7 ms·

The "post-radio" world is a weird one. An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience

by bane 2y ago

The "post-radio" world is a weird one. An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide. Sure songs would get overplayed, but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes. As much as I love the fact that teens these days are growing up with the same songs I grew up with as a teen, I also view it as a problem. The shared cultural experience that radio generated was powerful. We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste. An algorithm might find similar songs based on musical features, but the same sounding song over and over is boring. AI just makes more boring songs because it's largely looking to replicate popular song features as well. This can be passable for purely background music meant to fill space with non-distracting sound, but is terrible for active listening. Radio was good at mixing in variety within the confines of the genre and audience expectations. Heck, many channels use to program to support the mood during the commute and work hours, and outside of those main audience times would allow the DJs to get a little wild sometimes. Growing up the only place you could catch early EDM was on weekend late-night broadcasts on the local alt-rock station. It's not like radio of a sort does still exist - just download the GNOME Shortwave client and you can drown in channels there. It's just not powered by the marketing that supports Spotify. edit - I think it's interesting that the comments I'm seeing below this so far are talking about recent radio. I should have been more clear. In the U.S. markets at least Radio "died" during a great consolidation wave in the earl 2000s when Clearchannel and a few other media companies slurped up all the local channels, switched their formats and started playing consolidated playlists. It really did used to be the case that your local station DJs were local brands, each with their own curation of songs. Some stations would even have local music festivals and were big promoters of local talent. I spent many evenings calling up the local station to request songs to be slipped into the playlist, sometimes to promote somebody I knew and get them some airtime.

Gud 2y ago
I couldn't disagree more. Most radio stations only played the most blandest junk music, even from great artists. Seems they would rotate the top 3 songs even from the absolute most popular musicians. I must have heard Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden >500 times on the rock stations in Stockholm. The Prowler? 0. Maybe some 3am DJ could play some cool songs on occasion, like you said. There was always very little variety.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  yeah it's a hilarious complaint seeing as most radio stations have been a playlist on shuffle with algorithmically determined tracks and no real DJ for over twenty years. It's not different at all from most terrestrial radio. (shout-out to KEXP and KUTX for bucking the trend)
  - svnt 2y ago
    GP is talking about more than 20 years ago, I think. You could time-travel into the future by moving your radii from somewhere else to a musical cultural center like New York or Seattle. People would pay for subscription services to listen to radio stations from those areas.
  - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
    Some of us on HN are old enough to have grown up on radio more than 20 years ago. It's not ancient history, it's within our lifetime. We experienced the consolidation and genericization you are complaining about personally as we saw our favorite local stations get ruined.
- Retric 2y ago
  Always extends before you were born and things used to be different. Even fairly recently the exceptions were awesome. Over 25 years ago a friend setup a fairly expensive satellite dish system specifically to be able to listen to WFMU. It’s a NYC station he loved that was being rebroadcast for people who left the area. The station wasn’t something I was particularly into but nobody is doing that to listen to Clearchannel crap.
- devilbunny 2y ago
  Since you are, I assume, Swedish, this has essentially no relevance to your life, but if you get bored, and you have some way to access it, Mississippi Public Broadcasting made a movie ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31805076/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31805076/ ) about an FM station that broadcast from 1968-81 in the modest-sized market of Jackson, Mississippi (uh, about 250-300k people at the time). Because of the way a lot of stuff around broadcasting works, a small-ish life insurance company ended up with a 100 kW FM station (along with their existing TV and AM stations), a lawsuit challenging their AM, FM, and TV licenses over their (implicitly and explicitly racist) behavior, and as a result, a bunch of very diverse DJ's, mostly in their 20s, with almost no oversight. When the station was sold, the new owners immediately switched to country, which AFAIK it still is. The fact that local bands at the time wrote songs about it should give you a hint. Yes, the movie is a big late-Boomer/early-GenX reminiscence-fest, but there's a lot of interesting detail there. The DJ's partnered up with producers, bringing big shows to a relatively small city. Some started a record store. One ended up in charge of organizing group tours to concerts in near-ish cities (still 3 hours away in any direction) because, as he put it in the movie, he had a better weed connection than anyone else at the station and so could actually bring enough for everyone.
goosejuice 2y ago
Do you have any proof that radio DJs are less prevalent now than in the past? I'm having trouble finding evidence of that.
- miah_ 2y ago
  Clearchannel (which became IheartRadio) owns most radio stations (>850) in the US. They fired hundreds of DJ's in ~2011. https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/clear-channel-cuts-d-j-s-across-the-country/ https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2... When I was a kid in the 1980's I used to call the DJ and request songs A LOT. When I was a teen I used to call in to win contests. Now when I listen to a 'I<3Radio' station in the garage, its clear all the DJ segments are pre-recorded and everything is automated. Its all soundbites. Its all garbage. Its all advertisements. Its the same ~30 songs on rotation.
  - goosejuice 2y ago
    Sure but there's so many internet and college radio stations out there. Even with mainstream consolidation I would find it surprising that there are less overall now than ever before. I mean just look at boiler room and club culture in general. The amount of tastemaking DJs out there is pretty vast.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Internet DJ’s can’t feed off each other to produce regional music. It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity. College radio stations aren’t dramatically increasing to make up for the vast consolidation that removed something like 80-90% of radio DJ’s. 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s flowed into each other but the stuff was all very distinct in a way that 2000’s vs 2010’s isn’t.
      - goosejuice 2y ago
        So the problem is globalization? What do you mean by regional music? Genres span borders now. Look at the Midwest emo / mathrock scene and how it made its way to Japan and Taiwan. We can romanticise the old days of radio but local scenes aren't dead and these little genres are still going and new ones are popping up.
vohk 2y ago
What's really unfortunate is how archaic licensing models makes this nearly impossible to even attempt to address. Historically radio worked because their was actually money in the advertising, but also because radio was inherently regional. You could license content at a rate that made sense for your station's reach. Now it's trivial to broadcast over the web to a huge audience but the floor has fallen out on monetization. Podcasts and streaming both work because they don't rely on licensed content, but music can't make the jump.
RiverCrochet 2y ago
> An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide. Ad-supported radio eventually guarantees that only genres with desired-by-advertiser demographics exist on the radio. So it's hard to say if any curation radio was ever doing was out of love for music, or the genre, or simply to keep a certain timeslot valuable. I will say up until about 1997 I feel things were meeting in the middle fairly well. Radio was cool up until then. In the early 90's at least where I was from there were 8 or 9 radio stations of various genres, so lots to hear. > We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste This is what freedom looks like. But not everyone wants it. AI will be the thing to keep them happy and contained at some point and that is the prize for not caring. These same types of people would not have cared about the difference between Queen and Nickelback and probably have barely really listed to any song on the radio other than a few lyrics that resonate with them.
piltdownman 2y ago
>but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes. If ever there was a more censorious medium, I have yet to see it. Not only content dictating _what_ could be played, it dictated _how_ it could be played. This wasn't just about contemporary HipHop and vulgarity - even instrumental songs like Nick Wrays' 1958 song "Rumble" were banned from radio play. The list of songs banned by the BBC is a fantastic read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_banned_by_the_BBC#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_banned_by_the_BB...
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Songs banned by the BBC were banned by the management heirarchy. Songs played by the BBC were, for the most part, chosen by the DJs (particularly true after 19:00.
touristtam 2y ago
Internet radio still exists like actual radio streaming online and online only radio (such as radio paradise). With the latter you often can find community around then, voting on what comes next and the financement model are very varied. I know I rather spent the equivalent of a Spotify subscription as donation to independent radio instead of suffering the crass absurdity of an algorithm ala Facebook.

