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.
It absolutely does - allegedly there’s 6 million listeners to the biggest breakfast radio show in the UK and 4 million to the second biggest. That’s 10 million in a country of about 55 million adults.
In the 90s I knew a guy in high school who walked around the school in a black trenchcoat with portable speakers tucked inside that were continuously playing Western movie themes. I can only imagine how that bit of creativity would go over these days.
I suppose it was rare enough and somewhat fun in the 90s. Maybe that guy was doing this for others to enjoy as well, or to appear singular (whether it worked or not).
Nowadays it wouldn't appear particularly exotic (portable speakers are ubiquitous) and people playing loud music (from speakers or phones) seem to do this for themselves without caring about the surrounding people, that's just highly egotistical and self-centered. It's usually not music I personally like too.
That's not fun, it's just annoying. There's already too much noise in our cities.
But if you do it right, playing (singular) music for others, reading the room and all, I'm sure it can still work.
Sometimes, but not too often, in Berlin of all places you encounter someone biking around with a massive speaker attached to their bike blaring (obviously) techno
Not always a bike. Sometimes just a trolley or a handcart or a custom jerry-rigged contraption.
In the US "boom boxes" went out with the 1970s. They need to get with the times.
Okay, in all seriousness: boom boxes were a thing in the 1970s and early 1980s. There are still people who use the latest generation of them, but thankfully not nearly as many. These days people cranking music in a public place are generally doing it as part of a group that all want to hear the same thing. (and in back then the group wanting to hear the same music was the common case)
When I opened https://radio.garden/ and spun the globe the first time, I tuned to a radio station somewhere in Africa, and it gave me tingles to think that in Lagos at that same moment, some bus driver was surely listening to the same music.
Never in my life has radio in my country played music I wanted to listen to. The first thing I did when I bought my first car was disconnect the antenna entirely.
Yes, and I agree with a sibling comment that livestreaming is the modern equivalent, if not in ease or quality but in spirit. It's also why, despite having many movies in my library, I enjoy turning on TCM to watch old classics. I know that thousands of people at any given time are probably watching the same piece of history I am, right then.
You can still listen to the radio while driving, many people still do that, I still do that. I agree though that in essence streaming is a very alienating experience.
Many people do, but I don't get it. The typical station has a tiny playlist that they have had on repeat for a decade now. I haven't turned the radio on in years, and never was a regular listener, but I can still tell you what song will be next if you turn it on (for the stations that are played most often in public)
Yeah, but most current corporate radio sucks. It’s not a human broadcasting and allowing their idiosyncratic tastes to sneak in. Nationwide each station is just shuffling one of three or four playlists of inoffensive songs picked because nobody hates it (but nobody loves it)
I don't know. I mean if that is the criteria then livestreams surely fix this because there is another human at that moment in time also and you can even interact with them. Or do you like the passive interaction that they should just play music and shut up
This still exists today. When a new song gets released on YouTube for example a group of people close to it in latent space gets it recommended. By seeing a recommendation of a song in your feed you are part of a cohort of people with similar tastes.
That is the core issue. Only a preselected cohort are exposed to new media. That limits common experiences to digital islands rather than shared among the masses.
I'm the OP, and I'm surprised to find this article on HN at all, let alone the front page!
Many comments are focusing on music but the thing I tried to get across in the article was that good radio wasn't primarily about the music, it was about fun and connection. A good DJ kept you from just turning the radio off when you heard that same hit the fourth time today -- you wanted to keep listening because the DJ made it fun. It made homework and hobbies feel a lot less lonely. A Spotify playlist sure as heck can't do that.
Possibly controversial opinion, but radio stopped being relevant to me personally when congress removed the ownership restrictions for a single market. It's only gotten worse from there IMO. Radio is about catering to a very specific, and generally older, market at least where I am.
The local college station was still pretty fantastic until COVID hit. They shut the studio down during that time and most of the good DJs left. It never recovered.
> A good DJ kept you from just turning the radio off when you heard that same hit the fourth time today -- you wanted to keep listening because the DJ made it fun.
I'm old enough to remember when radio was king, but if that's what a good DJ does, then I suppose I've never heard a good DJ. Personally, I preferred the DJ who talked as little as possible and had good taste and variety in the music they chose to play.
But yes, we are poorer for their passing. They've been gone for a very long time, but I've still yet to see anything that can adequately replace them.
In commercial radio, DJs haven't selected the music in 40 or more years. I used to show up for my shifts to find a printed playlist from a software product called Selector. I had to follow it.
Also, most commercial radio DJs would talk and talk and talk all the way up to the point in the song where lyrics started, and then right after the last lyric, they'd start yacking again. A lot of music that was on the radio in the 70s, 80s and 90s had great instrumental intros and outros that you just totally missed because some garbage DJ had to get in one last "TODAY'S HITS, YESTERDAY'S LEGENDS, ONLY ON IDIOT ROCK 95.1!!!"
I believe talking through the intro was an actual skill that was taught to DJs, and the closer they could cut it the prouder they'd be. I've always hated it, and there have been occasions when I've switched stations because I couldn't take it anymore.
Back in the later 70s a Chicago three-letter AM radio station used to speed up songs so they could stuff in more commercials. And the DJ would do the parent’s talking when there’s no lyrics, even to the point of talking through the entire Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Love’s Theme instrumental.
I never understood the business reason for doing this. Do they really think listeners will switch away if they go 500 milliseconds without hearing a human voice?
There's a local station that advertises the fact that they don't do requests. I'm sure the reason they don't is because they can't - the playlist was mapped out long ago and there will be no deviations. The main DJ voice is some guy reportedly from Vancouver who records the voiceovers for this station and probably 40 others just like it. What he lacks in spontaneity he makes up for in snark.
There was that time I was tripping on acid at 2am and was offended by hearing the same Doobie Brothers song that plays during my drive in and my drive out and called up the college radio station thinking, "I'm either going to talk to the janitor or the program manager", turns out the program manager picks up the phone and I ask him, "Who picks this music out?" and he says "I do" and that it's programmed on the computer. I told him "Come on, you can play anything you want to play" so he put on a Miles Davis disc.
Your Miles Davis comment triggered a memory of college radio. In school in the early 90's, I had a 3-6am show Wednesday mornings, and mostly said and played whatever I wanted, as nobody was really listening anyway. One week, the guy who did the Friday night 6-8pm slot called me and asked if I could sub for him. I was way down on the call list, but nobody wanted to sub on a Friday night. So I took his slot and did my normal show. I immediately got a bunch of complaint calls that I was crap (which was fair, I was), and one guy who kept calling in over and over demanding I play Miles Davis.
On the other side of the coin, I also had a 10am Saturday news slot, which was just a quick 10 minute read of my pick of the top stories off the AP feed. I was on the city bus discussing the slot with my buddy who did the sports right after me, and the bus driver overheard us and said he listened to the station on his bus route, and loved us on Saturday mornings more than the other news readers. He was my only known fan in my very short lived radio "career".
One time I tuned into college radio and not long after came on a song from my own band. The only recording of our music was from a jam session that we put on CD that we handed out to a few friends and we hadn't played together in many years by that point so it was quite a shock to hear it.
I did college radio for a bit. You could play whatever you wanted up to a certain extent. At least where I was at, ~'06, you could play like 30? minutes of whatever you wanted, it's been a while might be more or less. The other x minutes of your hour you had to play a selection of music. It was a very wide range of things so you could easily find something to fit into your show but it had to be from the pool that college got.
Maybe other colleges did it differently but we didn't have a program manager or anything. Everyone was free to do what they wanted outside of some FCC rules and what I previously mentioned.
I don't know how it worked in Germany but in the Netherlands the government had a monopoly on broadcasting. Their public radio stations did not play rock and roll and was not in tune with "youth culture".
Rock'n'roll yes. Youth culture seems harder for me to say anything about, because that can mean a wide range, attitude towards drugs etc. But popular music young people dance to, for sure. You remember Neue Deutsche Welle, right?
Dunno if they were "in tune" though, maybe I'm too literal, because in my mind, anything, even the coolest stuff, that was made by adults and/or legal was not the stuff. Actual youth culture can only happen among the youth, if you know what I mean, so there's at least always this lag.
There's no reason it can't. You could do the same thing on streaming as was done back in the radio days. I've been searching for it but haven't really found it yet.
So far the closest thing I found was when Huey Lewis did a radio show on Apple Music. You couldn't call in and there were no contests, but it's a bit of talking from someone likable, separated by a couple of songs they introduce which you also like. That's basically the format of radio, in its most basic form.
I've searched a bit for that type of format on streaming. Sure there's always TuneIn or MyTuner apps which are interesting but those shows are always tailored to a specific faraway city that you don't know much about, or they're in a different language, or they're sports talk related which I'm not interested in.
I'm specifically looking for music I like and a likeable person talking and introducing songs, just like the clips you have on your web site. I just don't understand how that can be so expensive that big tech companies with deep pockets like Apple Music don't want to produce it. What's up with that?
BBC 6music has a lot of great DJs, Chris Hawkins being my favourite with plenty of banter for a 5am show. While it's just a Friday late night show: Ashley Storrie on BBC Radio Scotland and don't be surprised if you hear the same listeners sending in messages on both stations.
But then, they aren't commercial stations with less pressure. Whenever I have to listen to an Austrian (where I live) station I get bored. Even the public funded stations have commercials or, even more annoying, un-labeled advertising for the lottery.
I miss DJs with taste and encyclopedic knowledge of their music would challenge their listeners, educate them, expose them to new things. Variations on themes, new artists, connections with old ones. Now, I guess they read the blurb and hit the button on the canned program.
Shouts to Pierre Robert (rip), John DeBella, Cyndy Drue, etc at WMMR and WYSP (rip). They still let Jacky Bam Bam play the real stuff sometimes; at least the bots take a break for his show.
I wasn't a fan of drive-time radio, but WYSP had Metal Shop at something like 11PM Friday. That's where I discovered Metallica, Megadeth, Anvil, WASP, all the Metal Blade era music. I've never had anything algorithmic show me that much new music that quickly.
yes and also my spouse and i have the opposite where we enjoy listening to 89.5 whenever we pass through Seattle. we find the amateur students who try to sound smart and cool really endearing and entertaining
Radio also was your connection to your city and the city's youth communities. Which are now fragmented, subcultures, and frequently dominated by someone trying to make the scene into their living. As far as I know, nothing has filled that community void, and community itself is dying.
Local community is probably irreparably damaged. But I was a kid with niche interests and I didn't start to find my people until the Internet entered my life in 1989.
> Local community is probably irreparably damaged. But I was a kid with niche interests and I didn't start to find my people until the Internet entered my life in 1989.
Sounds like you should start listening to some community radio stations.
They don't even have to be your local community, I promise that somewhere in your timezone there is a community radio station broadcasting something you want to listen to.
Try our local one in Brisbane (where Bluey is from) that has been running since 1975 and started as a university student protest station: https://4zzz.org.au
You might not like the show you hear when you click, but look at their catalogue of shows and you'll find something.
I was a 'classic 70's latch key kid', that somehow discovered underground radio during elementary. Starting with "Dr. Demento" somewhere in my youth, by 6th grade it was "no commercial potential radio", mimeographed fanzines from everywhere on earth kids liked music + comics, and the punk rock + art music underground with shows at Unitarian Churches and abandoned buildings.
The scale of a radio station, versus the scale of one promoter today is night and day. The ownership of distribution of information is a curious thing; when it was more controlled we had community, and when that control relaxed the previous "controllers" did everything in their power to pollute the new communications channels with bad actors, essentially destroying the potential for community to form again. If someone cannot control the entire apparatus, those that cannot make sure the medium is non-commercially useful. Part of their protection of their medium, no others can be allowed to become viable as a replacement.
Check out bandcamp. It’s artist focused and they have shows with DJs that focus on highlighting new releases.
I even subscribe to one for Metal for $10/months they’ll give you a new album every month like one of those old CD clubs. Interviews and listening parties too.
If you are looking for a sense of community like radio used to have, it’s a lot closer than podcasts IMO. Everyone has a podcast but this is something else.
My son got used to listening to the local classic rock station i100 and one thing that is really fun is that the DJ's are local performers and celebrities. The station promoted an event for Ronnie James Dio last weekend
Even though the station is run by remote control much of the time and the sales manager recently got poached by the Buffalo Bills it's so much fun to get to know these people in real life. (I appreciate it how Billy, pictured, plays alternative rock, kinda like Green Day, even if the station's playlist got closed out around 1992)
I do miss the DJs of my childhood local rock station, WHJY, Providence. They were with me in the car for many, many hours. It's nostalgia though, I tuned out when they hired a program manager that played too much early 80's rock, like Van Halen, and not enough alternative. I tuned out after the 400th time the PM DJ dunked on his cohost's weight, the 347th time the AM DJs made a prank call, and the 500th time the evening DJ objectified his sultry-voiced intern. Later, I cancelled SiriusXM because I couldn't listen DJs anymore, not one more word.
I miss the locality, the connection, the need to cope outside the safe zone for nothing other than lack of options. Despite the nostalgia, and sensing what is lost, I think I would make the same choice again. Mostly so I never have to hear Jump again.
Hi Jim, I was involved in radio as a kid and it was one of the most formative experiences of my life. I remember that fondly.
A few questions, as I'd like to hear your take on this.
First, a premise, I think the audience is still out there, as there 10,000s perhaps 100,000s of people that would enjoy the experience you describe and would even pay for that, so it can be sustainable.
Anyway here's the questions:
1. Why not doing that yourself through the internet? Your own radio station, your rules. What usually stops one from accomplishing this?
and
2. What/why do you think the essence of what you describe does/would not translate to the online model? (if you think that's the case)
Small world. I'm sitting here in Terre Haute as I write this. I moved here about a decade ago so radio was already well on its way to the lowest common denominator before I got here. All I know about WBOW is that they turn into all Christmas music after Thanksgiving.
The current WBOW isn't actually connected to the OG WBOW, which was on AM at 1230. It went off the air in 2001 after the owner was convicted of some pretty awful crimes. Another company resurrected the call letters on FM some years later.
There's many stations that still do it just like the good old days. KEXP in Seattle is on my dial most of the time. I text the DJs most days to say thanks for the great show!
I still work in radio and have for more than 30 years. Perhaps I'm an outlier, but I never cared about the DJs, never felt a connection, never wanted their Morning Zoos or their Tammy and Frankie in the Morning junk, with the fake callers, the forced laughs, the crappy contests, the gossip lifted from other uncredited sources. All I ever wanted was lots of unrepeated music. Or, failing that, lots of intelligent talk and news.
I never used to like the morning show hijinx either, until I discovered that a friend hosted such a show. I tuned in every morning after that. He retired a couple of months ago, and I think I've only listened to the show twice since then. His replacements are OK but there's no draw anymore.
Lin Brehmer of WXRT Chicago was really good, he died not too long ago though. Since then I almost never turn the radio on in the car. Iggy pop does a great show on BBC radio 6 (online) and he plays good music but his many anecdotes and opinions are what really keep me listening.
I used to work graves and some stations would have shows at odd hours that played variety you might not hear during the day. The DJ as a curator is a role I miss. I also miss the notion someone else local was awake. Other night owls might call in and comment or make requests.
I’ve always felt that way as well. It doesn’t matter how perfect a playlist is, what a masterpiece an album is, the humanity of a real person selecting the music, and interjecting comments or style along the way just feels different.
Listening to the local collage radio during my teens was formative, and the exposure to all kinds of things I would have never had heard otherwise still heavily colors my musical taste to this day.
Most of the time songs were played randomly from a huge list, there were no “hits”, and this was exactly what I wanted.
If there was a song I liked, I had to quick record it to tape, because otherwise I likely wouldn’t hear it again for days or weeks.
There would at times be people DJing for time segments, but it was relaxed and music focused, not person focused. I’ll take some dead air and a soft spoken young adult just giving the name of the next song vs bombastic “personalities” any day.
