooded city government phone lines with complaints and rants, which had a lulz component that we wouldnt see again till the 4chan days.
Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)
Nowadays I have a USB drive, though I understand that's rare. Can hardly find a (car) radio that supports modern sizes these days, probably by design.
>Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)
Yes, that's an accurate description of the hassle of trying to avoid unskippable ads.
Meh, haven't missed radio in ages. If I have no control over the content, then the medium isn't for me.