by bane 2y ago

Gud 2y ago

I couldn't disagree more. Most radio stations only played the most blandest junk music, even from great artists. Seems they would rotate the top 3 songs even from the absolute most popular musicians. I must have heard Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden >500 times on the rock stations in Stockholm. The Prowler? 0. Maybe some 3am DJ could play some cool songs on occasion, like you said. There was always very little variety.

dingnuts 2y ago
yeah it's a hilarious complaint seeing as most radio stations have been a playlist on shuffle with algorithmically determined tracks and no real DJ for over twenty years. It's not different at all from most terrestrial radio. (shout-out to KEXP and KUTX for bucking the trend)
- svnt 2y ago
  GP is talking about more than 20 years ago, I think. You could time-travel into the future by moving your radii from somewhere else to a musical cultural center like New York or Seattle. People would pay for subscription services to listen to radio stations from those areas.
- mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
  Some of us on HN are old enough to have grown up on radio more than 20 years ago. It's not ancient history, it's within our lifetime. We experienced the consolidation and genericization you are complaining about personally as we saw our favorite local stations get ruined.
Retric 2y ago
Always extends before you were born and things used to be different. Even fairly recently the exceptions were awesome. Over 25 years ago a friend setup a fairly expensive satellite dish system specifically to be able to listen to WFMU. It’s a NYC station he loved that was being rebroadcast for people who left the area. The station wasn’t something I was particularly into but nobody is doing that to listen to Clearchannel crap.
devilbunny 2y ago
Since you are, I assume, Swedish, this has essentially no relevance to your life, but if you get bored, and you have some way to access it, Mississippi Public Broadcasting made a movie ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31805076/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31805076/ ) about an FM station that broadcast from 1968-81 in the modest-sized market of Jackson, Mississippi (uh, about 250-300k people at the time). Because of the way a lot of stuff around broadcasting works, a small-ish life insurance company ended up with a 100 kW FM station (along with their existing TV and AM stations), a lawsuit challenging their AM, FM, and TV licenses over their (implicitly and explicitly racist) behavior, and as a result, a bunch of very diverse DJ's, mostly in their 20s, with almost no oversight. When the station was sold, the new owners immediately switched to country, which AFAIK it still is. The fact that local bands at the time wrote songs about it should give you a hint. Yes, the movie is a big late-Boomer/early-GenX reminiscence-fest, but there's a lot of interesting detail there. The DJ's partnered up with producers, bringing big shows to a relatively small city. Some started a record store. One ended up in charge of organizing group tours to concerts in near-ish cities (still 3 hours away in any direction) because, as he put it in the movie, he had a better weed connection than anyone else at the station and so could actually bring enough for everyone.