Another big key to it, was my college radio station didn’t have advertisements. Radio ads are grating and repulsive and I simply cannot tolerate that shit. Same thing with TV ads, which is a big reason I basically stopped watching TV in my late teens as well.
I cherish and miss the radio experience that I personally had, but when I hear what others subject themselves to I simply cannot fathom why.
These days my tastes are mostly adjacent to doom or psych-rock, and my modern day radio replacement is following some curators on YouTube whose hobby/side job is to find new releases in these genres and dig up old gems. Which makes it easy for me to quickly find and add (mostly through Bandcamp) new songs into my own collection every so often, which I then self host and further rate/curate via navidrome.
Basically I’ve always been a very active, rather than passive music enjoyer.
I suppose anything thing to bring up, is if I was listening to people on the radio doing something interesting, then I end up either needing to be randomly cut off from it to do something else, or try to constrain my schedule to their show. Not fun at all.
I remember I had a data entry job and we were only allowed to bring in old tech like a CD player or radio. So I was listening to a local radio station and they posed the question "would you go back in time and kill Hitler" which I was like "shit I gotta call in and say my opinion".
Just wanted to give another opinion on this topic because I think people are being overly nostalgic about radio in this thread:
For as long as I can remember I have hated radio with a passion. The constant interruption of the occasional good song, the endless nonsense-talking hosts, the unfunny jokes, the annoying ads, the same songs over and over, etc.
I hate radio and I’m glad it’s gone. I don’t miss it at all!
Cheers
A millennial
I want to say thank you, so much because, it feels like radio & these people who worked to create these enjoyable spaces, filled with such life: it feels like that is so rapidly becoming such a lost art. And it just feels like theres so little we leave to the future to remember this by. That as things get bleaker and worse, there's so few artifacts to point to like this that tell the good tale.
Elsewhere in this thread I poured out such joy and happiness about so many station that are so beloved to me, are just darling special places. I want so badly to imagine https://mountainchill.com KRKQ to be broadcasting from Telluride Colorado for a hundred, a thousand years. It's something so special.
Yet the story, the sadness you tell here, identifying forces eroding us, our great Society, with nothing of substance and meaning in its place: it's just getting so much worse, in so many ways and places.
The mechanized take-over of the airwaves, the public's airwaves, that the FCC has congressional mandate to use and protect & make good for the public, is ongoingly getting so much worse, on and on. The takeover by right wing aligned outlets like Sinclair has been so bad, so ongoing, has so few hopeful counter-examples if things going right at any scale. Lots of small positive lights, but this chewing up of the world by hostile above-human quasi-immortal corporate super orgs is on full display in radio, in broadcast.
Meanwhile that same Carr run FCC is doing everything it can to chill and ruin free speech, to terrorize anyone with speech they find disagreeable. Orban style totalitarianism, right here at home. Ghastly ghastly anti-democratic, anti freedom, anti-liberty, just the smallest possible weasel stuff, shame beyond shame to these weak spirited cowards.
> "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
Meanwhile this same administration has all but destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts. Countless radio stations have had to make drastic efforts to stay afloat, as both a miniscule yet vital source of funding for such great public service has been cut, by these same foes of everything you've written of.
I want more than a memory. In the comments below I've shared some truly great amazing stations I love, that folks can tune into from anywhere and enjoy. I an a proud supporting member at multiple stations. Yet, with forces like this, big, scary, corrupt, evil, un American, in my view demonic forces like this, with Powell Memorandum operations to corporate and own the airwaves for private and increasingly political interest, I fear writing like this will serve all too strongly as a necessary vital remembrance of a past, one that few people would otherwise have any ability to connect to. With a tear and with thanks, let me say I really appreciate this write up, and I hope it will not be so very necessary for so very long into our future. With apologies for being a bit pointed, obviously, but for hopefully reasonable or understandable, good spirited cause... May there be better times ahead, may the people enjoy the airwaves & making special places of them together again.
It is a shame. I think it’s especially a shame for children and young people.
A counter to radio remaining relevant is “I can listen to whatever I want, via this digital technology”.
Fine - but young people don’t yet have a complete mental map of what culture they enjoy.
In the UK, funding for libraries and the arts (public radio, the BBC) has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity. I think that’s true in the US too.
Despite this, young people have an unprecedented amount of access to culture. Or, at least, any form of culture that can be digitally replicated.
Soulseek and Anna’s Archive are wonderful projects. But they only have as much utility as the person using them can put into the search bar.
We’re increasingly entrusting cultural education - what to put into the search bar - to algorithms that are designed not (as the BBC’s mission statement is) to “inform, educate, and entertain”, but to retain attention.
Even worse: many of these (eg, Spotify) hide real access behind subscription fees. If you grew up broke, like I did, you will understand how inaccessible this real access is.
The most motivated young people will continue to find the workarounds piracy offers, and to find other routes for cultural education.
Any young person who isn’t in that upper percentile of motivatedness might increasingly be left out. You can attribute that to a choice they have made - I think that’s wrong.
I think the joy of broadening one’s horizons is available to all, and is also difficult to learn and a strain to continue to practice. I think it must be taught.
I think this is especially true and important when everyone has a constantly-available option of algorithmically-selected pleasantness.
Human radio DJs are not optimized for pleasantness, or to serve you relevant ads based on your conversations with them. At their best, DJs are educators.
Anyone who grew up listening to radio knows that, and knows the pleasure that comes from learning not to change the channel when something new and uncomfortable-feeling comes on, just in case it ends up being something you fall in love with.
> In the UK, funding for libraries [] has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity.
Focusing on one thing here, for convenience. The problem remains that costs are up far in excess of budgets - austerity be damned! We are forced to prioritise, cutting the generally useful but "non-essential". (There is often a legal duty to the essential things)
Is a great breakdown. To illustrate my argument see Table 1. Real-terms spending per person by service area, various years (2024–25 prices)
> Within total service spending, per-person spending on children’s social care services [] increased by 11% in real terms. Spending on adult social care [] was also relatively protected, falling by only 2%. This meant much larger cuts to other services: more than 40% in the case of housing, culture and leisure, and highways and transport, and nearly 60% cuts to planning and development.
We cut what _could_ be cut, and that's a prioritisation call.
Yeah - I used "austerity" as a slightly sloppy shorthand in my comment. My two closest local libraries were closed due to cuts made during "the credit crunch" by the coalition government (from memory!), when "austerity" was the buzzword, so I felt it'd communicate most broadly (to HN's international userbase) the phenomenon I was gesturing at.
From what I can understand, these sources are saying: "because costs are up, those past cuts have not yet really been reversed, especially not in terms of real-terms funding per-capita, or funding for 'non-essential' services".
Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!
> Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!
That it is! It will require an actual change to the societal contract to resolve as best I can tell - and it remains unclear to me what direction the change will take.
Yes - I think the idea of 'citizenship' feels increasingly abstract and outdated to anyone who only rarely noticeably interacts with the entity they pay taxation to, typically solely in moments of extreme crisis. 'Noticeably' here meaning I'm excluding ambient aspects of life, like walking on a government-maintained pavement.
I would argue those 'non-essential' services - those which you actively notice benefiting from - are extremely important for building institutional trust in the state. For young people entering the workforce today, who (for example) are a demographic that have a lower requirement for the services of the NHS, it must be genuinely confusing and alienating to be paying (what I believe is) a historically high tax rate.
Citizenship, as an idea, does need to demonstrably benefit both the state and the individual. Otherwise, the state is basically asking people to draw on their reserves of empathy to have a reason not to act like a dick. That will, unfortunately, have much more varied results than empathy alongside tangible incentives.
The cost of not providing those 'non-essential' services may ultimately be larger, and more difficult to calculate, I think, than are calculable today. How you provide them without the cash to do so is a question I'm not smart enough to answer. But people have now - completely anecdotally - gone a very long time with low tangible incentives toward citizenship being provided by the either the state or local authorities, and the vibe is very, very bad.
I don't think this is restricted to the UK, either. The OECD’s 2024 trust survey found only 37% of respondents across 30 countries were confident their government balances the interests of current and future generations. [1]
The size of the core funding cuts to councils by HMG outweigh everything else the councils are facing according to the figures.
Now, purely by memory, I recall commentary over the years that 1) David Cameron was cutting taxes on various categories of land assets to benefit large land asset holders to the detriment of the budget, 2) the battle of any tax cuts are spending programs in disguise vs no they aren't and 3) May, Johnson, Sunak, Starmer etc have not reversed any of the tax cuts put in place by Cameron.
There's no doubt a more delicate story to what has happened, but a fact check of this into Deepseek before I posted this confirmed that the throughline is credible.
> Fine - but young people don’t yet have a complete mental map of what culture they enjoy.
Spotify and the likes will suggest new and different things for people to listen to. Apple has a special app just for classical music, which is the highest level of musical culture.
> Even worse: many of these (eg, Spotify) hide real access behind subscription fees. If you grew up broke, like I did, you will understand how inaccessible this real access is.
They have advertisements for those who don't pay the subscription. Radio has always had advertisements also. And nobody is too broke to afford Spotify. Every broke young person I've known have had a Spotify subscription, they're dirt cheap.
For the past 25 years, I've turned on the radio about once a year, and every time it's been just sewage. Whether that's government produced sewage or corporate produced sewage. The quality of podcasts and music streaming is on a quality level which radio never reached.
> I think the joy of broadening one’s horizons is available to all, and is also difficult to learn and a strain to continue to practice. I think it must be taught.
Lol, I'm personally too broke for a Spotify subscription - as in I couldn't sign up this month with the cash in my bank account - and that has often been true during the periods of my life I have not spent working in tech. I don't think I'd even be in their youngest adult user demo anymore!
We definitely exist. It's pretty tight out there right now. The £10.99/month I see quoted buys quite a few kilos of dry pasta.
In any case, the core argument I was making specifically is that I believe human curation can provide more friction for the audience than algorithmic curation tends to, and that this is a net-good for cultural education.
I would contend with classical music being the highest strata of musical culture (and the deeper idea of culture having 'levels'), but that's subjective. So, that aside, if classical music is your thing, and you believe:
> "The quality of podcasts and music streaming is on a quality level which radio never reached."
I'd recommend Glenn Gould's The Idea of North, which is one of my absolute favourite pieces of music. It's considered pretty innovative and important:
Glenn Gould wrote it specifically for radio, as it was commissioned by the CBC. So "government produced sewage". :-)
I'd also strongly recommend you give BBC Radio 3 (still often excellent, especially late at night) a try. NTS has some great classical shows, too. Perhaps you're already familiar with all of these, but - if not - they might give you a reason to turn on your radio more frequently than annually.
The metadata matters in a different way. A single piece with a single composer can be interpreted very differently, over time, by different conductors and orchestras.
This means classical music is very badly organised in most streaming apps. Sorting by "artist" doesn't really work if the artist is listed as an orchestra, which has probably recorded the work of more than one composer.
Roon is another example of a streaming platform that treats this metadata with the same importance.
That classical music is the highest level of musical culture? I didn't think anybody would need an explanation, it's generally understood. And for somebody who doesn't understand, it would be impossible to explain in words. It's about as subjective as saying that nothing can be more beautiful than nature.
But not all classical music is great or even good. That hindered me for years from listening more to classical music, because I thought that I couldn't understand some works which I listened to. Then I realized some of it is just bad, and there's nothing more to it.
The BBC hasn't been cut in the name of austerity. It isn't funded by general taxation it's funded by the licence fee, which has only risen, however not in line with inflation. This is basically because nobody wants to pay it, and indeed a huge number of people have stopped paying it.
You're mostly correct - I was absolutely generalising, using internationally known examples (like the BBC), to be more comprehensible to the international audience here about cuts to public arts spending.
The BBC was a silly example of me to use (as was 'public radio'!) because you're right - it's mostly not funded by general taxation.
That said, the license fee is directly tied to inflation (via the CPI). Whether you see that as a correct measurement is another question. [1]
The BBC has also historically been funded partially by taxation. For example, taxation provided free television licenses to over-75s, until 2020, when that funding was cut, and the cost of doing this was passed to the BBC itself.[2]
But yes - quibbles aside, a sloppy example for me to have used there. Your sibling comment has some great sources which better illustrate changes to arts funding, compared to the off-handed ones I initially provided.
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.
I enjoy the radio. I have a few stations I’ll cycle through at home and in the car. But all nonprofit/college /etc.
Most US commercial radio is very bad. I don’t really understand why the playlists are so small, and why they don’t even occasionally play lesser-known songs by the big acts. Like, why don’t classic rock stations play deeper cuts by Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, etc. instead of the same hit singles over and over for decades? How can that be what listeners want? People who work in retail environments with a repeated playlist usually say they hate it for obvious reasons.
It’s as if those TV stations that show The Office and Seinfeld every night showed the same five episodes every week.
Strangest is that the DJ will often talk about lesser-known songs/artists and will play a few second snippet of the music, but then go right back to the regular rotation. If the audience is already thought to be interested in the story/snippet about a song, you'd think they'd want to hear the whole thing, but apparently not.
Yeah, for a long time I thought I disliked Rush because I only heard "Tom Sawyer" and "Closer to the Heart" on the radio. Turns out the best shit doesn't get airtime.
At least my hometown classic rock station would do a bunch of Zeppelin at 10pm, so I got exposed to their broader range.
A large chunk of people turn off/change the station on anything they don't like, which may be because of even slight unfamiliarity. I remember myself being this way when very young. Even today playlist radios sometimes have popular tracks in the format that I really hate, and this can also cause me to switch. This is even worse if that track is sure to be played 10+ times a day...
Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.
People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.
And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.
I was pleasantly surprised driving through the boonies recently. Scanning through the channels I stumbled upon a station that I'd say was playing only 20-30% typical radio hits, with the rest filled with artists you may have heard of if you follow the scene but that never made as traditional radio stars along with a healthy set of underground/up-and-comers that you likely haven't heard of. It felt like how many describe the glory days of radio.
I also learned that that said station is owned by the same company as a station in my hometown, which is as bland, boring, and repetitive as radio gets. Still has me wondering what that market has that my local market doesn't. Perhaps the true death of radio is hinged on urbanization coupled with limited channel space? Maybe a channel like that can survive there because the small overall audience doesn't invite someone else trying to encroach on the available frequency? Whereas, as you noticed, where frequency space is at a premium someone else with formulaic programming in hand will soon come to buy out anyone who tries anything interesting.
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.
> I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone
One killer feature for phone-sized portable FM radios is live sports!
Some sports that have TV broadcasts but no radio broadcast will pipe the broadcast audio over an FM channel within the stadium.
Of course for sports that have a radio broadcast, you can tune directly to it.
Depending on the sport, it's really nice to get player background info, or some sports have mics on players that get piped through the radio in your ear.
I suppose Auracast could be used for that, which is a broadcast audio feature of Bluetooth Low Energy [1].
My Bluetooth pods have it. I'm not sure how well it's supported, I don't think I've ever entered a place that uses it (or I didn't notice), so I could never try it.
Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example. It's just a choice of the manufacturer to do not implement it completely, sometimes in hardware, sometimes in software. Several years ago there was SpiritFM application for Android that allowed to use FM radio on smartphones that sometimes never supported FM radio... oficially. So the only missing piece is sometimes only the software. As a result I think it wouldn't cost somewhat noticeably more to have that feature.
Also, I believe that is exactly the reason why FM tuners are being phased out.
Streaming services will nowadays give you uninterrupted playback pretty much anywhere, even in places like large buildings or subway tunnels, where radio coverage is nonexistent. Basically it all boils down to the fact that cell network coverage is much better today.
I don't know about "most smartphones," but the FM bits were commonly a built-in with Qualcomm and some other chipsets for a coon's age.
Even the OG Motorola Droid, of 2009, had the parts inside for an FM radio. They just weren't connected to an antenna and the default software stack didn't include any access to those parts at all.
Flagship Qualcomm-equipped Samsung phones up to the S20 or so tended to be ~similar: The FM tuner guts were usually in there, but they often weren't available to use, and even then they sometimes lacked an antenna.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. :)
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In my time, I've enabled FM radio on a few different phones that weren't advertised to have that function, sometimes with root-only hacks from grimy corners of the internet, and sometimes by just installing some software that just happened to have the right hooks.
Twenty years ago this would have been wrong with a kernel of truth. Today, it's just wrong. There were chips that integrated all this but they weren't that popular in the West and ultimately nobody cared.
And it's not a tiny kernel of truth, even iPhone(2007) had Wi-Fi/BT combo chips with FM radio. Apple was partly responsible for death of FM radio, by not implementing the software feature. That's also literally 20 years ago.
"somewhat" as in the ballpark of a few cents, definitely less than $1, because it's already there in the reference designs and deliberately removing it would actually take extra work and cost far more.
I remember all the no-name/generic MP3/MP4 players had an FM radio, while Apple's iPods did not. They deliberately chose not to include one, and definitely not because of cost.
I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
> I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
Cellphone emergency broadcasts turned out to be not reliable during the Hawaiian Island fires.
RDS in FM has a special mode for emergency broadcasts and some countries use them. As FM signals easily cover a 50-75 mile radius, the coverage area is huge versus cellular emergency broadcasts requiring the towers to be powered on which have also failed during natural disasters.
Agree. The only problem about radio is requiring wired headphones to serve as antenna.
Do flagship Snapdragon SOCs still have radio? Thinking about next GOS compatible Motorola-branded device, the first device GOS will support with Snapdragon.
My current Android phone has a FM radio that doesn't even require a wired headphone as the FM antenna is built-in. If you connect your BT headset, the FM station is heard through the BT headset in full stereo.
Of course, it is a Chinese brand who haven't forsaken FM radios. Apparently, Europeans still prefer a FM radio on their smartphones that Chinese brands that sell in Europe still retain them.
Here in USA, people don't seem to care about radio.
FM radio support is a part of a Bluetooth chip, an audio codec chip, or even a standalone IC.
In modern high end SoCs, even the 5G modem is largely evicted from the SoC itself. Only the digital processing happens in the SoC - while ADC/DAC and anything analog lives in its own IC.
I loved pirate radio in London in the 90s. It was so vital. There was nowhere else that you could hear tracks that new unless you were at a club or the handful of record shops where DJs hung out. You could phone in and they would give you a shout out! We would record the Sunday specials on Kool FM and listen to them the rest of the week. Good times.
Here in NZ we have a wonderful publicly-funded ad-free radio station RNZ! (Radio New Zealand.)
The main channel "RNZ National" is a mix of news bulletins [1], panels featuring interesting people [2], and episodes of the numerous high-quality podcasts they produce [3].
The really channel one is "RNZ Concert" through - it's just msuic. They have a best-in-class audio team who record concerts (e.g. choirs, orchestra, or anything else) as well as getting famous artists in to their studio to record their own music or a cover. Played for free all the time with no ads! It was super exciting as a kid in a community choir when we got the chance to be recorded by RNZ, and then find out roughly when it would be on so we sat by the radio in anticipation all day waiting for it to play. It also made getting to the finals of choir nationals [4] extra exciting knowing your performance there would be played nationwide.
[1]: Interestingly, despite us having reasonably good private competition for news here, the government-funded news source was recently votes the most trusted in the country - I reckon it's because they aren't beholden to advertisers: https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/17/rising-trust-should-keep-p...
[2]: Regularly including top politicians like the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, top academics, CEOs, investors, and the like
[3]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcasts
[4]: Yes competitive classical choir is a thing here, and it's treated just as seriously as rugby or any other code. You might travel will your high school choir all the way across the country to perform at Finale. https://nzcf.org.nz/events/nzcf-events/big-sing
I can receive RNZ on shortwave on the East Coast of USA! About 10,000 miles away if we count the signal bouncing multiple times between the ionosphere and the ground.
I remember few years ago listening to a radio interviewer with popular folk singer, the interview was over the phone so host at the end said that some day this singer should visit them in studio for proper interview, to which the singer replied: "If I visit you in studio for interview, will you play some of my songs?", to which the host with slight embarrassment admitted that they are not allowed to play outside the playlist.
The BBC often does as you say and even if the interview is down a phone line they will play a record. Some shows have the musicians playing live.
Other UK stations do similar.
My town has a listener-supported community radio station with all volunteer DJs who play whatever. I love tuning in and getting random music. And, unlike the robo stations, I rarely hear anything I've heard before. It's the only music station I have programmed in on my car. (My car is 26 years old--does the terminology still work? Maybe I should say "favorited". :) )
It's not quite the same, but I do like firing up https://radio.garden/ on occasion and rotating through international channels (after getting around the geoblock in the UK). Theres a random Arctic Outpost AM broadcasting from Longyearbyen I stick on for background noise.
Also listened in the car but since they've recently shut down the LW tower I can't receive it anymore in the midlands, only occasionally get FM signal.
It might not work in your scenario, but I too listen to radio a lot and found the signal issues annoying. My car is pretty old and doesn't have aux/bluetooth input so I can't plug in my phone and use the Sounds app, but I got a bluetooth to FM signal transmitter and now listen to my phone through my car radio, including a lot of streaming radio.
FM dongles for smartphones and tablets are a thing. You can stream your own playlist or podcasts over your tuner (and anyone else's within a small radius). The devices are cheap but effective.
I listen to podcasts all day while working and I am JEALOUS of your access to radio 4 and sounds. There is so much just insanely killer content coming out of the BBC in those avenues.
bbc.co.uk still allows listening to all stations live and yt-dlp has no problem to download shows, you just got to find your way to the correct page that doesn't trigger a redict to bbc.com e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qng7/episodes/player
Hah, one of the only tolerable commercial-ish stations in AB is Edmonton's 89.3 CIWE that broadcasts Freeform/First Nations content - also rebroadcasts to 88.1-HD3 in Calgary.
The frequencies are alive with music in Brazil. Among the broad (and excellent) variety of local music are three stations that play an eclectic variety of foreign music from around the world. One station features a lot of rare or more unusual recordings of music from the 60s through the 2000s. Sure you’ve heard Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” a million times on the radio but you probably haven’t heard the version by Heartbreak Klub, an Australian rock-pop band. Or one of the live recordings of “Going to California” with John Paul Jones’ extended mandolin solo.
It’s great because they stream online so when I’m back home and don’t know what to listen to, it’s always an option.
For those of is living in and near Seattle (and as of recently San Fransisco) KEXP is still on the air and is still amazing as ever (if not even more so).
I play the game with SiriusXM to only pay the intro price and listen to that 90% of the time I am in the car. XM has a weird collection of DJs, some are obnoxious or grating, but also after many years of listening to them they feel like people I know.
The local NPR backed station the Current is good but their audio quality is terrible, even their HD stream is muffled and wonky. They also eliminated many of the DJs I had grown to like and I never got that same connection with their replacement, which definitely impacted how I listen.
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 grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1."
I didn't. Apart from John Peel, many of the DJs were naff and the station was behind the curve (as the BBC nearly always is). The BBC was faintly ridiculous and banned groups like Runrig (informally because they considered them too Scottish) and songs like Split Enz's "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" (formally, because of the Falklands War). Both of which were inoffensive...
But apart from Peel, the BBC was way behind when it came to metal (except pop/hair metal), hip hop, indy/alternative/shoegaze, rave/trance/techno etc. I think they picked up on the Pixies and grunge but not much else.
IMHO, FM radio stations, broadcasting on government-attributed radio frequencies, are very different - both in nature and in how they feel - from the user of a big corporation's service streaming from someone else's computers.
Agree about YouTube and Twitch. Whatever personality you want, there's someone that fits it. You can pull up a recent stream or tune in and message them live if they're on. In some ways we're in the golden age of some of what the article was saying was lost, because pretty much anyone with a basic setup and a little bandwidth can start streaming and building an audience/brand. No need to get hired, no need to get a letter like in the story that says you might've been OK in a small town but you're not ready for the big leagues.
I listen to radio a lot. NTS, FIP, Concertzender. It's a great way to discover new music and have some human presence.
Recently a DJ with excellent music taste and a deep radio-perfect voice died. I was devastated when I got the news. The two remaining radio shows in his slot were something I'll remember forever. One unbelievably raw, as it was only two days since he died, the other beautiful, as everyone came with music and stories to remember him.
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 was briefly involved with WITR during my undergrad. Loved what they were doing, but at that time the station definitely bought into the hipster attitude, music you've never heard of and will never hear again.
The only band I can remember hearing on WITR, then hearing anywhere else, is Neon Indian. They also sponsored a concert with Viva Brother, which briefly got some airplay on other stations, in spite of never (to my knowledge) having played them.
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
I really appreciate this comment, so I'll try to return the favor (in small part) by sharing one pretty special to me: WYCE, https://grcmc.org/wyce. Hope you enjoy.
In a way it’s the same phenomenon as TV channels with fixed programming replaced by cable and the streaming video. Newspaper vs curated feeds. There is an exploit vs explore tradeoff in all of these. The newer versions lean heavier on exploit, so explore suffers. Explore is the ‘broadening horizons’ bit that some other comments refer to.
Automation / machines tend to make things more efficient and we shouldn’t shy away from automation, but they can also reduce the human connection. I think the same thing will happen with AI generated art - l human generated art can be a spiritual experience meaning you can connect with another human through art - but if a masterpiece like Cypress Trees in Wheat Fields is AI generated, there isn’t a connection with the human artist. Consequently we must consciously turn to other places to keep human connection strong.
College radio is still a thing. I've discovered some good music via WRUV (UVM). WERS (Emerson College) dropped the Rockers reggae show when they changed their programming back in 2013, but I should try streaming again and see what it's like these days.
I've been working on a streaming platform for musicians as a passion project for the last decade partly because the analog radio shows have become a dying breed. Web-based indie radio shows are lots of fun because they're very close to the best radio shows from my own youth when most radio DJ:s still were curators and experts in the music they played. And they have the feeling of community and genuine passion for the hobby.
There's definitely still demand for quality radio shows but I guess it just makes more money if you play whatever the big studios pay you to play. But its the same thing with television as well; many indie channels on YouTube produce MUCH better content than anything you can see on the traditional TV or Netflix.
My sad guess: radio will make less and less money, until the point owners view the spectrum as more valuable than the revenue left to extract from it, and ATT or the like will buy them out (after buying out the FCC) and use it for something else.
AM stations, in particular daytime only licensees, are almost free at this point. Most cases, the land value where the antenna is located is the sales price.
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.
It died mid 80s for me too. That was when the monoculture, where everyone was listening to the same thing, just disappeared. I was just a kid so I never knew what happened. All I knew was that when I was itty bitty, I could turn the dial and find mostly the same stuff everywhere. Mid 80s onwards and it was all fractured. That fracturing continued to the point where it’s like there’s a genre and a band for every taste…which is cool, but now we don’t have a broadly shared cultural experience anymore. Ditto for television. Basically, the scarcity is gone. On the one hand, cool, but on the other, society weirdly suffers.
Well, sort of. My radio presets back in the 2000s were 101.7 WFNX, 104.1 WBCN, 107.3 WAAF, 100.7 WZLX, and 92.9 WBOS. Of those stations, only WZLX remains.
The greats - in my opinion, WBCN and WFNX - are long off the air. They were powerhouses of culture, both local and national. WFNX was the first to play Nirvana's Nevermind; Bono of U2 once said that "...without BCN, we'd all be (expletive)'d, let's face it."
Oedipus, a well-known Boston DJ since the 70s (who got started at 88.1 WMBR, MIT's station) and program director at WBCN, said of it: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed radio... Corporations were now allowed to own multiple stations in the same market and across the country. Stations were no longer programmed locally."
Meanwhile, WAAF went online-only in 2020. WBOS got delegated to an HD2 subchannel in 2004. Likewise, The Boston Globe picked up many of the radio personalities for the online-only RadioBDC, now Indie617, but that seemed dead by the mid-2010s. I hear the former WFNX DJs Henry Santoro and Julie Kramer may still have some limited presence on 89.7 WGBH.
I was recently happy to find Adam 12 (formerly of WFNX (formerly of WBCN)) still DJing on 105.7 WROR.
88.9 WERS (Emerson College's station) is doing a great job of carrying the helm of Boston music culture. Occasionally I'll also tune into 90.3 WZBC (Boston College's station), which is a more "traditional" and less "commercial" college radio station.
Just outside Boston are likewise some public and community stations with good programming - 88.3 WRPS (Rockland's public radio station) and 101.3 WFNX (Scituate's community station - love that they picked up the WFNX callsign!) are pretty good, if you're in range.
Counterpoint: I always found WERS to be a slightly broader interpretation of adult contemporary programming than the commercial stations.
My goto was WUMB, which is out of UMass Boston, and played a consistent format (folk and Americana, I guess?) throughout the day. Blues Hangover on WHRB (Harvard) was always worthwhile when I caught it.
The playlist was set by corporate (or by a consultant). You could maybe change the order of the songs, but you were not allowed to add / subtract any songs.
By 1980 over 1/2 of the stations were "automated". Music was provided by a service, on Reel to Reel tape (played by Revox B77's).
Path to a radio job in 1980? A Third Class RadioTelephone License with Broadcast Endorsement.
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.
When I think about the glory days of radio, I think of American Graffiti.
I live in Austin and there's a pretty good station (I think it's actually a group of stations across Texas) called Sun Radio. I pretty much only listen in the car, but they are usually playing something I'm interested in.
At first I thought that was a complaint about electronic music and then I realised it means the station is automated with no humans. Could've been clearer.
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).
In 2005, right after Katrina hit, a lot of people in the Gulf lost power for a long time. All cell towers were overloaded constantly. What kept working was radio.
A bog standard Sony radio would run for a long, long time on a few AA batteries. Back then, you could also pick up the audio portion of UHF and VHF analog TV too. It was the main lifeline for news and local updates.
Radio is a fantastic technology that is being wasted. Cheap to transmit, cheap to receive, and covers a wide area. It would be great to see a radio renaissance. Maybe the Zoomers reconnecting to older technologies will revive it.
>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.
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 has been an explosion in the number of local community FM stations, frequently playing music from local bands and chat with local figures. Factor in the national BBC radio stations (who's charter is to “inform, educate, and entertain”, not to retain attention) and we are onto a winner.
Yes there are still some 'corporate' commercial stations, but we also have plenty of quality to choose from.
There are a lot of corporate piss-poor local stations. Apart from the Heart and Crapital stuff, the Forth and Clyde stations are awful. Even their continuity has one of those awful Estuary accents.
Most of them are indistinguishable, don't carry local news (apart from boasting about charity fundraising they do), or local bands. Pure pap
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.
Radio is still cool! But it's just not really on the FCC-licensed bands anymore. Independent Internet radio stations keep the spirit alive. Look around, there very well might be a vibrant local music-and-more community right in your neighborhood! Two stations I listen to regularly here in NYC:
Strongly seconded. Great radio, independent, opinionated, kind, reasonable, 100% listener supported. My main go-to for music in the last couple of years (since I discovered it)
Shout out to my local KUTX (https://kutx.org/)! This is the kind of station that (I think) the author is mourning the loss of. They have human DJs, a great variety of music, and since they're a public station they have relatively few ads.
I don't really know how successful they are but since their inception 13 years ago I've probably listened to them more than all other stations combined. And I donate to them.
My concern with radio is energy consumption. Transmitters are only about 50% efficient. So a 50kw transmitter is likely slurping down 100kw of power, 24/7. That can be incredibly wasteful, depending on how many people are listening at any given time.
Compound that with heavy advertising (for some stations) , and the "duty cycle" is even lower. It reminds me of those billboard trucks that drive up and down las Vegas, just burning gasoline, creating traffic, so you can see their ads.