goosejuice 2y ago

Do you have any proof that radio DJs are less prevalent now than in the past? I'm having trouble finding evidence of that.

miah_ 2y ago
Clearchannel (which became IheartRadio) owns most radio stations (>850) in the US. They fired hundreds of DJ's in ~2011. https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/clear-channel-cuts-d-j-s-across-the-country/ https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2... When I was a kid in the 1980's I used to call the DJ and request songs A LOT. When I was a teen I used to call in to win contests. Now when I listen to a 'I<3Radio' station in the garage, its clear all the DJ segments are pre-recorded and everything is automated. Its all soundbites. Its all garbage. Its all advertisements. Its the same ~30 songs on rotation.
- goosejuice 2y ago
  Sure but there's so many internet and college radio stations out there. Even with mainstream consolidation I would find it surprising that there are less overall now than ever before. I mean just look at boiler room and club culture in general. The amount of tastemaking DJs out there is pretty vast.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Internet DJ’s can’t feed off each other to produce regional music. It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity. College radio stations aren’t dramatically increasing to make up for the vast consolidation that removed something like 80-90% of radio DJ’s. 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s flowed into each other but the stuff was all very distinct in a way that 2000’s vs 2010’s isn’t.
    - goosejuice 2y ago
      So the problem is globalization? What do you mean by regional music? Genres span borders now. Look at the Midwest emo / mathrock scene and how it made its way to Japan and Taiwan. We can romanticise the old days of radio but local scenes aren't dead and these little genres are still going and new ones are popping up.

vohk 2y ago

What's really unfortunate is how archaic licensing models makes this nearly impossible to even attempt to address. Historically radio worked because their was actually money in the advertising, but also because radio was inherently regional. You could license content at a rate that made sense for your station's reach. Now it's trivial to broadcast over the web to a huge audience but the floor has fallen out on monetization. Podcasts and streaming both work because they don't rely on licensed content, but music can't make the jump.

RiverCrochet 2y ago

> An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide. Ad-supported radio eventually guarantees that only genres with desired-by-advertiser demographics exist on the radio. So it's hard to say if any curation radio was ever doing was out of love for music, or the genre, or simply to keep a certain timeslot valuable. I will say up until about 1997 I feel things were meeting in the middle fairly well. Radio was cool up until then. In the early 90's at least where I was from there were 8 or 9 radio stations of various genres, so lots to hear. > We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste This is what freedom looks like. But not everyone wants it. AI will be the thing to keep them happy and contained at some point and that is the prize for not caring. These same types of people would not have cared about the difference between Queen and Nickelback and probably have barely really listed to any song on the radio other than a few lyrics that resonate with them.

piltdownman 2y ago

>but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes. If ever there was a more censorious medium, I have yet to see it. Not only content dictating _what_ could be played, it dictated _how_ it could be played. This wasn't just about contemporary HipHop and vulgarity - even instrumental songs like Nick Wrays' 1958 song "Rumble" were banned from radio play. The list of songs banned by the BBC is a fantastic read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_banned_by_the_BBC#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_banned_by_the_BB...

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Songs banned by the BBC were banned by the management heirarchy. Songs played by the BBC were, for the most part, chosen by the DJs (particularly true after 19:00.

touristtam 2y ago

Internet radio still exists like actual radio streaming online and online only radio (such as radio paradise). With the latter you often can find community around then, voting on what comes next and the financement model are very varied. I know I rather spent the equivalent of a Spotify subscription as donation to independent radio instead of suffering the crass absurdity of an algorithm ala Facebook.