Efficiency is up, more in the upper 70%'s now days. (of course broadcasters will use a transmitter until it is unfixable, so there are some 50 year old units still on the air). Each user requires a 9 volt battery to listen (maybe a bit more...)
Compare that electricity with the streaming cost. The streamers computers and routers. The infrastructure cost for the internet (not all amortized to streaming, of course). The desktop / laptop / phone electricity for EACH user / subscriber.
Once you hit a certain audience size, broadcasting is more efficient.
Note: I agree with you on the billboard trucks. A waste.
Yes, audience size is key. If there was only 50-100 listers (say late at night), does it make sense to run a 1kw microwave for each listener so they each can hear Nickelback?
I know it's more complicated than that, if they shut off the transmitter at night, they would lose listeners in total. I just think it's wasteful compared to other forms of communication.
Glad to see this sentiment expressed. I got extremely tired of the stream-ification of everything on the web, and how something as simple as getting music playing has turned into an involved process with too much of my own data forfeit.
My solution is a small, self hosted PWA that simply has a list of a few dozen of my favorite internet radio stations. Loads quickly, no sign in or subscription, no add, just music. In the past month I have hardly even opened Spotify!
Well, that's where a lot of this type of content is (seemingly, at least) alive and well right now. Satellite appears to be here to stay, and can provide tremendous value on long drives. Particularly if you're doing a lot of them.
I'd love to see more FM stations return to human DJs, and human curated playlists. But until/unless that happens, we still need somewhere for those skills to be utilized and refined.
What if there was a radio station that didn't have commercials or corporate sponsorship?
What if there was a radio station that was entirely listener supported?
What if there was a radio station that let its volunteer DJs play whatever they wanted to play, and say whatever they wanted to say? Within FCC laws, of course.
WFMU is the answer. 1 terrestrial broadcast, 3 internet livestreams, 20 years of archives online and available for listening.
One radio program that's withstood the test of time is "Echos" with host John Diliberto. I ran across the program the other day and it blew my mind that it still sounds identical to when i first heard it 30 years ago. The guy is a legend and clearly devoted to his listeners and the musicians he promotes.
I quite like the "new" WKRP (in Cincinnati of course), it doesn't seem to be a corporate cookie-cutter kind of station, and it plays the kind of thing the TV version would probably play today (and they even use the same jingles):
My girlfriend has XM in her car so on road trips we listen to that. I'm always amazed at how terrible the djs on there are. Many of them are older musicians that I would imagine record all their segments for the week (or even month) in one day. I really don't know why they even bother paying for djs at all.
I agree with this sentiment. There was so much more to old radio than music, too (cf Relic Radio podcasts). A good DJ could add a lot to the experience of music as well (eg Dick Buckley...I am still waiting for the Chicago Public Library to make his Archives of Jazz shows available).
Yeah, I too long listened to radio after being a DJ in college. WXRT in Chicago was my go to. It's still running and I just listened to maybe 30 minutes: so many ads! I do enjoy the DJ banter and local references but with all the ads it ain't worth it.
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 was still listening to Jim Ladd and Uncle Joe on Sunday nights… maybe 15-20 years ago. They’d play a whole album, say Dark Side of the Moon and tell all the stories about it, sometimes even with recorded interviews they’d done.
Today there’s KCRW locally and it’s good though getting blander.
I have Jim Ladds book, autographed. My friend went to a book signing and got it for me. It’s signed “They say it’s your birthday — Jim Ladd”.
I also saw him when he toured with Roger Waters for “Radio KAOS”. “Good night Jim.” “Good night, Billy.”
I really enjoyed him when he was at KMPC/KEDG with JJ Jackson. That station struggled to find its way, starting early on with Pat “Paraquat” Kelly and Cynthia Fox, along with Guy Kemp at night (kind of a comedy/zoo shtick — I found his show really funny). I remember calling in once when Joe Satriani was just getting airplay, and the guy who answered was yelling “Are you hearing this? Are you HEARING THIS!?”.
Live radio.
It was nice with Ladd because he had his freedom, but a wider playlist.
MARS-FM, KROQ, KNAC, Pirate Radio, 91X (from Mexico, when you can get it, but they had some power).
But, a notable memory was 1989. Tiananmen Square.
Geno Michelini, KLOS, Five o’clock funnies fame, announced the breaking news of what was happening in China, and followed it up with Rush’s “Red Sector A” from “Grace Under Pressure”. I still get a little choked up thinking about.
The public Spanish radio and TV conglomerate (our BBC, that's it) recently shut down SW/AM radio stations. A shame, even more when we recently suffered a blackout and nothing could match AM's reachability, FM pales against it.
KUHF used to run classical music programming nearly exclusively up until 2011. Since then it's been relegated to their HD-2 channel and ran by some computer algorithm. If all you have is an old analog radio there is genuinely nothing to listen to around here.
Was sad to hear about the fate of WMHD. Growing up in the US around that time college radio and left-of-the-dial stations were the only places you'd get introduced to different stuff.
The problem is the people who advertisers want to target want to hear the same songs every day.
I wouldn't be surprised if people like you want me who want more variety are a majority - but we don't spend money on things advertisers want us to buy by enough to be worth advertising to us.
Well since my provincial government opened the floodgates to online gambling this month... Yeah, I definitely don't spend money on those advertisers. It's pretty crazy just how many ad spots they've gobbled up.
If people who want more variety are the majority, I suspect the problem is just that those people don't listen to radio anyway.
Like, think about how many stations are Christmas format, and how "Christmas music" is a very regimented set of about 20-40 songs from the 1950s. To paraphrase XKCD[0], radio embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Baby Boomers' childhoods every December[1]. Probably because they're the only ones who still even think about using radio anymore.
Next time you listen to the radio, pay attention not to the songs, but to the goods and services being advertised next to them. That will tell you everything you need to know about who is still listening to radio.
Jim Grey and I knew all the same people at WMHD yet somehow never ran into each other. I was an annoying high school student. Ron Dippold (he ran usenet votes for a long time) was there, among others.
When I was digging through old VHS tapes, I digitized a couple TV spots and put them on youtube; passing them along to Jim.
Best advice I got when I got to San Jose was from an old recruiter - she must have been 30!
She said the Bay Area is big, but the Silicon Valley is small.
I think about her advice a lot.
The radio world is even smaller. I tried out at WZZQ when I was in high school, but didn't make the cut.
A whole bunch of local stations got bought up by a web sales optimisation company. They do a really good job tbh. They leave the radio station in tact but just advertise their ability to make websites + google seo + advertise via radio and billboard in one package. If it keeps the station going its a nothingburger.
Theres also a local christian radio station I am only aware of because the guy fixing my fence was blasting it on his stereo. They were taking donations the entire time. I am sincerely not interested but they seem to deliver what their listeners want too.
Really depends on where you live. I find it's much better in bigger cities. Universities will have commercial-free stations. Also, more competition for the larger listener markets.
I was always a fan of talk radio. In the late 80s and early 90s there were so many diverse and interesting talk radio shows. And many times they were local and accessible, I was able to get on the air several times. But then Rush Limbaugh exploded and eventually angry right wing politics took over everything except sports and NPR.
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.
Very disappointed with the US FCC's ~2020 decision to REQUIRE EMAIL for a 1920s technology (access to, via their 10yr-cycle licensing online nightmare).
I recently went to renew my legal callsign, and apparently now email is a required attribute; if an email from them "bounces" then you get your callsign revoked.
My PO Box is no longer enough for them. I don't use email anymore. Radio silence.
>"Onair decorum prevents honest expression of how I really feel..."
AM is just OK but they spam the hell out of you. Also, too many religious stations on AM.
Meanwhile the government still throws money at NPR on FM, but sadly they've quit playing classical music all day like they once did and are instead pummeling the airwaves with leftist crap. Supposedly CPB will cease funding NPR but I'll believe it when NPR dies.
I'd like a mostly-classical right-leaning FM station, please, to listen to before my pecker falls off from the leftist shite spewing from NPR.
still never figured out if that was about popular culture moving from radio to TV, or just about former radio hosts who you imagined as beautiful actually being ugly when you saw them on TV, heh
There's so much good radio to be had since the arrival of the internet. Not even talking about online-only, but actual radio stations who also stream. Maybe there's less cool broadcast stations in any given area, but our overall exposure via internet is incredible. Just search for free-form radio. If you have a college in your area, you probably have interesting radio and DJs on the airwaves.
The article ends with giving up, ipod + KPFA news, which just seems wild. Never has there been a time where there's more music available.
There is a very different feeling streaming radio online as compared to getting it off a traditional radio. For me anyway. It's hard to explain. At night, you could pick up many weird stations from around the world here including Iceland and the Eastern Bloc, the Voice of America, sometimes if the conditions were right North American stations. I used to try and guess some of the languages. That was a challenge in itself sometimes.
Thanks to censorship and government interference, you can't listen to certain stations now, e.g. Turkey won't allow you to listen online outside Turkey, Russian stations are blocked thanks to the Ukrainian situation, and even some American stations are blocked. Search engines are near useless for most things nowadays.
They often have a mix of their call sign and another brand. The conglomerates have a few brands like The River (something for everyone is nothing at all). Local stations sometimes emphasize the call sign or they have something else, like 88.5 in Atlanta is "Album 88", or WRAS.
Who knows why we landed on our system of 3 and 4 letter call signs, but we did. Plenty of stations use them only when they have to: in the top of the hour legal ID, which is "<call sign> <city>," such as WZZQ Terre Haute.
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.
It absolutely does - allegedly there’s 6 million listeners to the biggest breakfast radio show in the UK and 4 million to the second biggest. That’s 10 million in a country of about 55 million adults.
Unfortunately, they broadcast on DAB so there’s a strong chance that two car radios next to each other are buffering differently and out of sync.
It’s interesting that the DAB rollout completely failed in Ireland and we are back to fully analog FM
At least my car is still using FM radio - 98.2MHz
If I turn up my volume loud enough, then the car next to me is going to be listening to the same song I am :)
If you really want a reaction here, announce that you use your phone speaker or a Bluetooth one out in public.
In the 90s I knew a guy in high school who walked around the school in a black trenchcoat with portable speakers tucked inside that were continuously playing Western movie themes. I can only imagine how that bit of creativity would go over these days.
I suppose it was rare enough and somewhat fun in the 90s. Maybe that guy was doing this for others to enjoy as well, or to appear singular (whether it worked or not).
Nowadays it wouldn't appear particularly exotic (portable speakers are ubiquitous) and people playing loud music (from speakers or phones) seem to do this for themselves without caring about the surrounding people, that's just highly egotistical and self-centered. It's usually not music I personally like too.
That's not fun, it's just annoying. There's already too much noise in our cities.
But if you do it right, playing (singular) music for others, reading the room and all, I'm sure it can still work.
Sometimes, but not too often, in Berlin of all places you encounter someone biking around with a massive speaker attached to their bike blaring (obviously) techno
Not always a bike. Sometimes just a trolley or a handcart or a custom jerry-rigged contraption.
In the US "boom boxes" went out with the 1970s. They need to get with the times.
Okay, in all seriousness: boom boxes were a thing in the 1970s and early 1980s. There are still people who use the latest generation of them, but thankfully not nearly as many. These days people cranking music in a public place are generally doing it as part of a group that all want to hear the same thing. (and in back then the group wanting to hear the same music was the common case)
Here, in a small US town, the most frequent public music is one or two people ~destroying the speaker on their phone.
Second is probably motorcycles blasting it over the engine noise.
Oh I've never seen a boom box around. It's always, like, a box of car batteries and a speaker on top. Clearly DIY.
You see this type of thing daily in Brooklyn NY still, but instead of techno it's any genre, primarily hip hop, reggaeton, or afrobeats.
When I opened https://radio.garden/ and spun the globe the first time, I tuned to a radio station somewhere in Africa, and it gave me tingles to think that in Lagos at that same moment, some bus driver was surely listening to the same music.
Younger generation get this connection out of live streaming
Never in my life has radio in my country played music I wanted to listen to. The first thing I did when I bought my first car was disconnect the antenna entirely.
Country issue.
> You were physically tethered to them through invisible waves through the sky
We've got a thing, and that's a-called radar love
We've got a wave in the air...
Radar love
Yes! Exactly this. I'm the OP and I wrote about this specifically as well.
https://blog.jimgrey.net/2023/01/10/connecting-through-the-e...
Yes, and I agree with a sibling comment that livestreaming is the modern equivalent, if not in ease or quality but in spirit. It's also why, despite having many movies in my library, I enjoy turning on TCM to watch old classics. I know that thousands of people at any given time are probably watching the same piece of history I am, right then.
You can still listen to the radio while driving, many people still do that, I still do that. I agree though that in essence streaming is a very alienating experience.
Many people do, but I don't get it. The typical station has a tiny playlist that they have had on repeat for a decade now. I haven't turned the radio on in years, and never was a regular listener, but I can still tell you what song will be next if you turn it on (for the stations that are played most often in public)
Yeah, but most current corporate radio sucks. It’s not a human broadcasting and allowing their idiosyncratic tastes to sneak in. Nationwide each station is just shuffling one of three or four playlists of inoffensive songs picked because nobody hates it (but nobody loves it)
The rush hours are the worst. You're lucky if you hear two songs in 30 minutes it's so crammed full of ads.
I don't know. I mean if that is the criteria then livestreams surely fix this because there is another human at that moment in time also and you can even interact with them. Or do you like the passive interaction that they should just play music and shut up
This still exists today. When a new song gets released on YouTube for example a group of people close to it in latent space gets it recommended. By seeing a recommendation of a song in your feed you are part of a cohort of people with similar tastes.
That is the core issue. Only a preselected cohort are exposed to new media. That limits common experiences to digital islands rather than shared among the masses.
How is this an issue at all?
I'm the OP, and I'm surprised to find this article on HN at all, let alone the front page!
Many comments are focusing on music but the thing I tried to get across in the article was that good radio wasn't primarily about the music, it was about fun and connection. A good DJ kept you from just turning the radio off when you heard that same hit the fourth time today -- you wanted to keep listening because the DJ made it fun. It made homework and hobbies feel a lot less lonely. A Spotify playlist sure as heck can't do that.
Possibly controversial opinion, but radio stopped being relevant to me personally when congress removed the ownership restrictions for a single market. It's only gotten worse from there IMO. Radio is about catering to a very specific, and generally older, market at least where I am.
Not controversial, not even within the DJ community.
The local college station was still pretty fantastic until COVID hit. They shut the studio down during that time and most of the good DJs left. It never recovered.
Agreed. That was the beginning of the end of good radio.
> A good DJ kept you from just turning the radio off when you heard that same hit the fourth time today -- you wanted to keep listening because the DJ made it fun.
I'm old enough to remember when radio was king, but if that's what a good DJ does, then I suppose I've never heard a good DJ. Personally, I preferred the DJ who talked as little as possible and had good taste and variety in the music they chose to play.
But yes, we are poorer for their passing. They've been gone for a very long time, but I've still yet to see anything that can adequately replace them.
In commercial radio, DJs haven't selected the music in 40 or more years. I used to show up for my shifts to find a printed playlist from a software product called Selector. I had to follow it.
Also, most commercial radio DJs would talk and talk and talk all the way up to the point in the song where lyrics started, and then right after the last lyric, they'd start yacking again. A lot of music that was on the radio in the 70s, 80s and 90s had great instrumental intros and outros that you just totally missed because some garbage DJ had to get in one last "TODAY'S HITS, YESTERDAY'S LEGENDS, ONLY ON IDIOT ROCK 95.1!!!"
I believe talking through the intro was an actual skill that was taught to DJs, and the closer they could cut it the prouder they'd be. I've always hated it, and there have been occasions when I've switched stations because I couldn't take it anymore.
Back in the later 70s a Chicago three-letter AM radio station used to speed up songs so they could stuff in more commercials. And the DJ would do the parent’s talking when there’s no lyrics, even to the point of talking through the entire Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Love’s Theme instrumental.
I never understood the business reason for doing this. Do they really think listeners will switch away if they go 500 milliseconds without hearing a human voice?
It’s the opposite, they do it to fit in more commercials, because apparently people don’t switch away when they talk over songs.
There's a local station that advertises the fact that they don't do requests. I'm sure the reason they don't is because they can't - the playlist was mapped out long ago and there will be no deviations. The main DJ voice is some guy reportedly from Vancouver who records the voiceovers for this station and probably 40 others just like it. What he lacks in spontaneity he makes up for in snark.
There was that time I was tripping on acid at 2am and was offended by hearing the same Doobie Brothers song that plays during my drive in and my drive out and called up the college radio station thinking, "I'm either going to talk to the janitor or the program manager", turns out the program manager picks up the phone and I ask him, "Who picks this music out?" and he says "I do" and that it's programmed on the computer. I told him "Come on, you can play anything you want to play" so he put on a Miles Davis disc.
Your Miles Davis comment triggered a memory of college radio. In school in the early 90's, I had a 3-6am show Wednesday mornings, and mostly said and played whatever I wanted, as nobody was really listening anyway. One week, the guy who did the Friday night 6-8pm slot called me and asked if I could sub for him. I was way down on the call list, but nobody wanted to sub on a Friday night. So I took his slot and did my normal show. I immediately got a bunch of complaint calls that I was crap (which was fair, I was), and one guy who kept calling in over and over demanding I play Miles Davis.
On the other side of the coin, I also had a 10am Saturday news slot, which was just a quick 10 minute read of my pick of the top stories off the AP feed. I was on the city bus discussing the slot with my buddy who did the sports right after me, and the bus driver overheard us and said he listened to the station on his bus route, and loved us on Saturday mornings more than the other news readers. He was my only known fan in my very short lived radio "career".
One time I tuned into college radio and not long after came on a song from my own band. The only recording of our music was from a jam session that we put on CD that we handed out to a few friends and we hadn't played together in many years by that point so it was quite a shock to hear it.
I did college radio for a bit. You could play whatever you wanted up to a certain extent. At least where I was at, ~'06, you could play like 30? minutes of whatever you wanted, it's been a while might be more or less. The other x minutes of your hour you had to play a selection of music. It was a very wide range of things so you could easily find something to fit into your show but it had to be from the pool that college got.
Maybe other colleges did it differently but we didn't have a program manager or anything. Everyone was free to do what they wanted outside of some FCC rules and what I previously mentioned.
> In commercial radio, DJs haven't selected the music in 40 or more years.
Yes, I'm painfully aware. That was what got me to stop listening to music radio.
Once upon a time in Southern Germany, there was the one and only C-Team...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GRBn7Vn2U0&t=775s
Obviously it loses a lot if you don't speak German, but they were very funny and silly and interacted with their fans a lot, to say the least.
I don't know how it worked in Germany but in the Netherlands the government had a monopoly on broadcasting. Their public radio stations did not play rock and roll and was not in tune with "youth culture".
Rock'n'roll yes. Youth culture seems harder for me to say anything about, because that can mean a wide range, attitude towards drugs etc. But popular music young people dance to, for sure. You remember Neue Deutsche Welle, right?
Dunno if they were "in tune" though, maybe I'm too literal, because in my mind, anything, even the coolest stuff, that was made by adults and/or legal was not the stuff. Actual youth culture can only happen among the youth, if you know what I mean, so there's at least always this lag.
We had SWF3 with Anke Engelke. WDR with specials(Electronic mostly). BFBS(British Forces Broadcasting Services).
In and around Bonn, in the 80ies. Guess there have been more, but they were out of reception range.
There's no reason it can't. You could do the same thing on streaming as was done back in the radio days. I've been searching for it but haven't really found it yet.
So far the closest thing I found was when Huey Lewis did a radio show on Apple Music. You couldn't call in and there were no contests, but it's a bit of talking from someone likable, separated by a couple of songs they introduce which you also like. That's basically the format of radio, in its most basic form.
I've searched a bit for that type of format on streaming. Sure there's always TuneIn or MyTuner apps which are interesting but those shows are always tailored to a specific faraway city that you don't know much about, or they're in a different language, or they're sports talk related which I'm not interested in.
I'm specifically looking for music I like and a likeable person talking and introducing songs, just like the clips you have on your web site. I just don't understand how that can be so expensive that big tech companies with deep pockets like Apple Music don't want to produce it. What's up with that?
BBC 6music has a lot of great DJs, Chris Hawkins being my favourite with plenty of banter for a 5am show. While it's just a Friday late night show: Ashley Storrie on BBC Radio Scotland and don't be surprised if you hear the same listeners sending in messages on both stations. But then, they aren't commercial stations with less pressure. Whenever I have to listen to an Austrian (where I live) station I get bored. Even the public funded stations have commercials or, even more annoying, un-labeled advertising for the lottery.
I miss DJs with taste and encyclopedic knowledge of their music would challenge their listeners, educate them, expose them to new things. Variations on themes, new artists, connections with old ones. Now, I guess they read the blurb and hit the button on the canned program.
Shouts to Pierre Robert (rip), John DeBella, Cyndy Drue, etc at WMMR and WYSP (rip). They still let Jacky Bam Bam play the real stuff sometimes; at least the bots take a break for his show.
I wasn't a fan of drive-time radio, but WYSP had Metal Shop at something like 11PM Friday. That's where I discovered Metallica, Megadeth, Anvil, WASP, all the Metal Blade era music. I've never had anything algorithmic show me that much new music that quickly.
yes and also my spouse and i have the opposite where we enjoy listening to 89.5 whenever we pass through Seattle. we find the amateur students who try to sound smart and cool really endearing and entertaining
Radio also was your connection to your city and the city's youth communities. Which are now fragmented, subcultures, and frequently dominated by someone trying to make the scene into their living. As far as I know, nothing has filled that community void, and community itself is dying.
Local community is probably irreparably damaged. But I was a kid with niche interests and I didn't start to find my people until the Internet entered my life in 1989.
> Local community is probably irreparably damaged. But I was a kid with niche interests and I didn't start to find my people until the Internet entered my life in 1989.
Sounds like you should start listening to some community radio stations. They don't even have to be your local community, I promise that somewhere in your timezone there is a community radio station broadcasting something you want to listen to.
Try our local one in Brisbane (where Bluey is from) that has been running since 1975 and started as a university student protest station: https://4zzz.org.au
You might not like the show you hear when you click, but look at their catalogue of shows and you'll find something.
Community can always be rebuilt.
I was a 'classic 70's latch key kid', that somehow discovered underground radio during elementary. Starting with "Dr. Demento" somewhere in my youth, by 6th grade it was "no commercial potential radio", mimeographed fanzines from everywhere on earth kids liked music + comics, and the punk rock + art music underground with shows at Unitarian Churches and abandoned buildings.
You do realize that the radio stations and everyone who worked at them used their radio "scene" as a way to make a living, right?
The scale of a radio station, versus the scale of one promoter today is night and day. The ownership of distribution of information is a curious thing; when it was more controlled we had community, and when that control relaxed the previous "controllers" did everything in their power to pollute the new communications channels with bad actors, essentially destroying the potential for community to form again. If someone cannot control the entire apparatus, those that cannot make sure the medium is non-commercially useful. Part of their protection of their medium, no others can be allowed to become viable as a replacement.
Check out bandcamp. It’s artist focused and they have shows with DJs that focus on highlighting new releases.
I even subscribe to one for Metal for $10/months they’ll give you a new album every month like one of those old CD clubs. Interviews and listening parties too.
If you are looking for a sense of community like radio used to have, it’s a lot closer than podcasts IMO. Everyone has a podcast but this is something else.
My son got used to listening to the local classic rock station i100 and one thing that is really fun is that the DJ's are local performers and celebrities. The station promoted an event for Ronnie James Dio last weekend
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/dioday
and this guy and another DJ were there with their own bands
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116954456921377276
Even though the station is run by remote control much of the time and the sales manager recently got poached by the Buffalo Bills it's so much fun to get to know these people in real life. (I appreciate it how Billy, pictured, plays alternative rock, kinda like Green Day, even if the station's playlist got closed out around 1992)
> It made homework and hobbies feel a lot less lonely. A Spotify playlist sure as heck can't do that.
People use podcasts for it now
I do miss the DJs of my childhood local rock station, WHJY, Providence. They were with me in the car for many, many hours. It's nostalgia though, I tuned out when they hired a program manager that played too much early 80's rock, like Van Halen, and not enough alternative. I tuned out after the 400th time the PM DJ dunked on his cohost's weight, the 347th time the AM DJs made a prank call, and the 500th time the evening DJ objectified his sultry-voiced intern. Later, I cancelled SiriusXM because I couldn't listen DJs anymore, not one more word.
I miss the locality, the connection, the need to cope outside the safe zone for nothing other than lack of options. Despite the nostalgia, and sensing what is lost, I think I would make the same choice again. Mostly so I never have to hear Jump again.
Hi Jim, I was involved in radio as a kid and it was one of the most formative experiences of my life. I remember that fondly.
A few questions, as I'd like to hear your take on this.
First, a premise, I think the audience is still out there, as there 10,000s perhaps 100,000s of people that would enjoy the experience you describe and would even pay for that, so it can be sustainable.
Anyway here's the questions:
1. Why not doing that yourself through the internet? Your own radio station, your rules. What usually stops one from accomplishing this?
and
2. What/why do you think the essence of what you describe does/would not translate to the online model? (if you think that's the case)
Thanks!
Small world. I'm sitting here in Terre Haute as I write this. I moved here about a decade ago so radio was already well on its way to the lowest common denominator before I got here. All I know about WBOW is that they turn into all Christmas music after Thanksgiving.
The current WBOW isn't actually connected to the OG WBOW, which was on AM at 1230. It went off the air in 2001 after the owner was convicted of some pretty awful crimes. Another company resurrected the call letters on FM some years later.
There's many stations that still do it just like the good old days. KEXP in Seattle is on my dial most of the time. I text the DJs most days to say thanks for the great show!
I still work in radio and have for more than 30 years. Perhaps I'm an outlier, but I never cared about the DJs, never felt a connection, never wanted their Morning Zoos or their Tammy and Frankie in the Morning junk, with the fake callers, the forced laughs, the crappy contests, the gossip lifted from other uncredited sources. All I ever wanted was lots of unrepeated music. Or, failing that, lots of intelligent talk and news.
You might get all-music at night. But in the mornings radio listeners want to hear talking.
I don't want to hear morning show hijinx. I will gladly listen to well-produced news and features.
I never used to like the morning show hijinx either, until I discovered that a friend hosted such a show. I tuned in every morning after that. He retired a couple of months ago, and I think I've only listened to the show twice since then. His replacements are OK but there's no draw anymore.
Lin Brehmer of WXRT Chicago was really good, he died not too long ago though. Since then I almost never turn the radio on in the car. Iggy pop does a great show on BBC radio 6 (online) and he plays good music but his many anecdotes and opinions are what really keep me listening.
I used to work graves and some stations would have shows at odd hours that played variety you might not hear during the day. The DJ as a curator is a role I miss. I also miss the notion someone else local was awake. Other night owls might call in and comment or make requests.
Since you worked in radio, at WZZQ no less, you probably would enjoy the story of the earlier WZZQ.
https://www.pbs.org/show/wzzq-the-movie/
I’ve always felt that way as well. It doesn’t matter how perfect a playlist is, what a masterpiece an album is, the humanity of a real person selecting the music, and interjecting comments or style along the way just feels different.
Listening to the local collage radio during my teens was formative, and the exposure to all kinds of things I would have never had heard otherwise still heavily colors my musical taste to this day.
Most of the time songs were played randomly from a huge list, there were no “hits”, and this was exactly what I wanted.
If there was a song I liked, I had to quick record it to tape, because otherwise I likely wouldn’t hear it again for days or weeks.
There would at times be people DJing for time segments, but it was relaxed and music focused, not person focused. I’ll take some dead air and a soft spoken young adult just giving the name of the next song vs bombastic “personalities” any day.
Another big key to it, was my college radio station didn’t have advertisements. Radio ads are grating and repulsive and I simply cannot tolerate that shit. Same thing with TV ads, which is a big reason I basically stopped watching TV in my late teens as well.
I cherish and miss the radio experience that I personally had, but when I hear what others subject themselves to I simply cannot fathom why.
These days my tastes are mostly adjacent to doom or psych-rock, and my modern day radio replacement is following some curators on YouTube whose hobby/side job is to find new releases in these genres and dig up old gems. Which makes it easy for me to quickly find and add (mostly through Bandcamp) new songs into my own collection every so often, which I then self host and further rate/curate via navidrome.
Basically I’ve always been a very active, rather than passive music enjoyer.
I suppose anything thing to bring up, is if I was listening to people on the radio doing something interesting, then I end up either needing to be randomly cut off from it to do something else, or try to constrain my schedule to their show. Not fun at all.
I remember I had a data entry job and we were only allowed to bring in old tech like a CD player or radio. So I was listening to a local radio station and they posed the question "would you go back in time and kill Hitler" which I was like "shit I gotta call in and say my opinion".
Just wanted to give another opinion on this topic because I think people are being overly nostalgic about radio in this thread: For as long as I can remember I have hated radio with a passion. The constant interruption of the occasional good song, the endless nonsense-talking hosts, the unfunny jokes, the annoying ads, the same songs over and over, etc. I hate radio and I’m glad it’s gone. I don’t miss it at all! Cheers A millennial
I want to say thank you, so much because, it feels like radio & these people who worked to create these enjoyable spaces, filled with such life: it feels like that is so rapidly becoming such a lost art. And it just feels like theres so little we leave to the future to remember this by. That as things get bleaker and worse, there's so few artifacts to point to like this that tell the good tale.
Elsewhere in this thread I poured out such joy and happiness about so many station that are so beloved to me, are just darling special places. I want so badly to imagine https://mountainchill.com KRKQ to be broadcasting from Telluride Colorado for a hundred, a thousand years. It's something so special.
Yet the story, the sadness you tell here, identifying forces eroding us, our great Society, with nothing of substance and meaning in its place: it's just getting so much worse, in so many ways and places.
The mechanized take-over of the airwaves, the public's airwaves, that the FCC has congressional mandate to use and protect & make good for the public, is ongoingly getting so much worse, on and on. The takeover by right wing aligned outlets like Sinclair has been so bad, so ongoing, has so few hopeful counter-examples if things going right at any scale. Lots of small positive lights, but this chewing up of the world by hostile above-human quasi-immortal corporate super orgs is on full display in radio, in broadcast.
Trump I's FCC overturning congressional media ownership requirements has been part of this. There are only three major players in radio left, since these rules, and two of them are trying to merge right now, for a $6.2B merger. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15716219 (2017), and excellent article today, https://karlbode.com/local-u-s-tv-news-will-soon-be-entirely...
Meanwhile that same Carr run FCC is doing everything it can to chill and ruin free speech, to terrorize anyone with speech they find disagreeable. Orban style totalitarianism, right here at home. Ghastly ghastly anti-democratic, anti freedom, anti-liberty, just the smallest possible weasel stuff, shame beyond shame to these weak spirited cowards.
> "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
Meanwhile this same administration has all but destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts. Countless radio stations have had to make drastic efforts to stay afloat, as both a miniscule yet vital source of funding for such great public service has been cut, by these same foes of everything you've written of.
I want more than a memory. In the comments below I've shared some truly great amazing stations I love, that folks can tune into from anywhere and enjoy. I an a proud supporting member at multiple stations. Yet, with forces like this, big, scary, corrupt, evil, un American, in my view demonic forces like this, with Powell Memorandum operations to corporate and own the airwaves for private and increasingly political interest, I fear writing like this will serve all too strongly as a necessary vital remembrance of a past, one that few people would otherwise have any ability to connect to. With a tear and with thanks, let me say I really appreciate this write up, and I hope it will not be so very necessary for so very long into our future. With apologies for being a bit pointed, obviously, but for hopefully reasonable or understandable, good spirited cause... May there be better times ahead, may the people enjoy the airwaves & making special places of them together again.
It is a shame. I think it’s especially a shame for children and young people.
A counter to radio remaining relevant is “I can listen to whatever I want, via this digital technology”.
Fine - but young people don’t yet have a complete mental map of what culture they enjoy.
In the UK, funding for libraries and the arts (public radio, the BBC) has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity. I think that’s true in the US too.
Despite this, young people have an unprecedented amount of access to culture. Or, at least, any form of culture that can be digitally replicated.
Soulseek and Anna’s Archive are wonderful projects. But they only have as much utility as the person using them can put into the search bar.
We’re increasingly entrusting cultural education - what to put into the search bar - to algorithms that are designed not (as the BBC’s mission statement is) to “inform, educate, and entertain”, but to retain attention.
Even worse: many of these (eg, Spotify) hide real access behind subscription fees. If you grew up broke, like I did, you will understand how inaccessible this real access is.
The most motivated young people will continue to find the workarounds piracy offers, and to find other routes for cultural education.
Any young person who isn’t in that upper percentile of motivatedness might increasingly be left out. You can attribute that to a choice they have made - I think that’s wrong.
I think the joy of broadening one’s horizons is available to all, and is also difficult to learn and a strain to continue to practice. I think it must be taught.
I think this is especially true and important when everyone has a constantly-available option of algorithmically-selected pleasantness.
Human radio DJs are not optimized for pleasantness, or to serve you relevant ads based on your conversations with them. At their best, DJs are educators.
Anyone who grew up listening to radio knows that, and knows the pleasure that comes from learning not to change the channel when something new and uncomfortable-feeling comes on, just in case it ends up being something you fall in love with.
> In the UK, funding for libraries [] has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity.
Focusing on one thing here, for convenience. The problem remains that costs are up far in excess of budgets - austerity be damned! We are forced to prioritise, cutting the generally useful but "non-essential". (There is often a legal duty to the essential things)
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/how-have-english-councils-fu...
Is a great breakdown. To illustrate my argument see Table 1. Real-terms spending per person by service area, various years (2024–25 prices)
> Within total service spending, per-person spending on children’s social care services [] increased by 11% in real terms. Spending on adult social care [] was also relatively protected, falling by only 2%. This meant much larger cuts to other services: more than 40% in the case of housing, culture and leisure, and highways and transport, and nearly 60% cuts to planning and development.
We cut what _could_ be cut, and that's a prioritisation call.
edit: now in https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/fixing...
Great rabbit hole for my Wednesday morning! :D
Yeah - I used "austerity" as a slightly sloppy shorthand in my comment. My two closest local libraries were closed due to cuts made during "the credit crunch" by the coalition government (from memory!), when "austerity" was the buzzword, so I felt it'd communicate most broadly (to HN's international userbase) the phenomenon I was gesturing at.
From what I can understand, these sources are saying: "because costs are up, those past cuts have not yet really been reversed, especially not in terms of real-terms funding per-capita, or funding for 'non-essential' services".
Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!
> Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!
That it is! It will require an actual change to the societal contract to resolve as best I can tell - and it remains unclear to me what direction the change will take.
Yes - I think the idea of 'citizenship' feels increasingly abstract and outdated to anyone who only rarely noticeably interacts with the entity they pay taxation to, typically solely in moments of extreme crisis. 'Noticeably' here meaning I'm excluding ambient aspects of life, like walking on a government-maintained pavement.
I would argue those 'non-essential' services - those which you actively notice benefiting from - are extremely important for building institutional trust in the state. For young people entering the workforce today, who (for example) are a demographic that have a lower requirement for the services of the NHS, it must be genuinely confusing and alienating to be paying (what I believe is) a historically high tax rate.
Citizenship, as an idea, does need to demonstrably benefit both the state and the individual. Otherwise, the state is basically asking people to draw on their reserves of empathy to have a reason not to act like a dick. That will, unfortunately, have much more varied results than empathy alongside tangible incentives.
The cost of not providing those 'non-essential' services may ultimately be larger, and more difficult to calculate, I think, than are calculable today. How you provide them without the cash to do so is a question I'm not smart enough to answer. But people have now - completely anecdotally - gone a very long time with low tangible incentives toward citizenship being provided by the either the state or local authorities, and the vibe is very, very bad.
I don't think this is restricted to the UK, either. The OECD’s 2024 trust survey found only 37% of respondents across 30 countries were confident their government balances the interests of current and future generations. [1]
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...
The size of the core funding cuts to councils by HMG outweigh everything else the councils are facing according to the figures.
Now, purely by memory, I recall commentary over the years that 1) David Cameron was cutting taxes on various categories of land assets to benefit large land asset holders to the detriment of the budget, 2) the battle of any tax cuts are spending programs in disguise vs no they aren't and 3) May, Johnson, Sunak, Starmer etc have not reversed any of the tax cuts put in place by Cameron.
There's no doubt a more delicate story to what has happened, but a fact check of this into Deepseek before I posted this confirmed that the throughline is credible.
> Fine - but young people don’t yet have a complete mental map of what culture they enjoy.
Spotify and the likes will suggest new and different things for people to listen to. Apple has a special app just for classical music, which is the highest level of musical culture.
> Even worse: many of these (eg, Spotify) hide real access behind subscription fees. If you grew up broke, like I did, you will understand how inaccessible this real access is.
They have advertisements for those who don't pay the subscription. Radio has always had advertisements also. And nobody is too broke to afford Spotify. Every broke young person I've known have had a Spotify subscription, they're dirt cheap.
For the past 25 years, I've turned on the radio about once a year, and every time it's been just sewage. Whether that's government produced sewage or corporate produced sewage. The quality of podcasts and music streaming is on a quality level which radio never reached.
> I think the joy of broadening one’s horizons is available to all, and is also difficult to learn and a strain to continue to practice. I think it must be taught.
Very much agree.
Lol, I'm personally too broke for a Spotify subscription - as in I couldn't sign up this month with the cash in my bank account - and that has often been true during the periods of my life I have not spent working in tech. I don't think I'd even be in their youngest adult user demo anymore!
We definitely exist. It's pretty tight out there right now. The £10.99/month I see quoted buys quite a few kilos of dry pasta.
In any case, the core argument I was making specifically is that I believe human curation can provide more friction for the audience than algorithmic curation tends to, and that this is a net-good for cultural education.
I would contend with classical music being the highest strata of musical culture (and the deeper idea of culture having 'levels'), but that's subjective. So, that aside, if classical music is your thing, and you believe:
> "The quality of podcasts and music streaming is on a quality level which radio never reached."
I'd recommend Glenn Gould's The Idea of North, which is one of my absolute favourite pieces of music. It's considered pretty innovative and important:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5MUnZoeGI
Glenn Gould wrote it specifically for radio, as it was commissioned by the CBC. So "government produced sewage". :-)
I'd also strongly recommend you give BBC Radio 3 (still often excellent, especially late at night) a try. NTS has some great classical shows, too. Perhaps you're already familiar with all of these, but - if not - they might give you a reason to turn on your radio more frequently than annually.
> Apple has a special app just for classical music, which is the highest level of musical culture.
Really? Why?
The metadata matters in a different way. A single piece with a single composer can be interpreted very differently, over time, by different conductors and orchestras.
This means classical music is very badly organised in most streaming apps. Sorting by "artist" doesn't really work if the artist is listed as an orchestra, which has probably recorded the work of more than one composer.
Roon is another example of a streaming platform that treats this metadata with the same importance.
Not the app itself of course. What I meant to say is that classical music is the highest level of musical culture.
That’s what I was asking. Why do you think that is true? Seems like the most subjective thing possible.
That classical music is the highest level of musical culture? I didn't think anybody would need an explanation, it's generally understood. And for somebody who doesn't understand, it would be impossible to explain in words. It's about as subjective as saying that nothing can be more beautiful than nature.
But not all classical music is great or even good. That hindered me for years from listening more to classical music, because I thought that I couldn't understand some works which I listened to. Then I realized some of it is just bad, and there's nothing more to it.
The BBC hasn't been cut in the name of austerity. It isn't funded by general taxation it's funded by the licence fee, which has only risen, however not in line with inflation. This is basically because nobody wants to pay it, and indeed a huge number of people have stopped paying it.
You're mostly correct - I was absolutely generalising, using internationally known examples (like the BBC), to be more comprehensible to the international audience here about cuts to public arts spending.
The BBC was a silly example of me to use (as was 'public radio'!) because you're right - it's mostly not funded by general taxation.
That said, the license fee is directly tied to inflation (via the CPI). Whether you see that as a correct measurement is another question. [1]
The BBC has also historically been funded partially by taxation. For example, taxation provided free television licenses to over-75s, until 2020, when that funding was cut, and the cost of doing this was passed to the BBC itself.[2]
But yes - quibbles aside, a sloppy example for me to have used there. Your sibling comment has some great sources which better illustrate changes to arts funding, compared to the off-handed ones I initially provided.
[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ23
[2] https://www.ageuk.org.uk/northumberland/about-us/volunteer-f...
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.
I enjoy the radio. I have a few stations I’ll cycle through at home and in the car. But all nonprofit/college /etc.
Most US commercial radio is very bad. I don’t really understand why the playlists are so small, and why they don’t even occasionally play lesser-known songs by the big acts. Like, why don’t classic rock stations play deeper cuts by Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, etc. instead of the same hit singles over and over for decades? How can that be what listeners want? People who work in retail environments with a repeated playlist usually say they hate it for obvious reasons.
It’s as if those TV stations that show The Office and Seinfeld every night showed the same five episodes every week.
Strangest is that the DJ will often talk about lesser-known songs/artists and will play a few second snippet of the music, but then go right back to the regular rotation. If the audience is already thought to be interested in the story/snippet about a song, you'd think they'd want to hear the whole thing, but apparently not.
Yeah, for a long time I thought I disliked Rush because I only heard "Tom Sawyer" and "Closer to the Heart" on the radio. Turns out the best shit doesn't get airtime.
At least my hometown classic rock station would do a bunch of Zeppelin at 10pm, so I got exposed to their broader range.
A large chunk of people turn off/change the station on anything they don't like, which may be because of even slight unfamiliarity. I remember myself being this way when very young. Even today playlist radios sometimes have popular tracks in the format that I really hate, and this can also cause me to switch. This is even worse if that track is sure to be played 10+ times a day...
Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.
People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.
And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.
I was pleasantly surprised driving through the boonies recently. Scanning through the channels I stumbled upon a station that I'd say was playing only 20-30% typical radio hits, with the rest filled with artists you may have heard of if you follow the scene but that never made as traditional radio stars along with a healthy set of underground/up-and-comers that you likely haven't heard of. It felt like how many describe the glory days of radio.
I also learned that that said station is owned by the same company as a station in my hometown, which is as bland, boring, and repetitive as radio gets. Still has me wondering what that market has that my local market doesn't. Perhaps the true death of radio is hinged on urbanization coupled with limited channel space? Maybe a channel like that can survive there because the small overall audience doesn't invite someone else trying to encroach on the available frequency? Whereas, as you noticed, where frequency space is at a premium someone else with formulaic programming in hand will soon come to buy out anyone who tries anything interesting.
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.
> I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone
One killer feature for phone-sized portable FM radios is live sports!
Some sports that have TV broadcasts but no radio broadcast will pipe the broadcast audio over an FM channel within the stadium.
Of course for sports that have a radio broadcast, you can tune directly to it.
Depending on the sport, it's really nice to get player background info, or some sports have mics on players that get piped through the radio in your ear.
I have never had any interest in live sports and I was genuinely unaware of this use case.
I suppose Auracast could be used for that, which is a broadcast audio feature of Bluetooth Low Energy [1].
My Bluetooth pods have it. I'm not sure how well it's supported, I don't think I've ever entered a place that uses it (or I didn't notice), so I could never try it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auracast?oldid=1346244865
Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example. It's just a choice of the manufacturer to do not implement it completely, sometimes in hardware, sometimes in software. Several years ago there was SpiritFM application for Android that allowed to use FM radio on smartphones that sometimes never supported FM radio... oficially. So the only missing piece is sometimes only the software. As a result I think it wouldn't cost somewhat noticeably more to have that feature.
The 3.5mm jack is the other missing piece required for that FM receiver to work - and that's not coming back any time soon.
My Moto X4's FM radio worked well enough without the headphones plugged in, but you needed really good reception.
Right, you'd need a really strong signal.
Also, I believe that is exactly the reason why FM tuners are being phased out.
Streaming services will nowadays give you uninterrupted playback pretty much anywhere, even in places like large buildings or subway tunnels, where radio coverage is nonexistent. Basically it all boils down to the fact that cell network coverage is much better today.
I've never had a phone without one.
Good thing you're the majority of people, then.
>Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example
Who told you this? They are wildly different frequencies and encoding.
I don't know about "most smartphones," but the FM bits were commonly a built-in with Qualcomm and some other chipsets for a coon's age.
Even the OG Motorola Droid, of 2009, had the parts inside for an FM radio. They just weren't connected to an antenna and the default software stack didn't include any access to those parts at all.
Flagship Qualcomm-equipped Samsung phones up to the S20 or so tended to be ~similar: The FM tuner guts were usually in there, but they often weren't available to use, and even then they sometimes lacked an antenna.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. :)
---
In my time, I've enabled FM radio on a few different phones that weren't advertised to have that function, sometimes with root-only hacks from grimy corners of the internet, and sometimes by just installing some software that just happened to have the right hooks.
This has absolutely nothing to do with similarity with BLE radio and it’s 2.4Ghz antenna. And a far cry from most smartphones.
Thank you for the input.
I'm not here to argue, nor to support claims that I have not made.
Twenty years ago this would have been wrong with a kernel of truth. Today, it's just wrong. There were chips that integrated all this but they weren't that popular in the West and ultimately nobody cared.
https://www.mediatek.com/press-room/mediatek-announces-world...
MTK still has the largest marketshare of smartphone SoCs worldwide and they still use their combo RFICs.
https://pccentral.net/q1-2026-smartphone-soc-market-share-me...
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/03/mediatek-leads-glob...
And it's not a tiny kernel of truth, even iPhone(2007) had Wi-Fi/BT combo chips with FM radio. Apple was partly responsible for death of FM radio, by not implementing the software feature. That's also literally 20 years ago.
would make phones somewhat more expensive
"somewhat" as in the ballpark of a few cents, definitely less than $1, because it's already there in the reference designs and deliberately removing it would actually take extra work and cost far more.
I remember all the no-name/generic MP3/MP4 players had an FM radio, while Apple's iPods did not. They deliberately chose not to include one, and definitely not because of cost.
How much would an additional frequency cost to add to a sophisticated radio?
I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
Thought it was that executives decided that forcing you into the media store was much more lucrative.
> I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
Ha!
If you mandate FM for this reason what else will you mandate? Morse code scanning for SOS?
Cellphones got cellphone emergency broadcasts before they lost FM radio, so they still show emergency broadcasts.
I assume they'd also mandate headphone ports, since without a wired headphone to use as an antenna I don't know how you'd do cheap FM in a cell phone.
Which, if the motivation is to provide emergency notification, I also assume means mandating that users carry wired headphones?
Sliding down this slope looks fun...
What a ridiculous comment!
Cellphone emergency broadcasts turned out to be not reliable during the Hawaiian Island fires.
RDS in FM has a special mode for emergency broadcasts and some countries use them. As FM signals easily cover a 50-75 mile radius, the coverage area is huge versus cellular emergency broadcasts requiring the towers to be powered on which have also failed during natural disasters.
FM is a technology that was a solved problem. It didn't have to go.
So was Morse code
Not comparable but okay... so were smoke signals
Indeed. They didn't have to go away. We should mandate mobile phones to have smoke signal decoders.
If I remember correctly, wasn't that because you can't fit proper antenna into the phone?
Something-something antenna 1/4 of the wavelength physics. And FM wave is roughly 3 meters long.
When people carried antennas (headphone cords) around it was handy, but not a lot of people would carry antenna now
I have a car with it - even HD - and I thought I would use it more.
But every time I try it out, the stations are playing a loud advertisement.
Agree. The only problem about radio is requiring wired headphones to serve as antenna.
Do flagship Snapdragon SOCs still have radio? Thinking about next GOS compatible Motorola-branded device, the first device GOS will support with Snapdragon.
My current Android phone has a FM radio that doesn't even require a wired headphone as the FM antenna is built-in. If you connect your BT headset, the FM station is heard through the BT headset in full stereo.
Of course, it is a Chinese brand who haven't forsaken FM radios. Apparently, Europeans still prefer a FM radio on their smartphones that Chinese brands that sell in Europe still retain them.
Here in USA, people don't seem to care about radio.
SoCs - not really.
FM radio support is a part of a Bluetooth chip, an audio codec chip, or even a standalone IC.
In modern high end SoCs, even the 5G modem is largely evicted from the SoC itself. Only the digital processing happens in the SoC - while ADC/DAC and anything analog lives in its own IC.
I loved pirate radio in London in the 90s. It was so vital. There was nowhere else that you could hear tracks that new unless you were at a club or the handful of record shops where DJs hung out. You could phone in and they would give you a shout out! We would record the Sunday specials on Kool FM and listen to them the rest of the week. Good times.
Here in NZ we have a wonderful publicly-funded ad-free radio station RNZ! (Radio New Zealand.)
The main channel "RNZ National" is a mix of news bulletins [1], panels featuring interesting people [2], and episodes of the numerous high-quality podcasts they produce [3].
The really channel one is "RNZ Concert" through - it's just msuic. They have a best-in-class audio team who record concerts (e.g. choirs, orchestra, or anything else) as well as getting famous artists in to their studio to record their own music or a cover. Played for free all the time with no ads! It was super exciting as a kid in a community choir when we got the chance to be recorded by RNZ, and then find out roughly when it would be on so we sat by the radio in anticipation all day waiting for it to play. It also made getting to the finals of choir nationals [4] extra exciting knowing your performance there would be played nationwide.
[1]: Interestingly, despite us having reasonably good private competition for news here, the government-funded news source was recently votes the most trusted in the country - I reckon it's because they aren't beholden to advertisers: https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/17/rising-trust-should-keep-p... [2]: Regularly including top politicians like the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, top academics, CEOs, investors, and the like [3]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcasts [4]: Yes competitive classical choir is a thing here, and it's treated just as seriously as rugby or any other code. You might travel will your high school choir all the way across the country to perform at Finale. https://nzcf.org.nz/events/nzcf-events/big-sing
Hey,
I can receive RNZ on shortwave on the East Coast of USA! About 10,000 miles away if we count the signal bouncing multiple times between the ionosphere and the ground.
I get it in the mornings here in Vancouver, BC.
I can receive it only during night.
I remember few years ago listening to a radio interviewer with popular folk singer, the interview was over the phone so host at the end said that some day this singer should visit them in studio for proper interview, to which the singer replied: "If I visit you in studio for interview, will you play some of my songs?", to which the host with slight embarrassment admitted that they are not allowed to play outside the playlist.
It depends on the station.
The BBC often does as you say and even if the interview is down a phone line they will play a record. Some shows have the musicians playing live. Other UK stations do similar.
My town has a listener-supported community radio station with all volunteer DJs who play whatever. I love tuning in and getting random music. And, unlike the robo stations, I rarely hear anything I've heard before. It's the only music station I have programmed in on my car. (My car is 26 years old--does the terminology still work? Maybe I should say "favorited". :) )
It's not quite the same, but I do like firing up https://radio.garden/ on occasion and rotating through international channels (after getting around the geoblock in the UK). Theres a random Arctic Outpost AM broadcasting from Longyearbyen I stick on for background noise.
Hm I actually heard some great and rare metal on FM radio in Philadelphia the other day -- and I was SURPRISED because I thought radio was dead too
I just Googled and it turns out it was https://wkdu.org/ 91.7 FM, Drexel University college radio! Woohoo something is alive out there !!
And I just found the playlist of the exact show I listened to, on Thursday July 16th - https://wkdu.org/playlist/71388
Nonprofit radio stations are the last vestige of the old days. NPR, college-run stations, and public access.
I'm so thankful for the BBC.
I listen to Radio 4 through the day when I'm working on things that don't need my full concentration.
It's the alarm that wakes me at 0630 and I often listen to the news before bed.
Adverts drive me insane. It's a national treasure and I'd pay the licence fee again just for R4 + Sounds.
Also listened in the car but since they've recently shut down the LW tower I can't receive it anymore in the midlands, only occasionally get FM signal.
I could pick the LW up at night in my car from Slovenia!
It might not work in your scenario, but I too listen to radio a lot and found the signal issues annoying. My car is pretty old and doesn't have aux/bluetooth input so I can't plug in my phone and use the Sounds app, but I got a bluetooth to FM signal transmitter and now listen to my phone through my car radio, including a lot of streaming radio.
FM dongles for smartphones and tablets are a thing. You can stream your own playlist or podcasts over your tuner (and anyone else's within a small radius). The devices are cheap but effective.
I listen to podcasts all day while working and I am JEALOUS of your access to radio 4 and sounds. There is so much just insanely killer content coming out of the BBC in those avenues.
Lots of Radio 4 programmes are available as podcasts, and it is possible to stream BBC radio outside the UK without a VPN - see the links here:
http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/
bbc.co.uk still allows listening to all stations live and yt-dlp has no problem to download shows, you just got to find your way to the correct page that doesn't trigger a redict to bbc.com e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qng7/episodes/player
In my neck of the woods, Vancouver, Canada, nothing happened to radio. It was shit in the 1980s and it's the same today.
Wait! Except for one major improvement. There is a station CJNY ("The Journey") at 106.3 FM, which is run by Indigenous people:
https://www.cjnyfm.ca/about/
Hah, one of the only tolerable commercial-ish stations in AB is Edmonton's 89.3 CIWE that broadcasts Freeform/First Nations content - also rebroadcasts to 88.1-HD3 in Calgary.
I admit to not listening to radio anymore but I was surprised to hear that there are still some music stations with local DJ's in Vancouver.
This article also claims that radio is slowly gaining listeners.
https://www.vancitylookout.com/p/in-the-face-of-algorithms-a...
i suspect there is a fairly large group of people who still listen to the radio---but only in the car. Once they park the car, radio ceases to exist.
> In my neck of the woods, Vancouver, Canada, nothing happened to radio.
The last sports radio station in Vancouver literally closed this month!
The frequencies are alive with music in Brazil. Among the broad (and excellent) variety of local music are three stations that play an eclectic variety of foreign music from around the world. One station features a lot of rare or more unusual recordings of music from the 60s through the 2000s. Sure you’ve heard Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” a million times on the radio but you probably haven’t heard the version by Heartbreak Klub, an Australian rock-pop band. Or one of the live recordings of “Going to California” with John Paul Jones’ extended mandolin solo.
It’s great because they stream online so when I’m back home and don’t know what to listen to, it’s always an option.
For those interested - https://itapemafm.com.br/
For those of is living in and near Seattle (and as of recently San Fransisco) KEXP is still on the air and is still amazing as ever (if not even more so).
Yes! Eclectic, and if you text or call, a human will often respond.
Long Live KEXP!
I play the game with SiriusXM to only pay the intro price and listen to that 90% of the time I am in the car. XM has a weird collection of DJs, some are obnoxious or grating, but also after many years of listening to them they feel like people I know.
The local NPR backed station the Current is good but their audio quality is terrible, even their HD stream is muffled and wonky. They also eliminated many of the DJs I had grown to like and I never got that same connection with their replacement, which definitely impacted how I listen.
(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.
"I grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1."
I didn't. Apart from John Peel, many of the DJs were naff and the station was behind the curve (as the BBC nearly always is). The BBC was faintly ridiculous and banned groups like Runrig (informally because they considered them too Scottish) and songs like Split Enz's "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" (formally, because of the Falklands War). Both of which were inoffensive...
But apart from Peel, the BBC was way behind when it came to metal (except pop/hair metal), hip hop, indy/alternative/shoegaze, rave/trance/techno etc. I think they picked up on the Pixies and grunge but not much else.
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.
Yep and all available online as well. I listen to PBS every day.
IMHO, FM radio stations, broadcasting on government-attributed radio frequencies, are very different - both in nature and in how they feel - from the user of a big corporation's service streaming from someone else's computers.
Agree about YouTube and Twitch. Whatever personality you want, there's someone that fits it. You can pull up a recent stream or tune in and message them live if they're on. In some ways we're in the golden age of some of what the article was saying was lost, because pretty much anyone with a basic setup and a little bandwidth can start streaming and building an audience/brand. No need to get hired, no need to get a letter like in the story that says you might've been OK in a small town but you're not ready for the big leagues.
I have yet to see a streamer match what Click and Clack did on the radio..
I listen to radio a lot. NTS, FIP, Concertzender. It's a great way to discover new music and have some human presence.
Recently a DJ with excellent music taste and a deep radio-perfect voice died. I was devastated when I got the news. The two remaining radio shows in his slot were something I'll remember forever. One unbelievably raw, as it was only two days since he died, the other beautiful, as everyone came with music and stories to remember him.
You don't get this connection over streaming.
RIP Bob Rusche
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.
Still a few great ones hanging around, like WBER in Rochester: https://wber.org/
Adelaide, South Australia: https://threedradio.com/
Fiercely local, fiercely independent. Has been great for new music discovery for me for years.
Discovered WITR not too long ago, their selection is right up my alley (although it is arguably "millenial radio" rather than "college radio")
I was briefly involved with WITR during my undergrad. Loved what they were doing, but at that time the station definitely bought into the hipster attitude, music you've never heard of and will never hear again.
The only band I can remember hearing on WITR, then hearing anywhere else, is Neon Indian. They also sponsored a concert with Viva Brother, which briefly got some airplay on other stations, in spite of never (to my knowledge) having played them.
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 really appreciate this comment, so I'll try to return the favor (in small part) by sharing one pretty special to me: WYCE, https://grcmc.org/wyce. Hope you enjoy.
In a way it’s the same phenomenon as TV channels with fixed programming replaced by cable and the streaming video. Newspaper vs curated feeds. There is an exploit vs explore tradeoff in all of these. The newer versions lean heavier on exploit, so explore suffers. Explore is the ‘broadening horizons’ bit that some other comments refer to.
Automation / machines tend to make things more efficient and we shouldn’t shy away from automation, but they can also reduce the human connection. I think the same thing will happen with AI generated art - l human generated art can be a spiritual experience meaning you can connect with another human through art - but if a masterpiece like Cypress Trees in Wheat Fields is AI generated, there isn’t a connection with the human artist. Consequently we must consciously turn to other places to keep human connection strong.
College radio is still a thing. I've discovered some good music via WRUV (UVM). WERS (Emerson College) dropped the Rockers reggae show when they changed their programming back in 2013, but I should try streaming again and see what it's like these days.
CIUT from UofT is good
Dang I still miss CKLN
kutx and koop on the same frequency are great
KUTX is 98.9, KOOP is 91.7?
I've been working on a streaming platform for musicians as a passion project for the last decade partly because the analog radio shows have become a dying breed. Web-based indie radio shows are lots of fun because they're very close to the best radio shows from my own youth when most radio DJ:s still were curators and experts in the music they played. And they have the feeling of community and genuine passion for the hobby.
There's definitely still demand for quality radio shows but I guess it just makes more money if you play whatever the big studios pay you to play. But its the same thing with television as well; many indie channels on YouTube produce MUCH better content than anything you can see on the traditional TV or Netflix.
My sad guess: radio will make less and less money, until the point owners view the spectrum as more valuable than the revenue left to extract from it, and ATT or the like will buy them out (after buying out the FCC) and use it for something else.
AM stations, in particular daytime only licensees, are almost free at this point. Most cases, the land value where the antenna is located is the sales price.
There's always public radio.
* If you're in your 50s and listening to the radio you're probably rich and we want you!
* More live DJs for sure
That said, if you're going to listen on your iPhone there are plenty of good DJs there too. dandelionradio.com for me.
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.
It died mid 80s for me too. That was when the monoculture, where everyone was listening to the same thing, just disappeared. I was just a kid so I never knew what happened. All I knew was that when I was itty bitty, I could turn the dial and find mostly the same stuff everywhere. Mid 80s onwards and it was all fractured. That fracturing continued to the point where it’s like there’s a genre and a band for every taste…which is cool, but now we don’t have a broadly shared cultural experience anymore. Ditto for television. Basically, the scarcity is gone. On the one hand, cool, but on the other, society weirdly suffers.
Boston has a whole bunch of live and college ratio stations still.
Well, sort of. My radio presets back in the 2000s were 101.7 WFNX, 104.1 WBCN, 107.3 WAAF, 100.7 WZLX, and 92.9 WBOS. Of those stations, only WZLX remains.
The greats - in my opinion, WBCN and WFNX - are long off the air. They were powerhouses of culture, both local and national. WFNX was the first to play Nirvana's Nevermind; Bono of U2 once said that "...without BCN, we'd all be (expletive)'d, let's face it."
Oedipus, a well-known Boston DJ since the 70s (who got started at 88.1 WMBR, MIT's station) and program director at WBCN, said of it: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed radio... Corporations were now allowed to own multiple stations in the same market and across the country. Stations were no longer programmed locally."
Meanwhile, WAAF went online-only in 2020. WBOS got delegated to an HD2 subchannel in 2004. Likewise, The Boston Globe picked up many of the radio personalities for the online-only RadioBDC, now Indie617, but that seemed dead by the mid-2010s. I hear the former WFNX DJs Henry Santoro and Julie Kramer may still have some limited presence on 89.7 WGBH.
I was recently happy to find Adam 12 (formerly of WFNX (formerly of WBCN)) still DJing on 105.7 WROR.
88.9 WERS (Emerson College's station) is doing a great job of carrying the helm of Boston music culture. Occasionally I'll also tune into 90.3 WZBC (Boston College's station), which is a more "traditional" and less "commercial" college radio station.
Just outside Boston are likewise some public and community stations with good programming - 88.3 WRPS (Rockland's public radio station) and 101.3 WFNX (Scituate's community station - love that they picked up the WFNX callsign!) are pretty good, if you're in range.
Counterpoint: I always found WERS to be a slightly broader interpretation of adult contemporary programming than the commercial stations.
My goto was WUMB, which is out of UMass Boston, and played a consistent format (folk and Americana, I guess?) throughout the day. Blues Hangover on WHRB (Harvard) was always worthwhile when I caught it.
In 1980 I worked in local radio.
The playlist was set by corporate (or by a consultant). You could maybe change the order of the songs, but you were not allowed to add / subtract any songs.
By 1980 over 1/2 of the stations were "automated". Music was provided by a service, on Reel to Reel tape (played by Revox B77's).
Path to a radio job in 1980? A Third Class RadioTelephone License with Broadcast Endorsement.
An aside...
The automation machine at one station I worked at had 2047 programmable steps. (well, 2048, 0 was a step)
As a 16 year old, I could not fathom why it was not 2400. With 2400 steps, you could program each hour the exact same; not so with 2047.
Editing was a dream on the ASR33 teletype. Seems scissors and tape are very effective.
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.
When I think about the glory days of radio, I think of American Graffiti.
I live in Austin and there's a pretty good station (I think it's actually a group of stations across Texas) called Sun Radio. I pretty much only listen in the car, but they are usually playing something I'm interested in.
https://www.sunradio.com/playlist/
At first I thought that was a complaint about electronic music and then I realised it means the station is automated with no humans. Could've been clearer.
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).
In 2005, right after Katrina hit, a lot of people in the Gulf lost power for a long time. All cell towers were overloaded constantly. What kept working was radio.
A bog standard Sony radio would run for a long, long time on a few AA batteries. Back then, you could also pick up the audio portion of UHF and VHF analog TV too. It was the main lifeline for news and local updates.
Radio is a fantastic technology that is being wasted. Cheap to transmit, cheap to receive, and covers a wide area. It would be great to see a radio renaissance. Maybe the Zoomers reconnecting to older technologies will revive it.
It’s also great in wartime, when communications are likely to be interrupted. For an example read the book “All the light we cannot See” by Doerr
>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.
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.
I skipped ’em. Hassle is kinda strong and doesn’t bother me that much, don’t expect more for free.
> FM Radio is definitely more corporate today,
Opposite here in Blighty.
There has been an explosion in the number of local community FM stations, frequently playing music from local bands and chat with local figures. Factor in the national BBC radio stations (who's charter is to “inform, educate, and entertain”, not to retain attention) and we are onto a winner.
Yes there are still some 'corporate' commercial stations, but we also have plenty of quality to choose from.
There are a lot of corporate piss-poor local stations. Apart from the Heart and Crapital stuff, the Forth and Clyde stations are awful. Even their continuity has one of those awful Estuary accents.
Most of them are indistinguishable, don't carry local news (apart from boasting about charity fundraising they do), or local bands. Pure pap
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.
KEGL, The Eagle ROCKS! Back on the air again after a failed attempt to make it yet another sports talk station.
They also had an ad-free (or at least low as, I don't think I've heard any) version of The Edge on their HD2 stream.
Radio is still cool! But it's just not really on the FCC-licensed bands anymore. Independent Internet radio stations keep the spirit alive. Look around, there very well might be a vibrant local music-and-more community right in your neighborhood! Two stations I listen to regularly here in NYC:
8 Ball Radio - https://8ballradio.nyc
Radio Free Brooklyn - https://www.radiofreebrooklyn.org
Who else has favorites to share?
Radio Paradise (https://radioparadise.com) has been my go-to for years. Discovered a lot of great new music through here.
Strongly seconded. Great radio, independent, opinionated, kind, reasonable, 100% listener supported. My main go-to for music in the last couple of years (since I discovered it)
CHIRP radio https://chirpradio.org/ in Chicago is so, so good. Very very eclectic.
Shout out to my local KUTX (https://kutx.org/)! This is the kind of station that (I think) the author is mourning the loss of. They have human DJs, a great variety of music, and since they're a public station they have relatively few ads.
I don't really know how successful they are but since their inception 13 years ago I've probably listened to them more than all other stations combined. And I donate to them.
My concern with radio is energy consumption. Transmitters are only about 50% efficient. So a 50kw transmitter is likely slurping down 100kw of power, 24/7. That can be incredibly wasteful, depending on how many people are listening at any given time.
Compound that with heavy advertising (for some stations) , and the "duty cycle" is even lower. It reminds me of those billboard trucks that drive up and down las Vegas, just burning gasoline, creating traffic, so you can see their ads.
Not that many 50kw stations.
Efficiency is up, more in the upper 70%'s now days. (of course broadcasters will use a transmitter until it is unfixable, so there are some 50 year old units still on the air). Each user requires a 9 volt battery to listen (maybe a bit more...)
Compare that electricity with the streaming cost. The streamers computers and routers. The infrastructure cost for the internet (not all amortized to streaming, of course). The desktop / laptop / phone electricity for EACH user / subscriber.
Once you hit a certain audience size, broadcasting is more efficient.
Note: I agree with you on the billboard trucks. A waste.
Yes, audience size is key. If there was only 50-100 listers (say late at night), does it make sense to run a 1kw microwave for each listener so they each can hear Nickelback?
I know it's more complicated than that, if they shut off the transmitter at night, they would lose listeners in total. I just think it's wasteful compared to other forms of communication.
Is it disk jockey? As an IT nerd I am a disk jockey. Radio guys are disc jockeys.
Like as in spinning discs.
Can someone be a disc jockey and not know they are not disk jockeys? Not sure. Or maybe I'm mistaken
Human DJs at still around on college radio.
But the human ones are probably jockeying disks now anyway :)
Glad to see this sentiment expressed. I got extremely tired of the stream-ification of everything on the web, and how something as simple as getting music playing has turned into an involved process with too much of my own data forfeit.
My solution is a small, self hosted PWA that simply has a list of a few dozen of my favorite internet radio stations. Loads quickly, no sign in or subscription, no add, just music. In the past month I have hardly even opened Spotify!
> I don’t have XM radio
Well, that's where a lot of this type of content is (seemingly, at least) alive and well right now. Satellite appears to be here to stay, and can provide tremendous value on long drives. Particularly if you're doing a lot of them.
I'd love to see more FM stations return to human DJs, and human curated playlists. But until/unless that happens, we still need somewhere for those skills to be utilized and refined.
Shout out to WFMU. Listen, donate.
Always try to find time for the Evan Davies show
What if there was a radio station that didn't have commercials or corporate sponsorship?
What if there was a radio station that was entirely listener supported?
What if there was a radio station that let its volunteer DJs play whatever they wanted to play, and say whatever they wanted to say? Within FCC laws, of course.
WFMU is the answer. 1 terrestrial broadcast, 3 internet livestreams, 20 years of archives online and available for listening.
One radio program that's withstood the test of time is "Echos" with host John Diliberto. I ran across the program the other day and it blew my mind that it still sounds identical to when i first heard it 30 years ago. The guy is a legend and clearly devoted to his listeners and the musicians he promotes.
https://echoes.org/
I quite like the "new" WKRP (in Cincinnati of course), it doesn't seem to be a corporate cookie-cutter kind of station, and it plays the kind of thing the TV version would probably play today (and they even use the same jingles):
https://www.iheart.com/live/wkrp-10724/
My girlfriend has XM in her car so on road trips we listen to that. I'm always amazed at how terrible the djs on there are. Many of them are older musicians that I would imagine record all their segments for the week (or even month) in one day. I really don't know why they even bother paying for djs at all.
I agree with this sentiment. There was so much more to old radio than music, too (cf Relic Radio podcasts). A good DJ could add a lot to the experience of music as well (eg Dick Buckley...I am still waiting for the Chicago Public Library to make his Archives of Jazz shows available).
Yeah, I too long listened to radio after being a DJ in college. WXRT in Chicago was my go to. It's still running and I just listened to maybe 30 minutes: so many ads! I do enjoy the DJ banter and local references but with all the ads it ain't worth it.
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 was still listening to Jim Ladd and Uncle Joe on Sunday nights… maybe 15-20 years ago. They’d play a whole album, say Dark Side of the Moon and tell all the stories about it, sometimes even with recorded interviews they’d done.
Today there’s KCRW locally and it’s good though getting blander.
I have Jim Ladds book, autographed. My friend went to a book signing and got it for me. It’s signed “They say it’s your birthday — Jim Ladd”.
I also saw him when he toured with Roger Waters for “Radio KAOS”. “Good night Jim.” “Good night, Billy.”
I really enjoyed him when he was at KMPC/KEDG with JJ Jackson. That station struggled to find its way, starting early on with Pat “Paraquat” Kelly and Cynthia Fox, along with Guy Kemp at night (kind of a comedy/zoo shtick — I found his show really funny). I remember calling in once when Joe Satriani was just getting airplay, and the guy who answered was yelling “Are you hearing this? Are you HEARING THIS!?”.
Live radio.
It was nice with Ladd because he had his freedom, but a wider playlist.
MARS-FM, KROQ, KNAC, Pirate Radio, 91X (from Mexico, when you can get it, but they had some power).
But, a notable memory was 1989. Tiananmen Square.
Geno Michelini, KLOS, Five o’clock funnies fame, announced the breaking news of what was happening in China, and followed it up with Rush’s “Red Sector A” from “Grace Under Pressure”. I still get a little choked up thinking about.
Live radio.
Some names I haven’t heard in a long time. I’m just old enough to remember KMET and Dr. Demento back then. ;-)
The public Spanish radio and TV conglomerate (our BBC, that's it) recently shut down SW/AM radio stations. A shame, even more when we recently suffered a blackout and nothing could match AM's reachability, FM pales against it.
KUHF used to run classical music programming nearly exclusively up until 2011. Since then it's been relegated to their HD-2 channel and ran by some computer algorithm. If all you have is an old analog radio there is genuinely nothing to listen to around here.
Was sad to hear about the fate of WMHD. Growing up in the US around that time college radio and left-of-the-dial stations were the only places you'd get introduced to different stuff.
I love radio more than ever now thanks to KEXP and KCSM!
5G Broadcast is too little too late to the party but seems like a nice idea to preserve the medium. My phone has 3,5mm jack but no FM Tuner...
There was a great college radio in my city growing up, the commercial shit though; I don't want to hear the same songs everyday.
The problem is the people who advertisers want to target want to hear the same songs every day.
I wouldn't be surprised if people like you want me who want more variety are a majority - but we don't spend money on things advertisers want us to buy by enough to be worth advertising to us.
Well since my provincial government opened the floodgates to online gambling this month... Yeah, I definitely don't spend money on those advertisers. It's pretty crazy just how many ad spots they've gobbled up.
If people who want more variety are the majority, I suspect the problem is just that those people don't listen to radio anyway.
Like, think about how many stations are Christmas format, and how "Christmas music" is a very regimented set of about 20-40 songs from the 1950s. To paraphrase XKCD[0], radio embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Baby Boomers' childhoods every December[1]. Probably because they're the only ones who still even think about using radio anymore.
Next time you listen to the radio, pay attention not to the songs, but to the goods and services being advertised next to them. That will tell you everything you need to know about who is still listening to radio.
[0] https://xkcd.com/988/
[1] don't forget.
Heh, I haven't seen that xkcd before now, that sure reinforces my sympathy towards service workers.
Though it goes both ways: non-boomers are not listening because radio has nothing to offer.
I used to travel to the valley a lot. Fly to SFO, pick up a rental car, tune in to 107.7 the Bone. Are they still going?
looks like it! https://radio.garden/listen/ksan-fm-107-7/iWCTdfjj
Jim Grey and I knew all the same people at WMHD yet somehow never ran into each other. I was an annoying high school student. Ron Dippold (he ran usenet votes for a long time) was there, among others.
When I was digging through old VHS tapes, I digitized a couple TV spots and put them on youtube; passing them along to Jim.
Best advice I got when I got to San Jose was from an old recruiter - she must have been 30!
She said the Bay Area is big, but the Silicon Valley is small.
I think about her advice a lot.
The radio world is even smaller. I tried out at WZZQ when I was in high school, but didn't make the cut.
<waves frantically> Hi! How did we overlap at WMHD and never run into each other?
Howdy! maybe? I was off and on at WMHD as a reprobate from a local high school. I never had the GPA to get in to Rose Hulman; even as a local.
A whole bunch of local stations got bought up by a web sales optimisation company. They do a really good job tbh. They leave the radio station in tact but just advertise their ability to make websites + google seo + advertise via radio and billboard in one package. If it keeps the station going its a nothingburger.
Theres also a local christian radio station I am only aware of because the guy fixing my fence was blasting it on his stereo. They were taking donations the entire time. I am sincerely not interested but they seem to deliver what their listeners want too.
Radio always sucked to me. Full of annoying ands and annoying hosts.
Really depends on where you live. I find it's much better in bigger cities. Universities will have commercial-free stations. Also, more competition for the larger listener markets.
I cherish BBC Radio.
Heh. Just BBC Radio 3 or 4 alone is worth the licence fee.
1982 KMEL 107.1 out of San Francisco.
I was always a fan of talk radio. In the late 80s and early 90s there were so many diverse and interesting talk radio shows. And many times they were local and accessible, I was able to get on the air several times. But then Rush Limbaugh exploded and eventually angry right wing politics took over everything except sports and NPR.
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.
Meh, haven't missed radio in ages. If I have no control over the content, then the medium isn't for me.
Very disappointed with the US FCC's ~2020 decision to REQUIRE EMAIL for a 1920s technology (access to, via their 10yr-cycle licensing online nightmare).
I recently went to renew my legal callsign, and apparently now email is a required attribute; if an email from them "bounces" then you get your callsign revoked.
My PO Box is no longer enough for them. I don't use email anymore. Radio silence.
>"Onair decorum prevents honest expression of how I really feel..."
>So I guess it's a gonna be a final:
>73//silentkeyKG5???//onmyfinalrogerALLCLEAR>>>rogerroger
----
Ya'll can go to hell, too.
> I don't use email anymore.
That's a choice. Why no email? Why is it so hard to have an email account for the few things that require it?
I'll just use a 10-minute-email, and have anybody send anything to that burner while on my landline with them.
To cite Paul Graham's 15+ year old essay on the topic, email is nothing more than "a to-do list that anybody can add on to."
I respect myself to not use an ineffective communication medium (beyond as-described, above).
AM is just OK but they spam the hell out of you. Also, too many religious stations on AM.
Meanwhile the government still throws money at NPR on FM, but sadly they've quit playing classical music all day like they once did and are instead pummeling the airwaves with leftist crap. Supposedly CPB will cease funding NPR but I'll believe it when NPR dies.
I'd like a mostly-classical right-leaning FM station, please, to listen to before my pecker falls off from the leftist shite spewing from NPR.
I'll never forget Dennis Erectus on KOME 98.5 (the wet spot on your dial) in 80's Silicon Valley.
“Don’t Touch That Dial! It Has KOME On It!!”
"Video killed the radio star."
still never figured out if that was about popular culture moving from radio to TV, or just about former radio hosts who you imagined as beautiful actually being ugly when you saw them on TV, heh
Probably just capital moving towards the new thing?
This is peak old man yells at cloud.
There's so much good radio to be had since the arrival of the internet. Not even talking about online-only, but actual radio stations who also stream. Maybe there's less cool broadcast stations in any given area, but our overall exposure via internet is incredible. Just search for free-form radio. If you have a college in your area, you probably have interesting radio and DJs on the airwaves.
The article ends with giving up, ipod + KPFA news, which just seems wild. Never has there been a time where there's more music available.
There is a very different feeling streaming radio online as compared to getting it off a traditional radio. For me anyway. It's hard to explain. At night, you could pick up many weird stations from around the world here including Iceland and the Eastern Bloc, the Voice of America, sometimes if the conditions were right North American stations. I used to try and guess some of the languages. That was a challenge in itself sometimes.
Thanks to censorship and government interference, you can't listen to certain stations now, e.g. Turkey won't allow you to listen online outside Turkey, Russian stations are blocked thanks to the Ukrainian situation, and even some American stations are blocked. Search engines are near useless for most things nowadays.
Choice paradox. When there's too much, it's as bad as too little.
What's up with US radio names sounding like amazon chinese electronic devices autogenerated brands with just a string of random letters?
Weren't they allowed to have "normal" names like anywhere else in the world?
They often have a mix of their call sign and another brand. The conglomerates have a few brands like The River (something for everyone is nothing at all). Local stations sometimes emphasize the call sign or they have something else, like 88.5 in Atlanta is "Album 88", or WRAS.
Who knows why we landed on our system of 3 and 4 letter call signs, but we did. Plenty of stations use them only when they have to: in the top of the hour legal ID, which is "<call sign> <city>," such as WZZQ Terre Haute.
Branding was usually based on FCC callsigns. But not always... many people in the US grew up with some Z100 or morning crew brands too.
Other countries have similarly arbitrary brands based on either band spectrum or regulatory regimes - eg Channel 4 / Radio 4
This is a tradition over a century old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_sign