7 ms·

It's a shame what's happened to radio

• parpfish 2mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • olsondv 2mo ago
    Or at a stop light and the car next to you is listening/singing to the same song. Never happens anymore.
    • antisthenes 2mo ago
      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 :)
      • lostlogin 2mo ago
        If you really want a reaction here, announce that you use your phone speaker or a Bluetooth one out in public.
        • safety1st 2mo ago
          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.
          • jraph 2mo ago
            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.
        • inigyou 2mo ago
          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.
          • setsewerd 2mo ago
            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.
          • bluGill 2mo ago
            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)
            • maxerickson 2mo ago
              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.
            • inigyou 2mo ago
              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.
    • maccard 2mo ago
      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.
      • rhplus 2mo ago
        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.
        • maccard 2mo ago
          At least my car is still using FM radio - 98.2MHz
        • johnflan 2mo ago
          It’s interesting that the DAB rollout completely failed in Ireland and we are back to fully analog FM
  • OsrsNeedsf2P 2mo ago
    Younger generation get this connection out of live streaming
  • unethical_ban 2mo ago
    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.
  • altmanaltman 2mo ago
    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
  • charcircuit 2mo ago
    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.
    • kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
      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.
      • NuclearPM 2mo ago
        How is this an issue at all?
  • paganel 2mo ago
    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.
    • bluGill 2mo ago
      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)
    • parpfish 2mo ago
      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)
    • mr_toad 2mo ago
      The rush hours are the worst. You're lucky if you hear two songs in 30 minutes it's so crammed full of ads.
  • netsharc 2mo ago
    When I opened https://radio.garden/ 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.
  • forlorn_mammoth 2mo ago
    > 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
  • herpdyderp 2mo ago
    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.
    • moffkalast 2mo ago
      Country issue.
  • mobilene 2mo ago
    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-ether/ https://blog.jimgrey.net/2023/01/10/connecting-through-the-e...
• stackghost 2mo ago
  >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.
  • mixmastamyk 2mo ago
    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.
    • stackghost 2mo ago
      >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.
      • mixmastamyk 2mo ago
        I skipped ’em. Hassle is kinda strong and doesn’t bother me that much, don’t expect more for free.
  • pixl97 2mo ago
    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.
• kxrm 2mo ago
  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.
  • mickdeek86 2mo ago
    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.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      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.
    • criddell 2mo ago
      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/ https://www.sunradio.com/playlist/
  • wffurr 2mo ago
    Boston has a whole bunch of live and college ratio stations still.
    • 2mo ago
• nicksergeant 2mo ago
  Still a few great ones hanging around, like WBER in Rochester: https://wber.org/ https://wber.org/
  • yaky 2mo ago
    Discovered WITR not too long ago, their selection is right up my alley (although it is arguably "millenial radio" rather than "college radio")
    • don-code 2mo ago
      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.
  • jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
    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 https://kexp.org of course. https://kcrw.com https://kcrw.com and their HD2 channel. Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org 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 https://ksjd.org has some fun variety. https://coloradosound.org https://coloradosound.org is great rock, as is https://koto.org https://koto.org in CO. There's nearly nothing that makes me so happy as https://mountainchill.com 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 https://wtmd.org rock in Baltimore md, https://xpn.org https://xpn.org in Philly for more. https://wzum.org https://wzum.org jazz in pittsburgh pa. https://wdvx.com 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 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 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=radio.garden
• JuniperMesos 2mo ago
  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.
• ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
  (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.
  • marcus_holmes 2mo ago
    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.
    • sien 2mo ago
      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.
      • pgreenwood 2mo ago
        Yep and all available online as well. I listen to PBS every day.
    • nephihaha 2mo ago
      "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.
• waveforms 2mo ago
  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/ https://hawaiireggaenetwork.com/
  • JuniperMesos 2mo ago
    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.
    • mixmastamyk 2mo ago
      How much would an additional frequency cost to add to a sophisticated radio?
      • JuniperMesos 2mo ago
        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.
        • mixmastamyk 2mo ago
          Thought it was that executives decided that forcing you into the media store was much more lucrative.
        • palmotea 2mo ago
          > 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!
• Marsymars 2mo ago
  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.
  • smelendez 2mo ago
    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.
    • stereolambda 2mo ago
      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.
• WalterBright 2mo ago
  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.
• yaky 2mo ago
  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/ https://yaky.dev/radio/
• behnamoh 2mo ago
  Meh, haven't missed radio in ages. If I have no control over the content, then the medium isn't for me.
• kazinator 2mo ago
  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/ https://www.cjnyfm.ca/about/
  • sefrost 2mo ago
    > In my neck of the woods, Vancouver, Canada, nothing happened to radio. The last sports radio station in Vancouver literally closed this month!
  • Marsymars 2mo ago
    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.
  • corny 2mo ago
    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-and-ai-vancouver-s-music-radio-stations-continue-to-bet-on-human-curation https://www.vancitylookout.com/p/in-the-face-of-algorithms-a...
    • kazinator 2mo ago
      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.
• drmpeg 2mo ago
  I'll never forget Dennis Erectus on KOME 98.5 (the wet spot on your dial) in 80's Silicon Valley.
  • ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
    “Don’t Touch That Dial! It Has KOME On It!!”
• mixmastamyk 2mo ago
  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.
  • whartung 2mo ago
    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.
    • mixmastamyk 2mo ago
      Some names I haven’t heard in a long time. I’m just old enough to remember KMET and Dr. Demento back then. ;-)
• runarberg 2mo ago
  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).
  • Uhhrrr 2mo ago
    Yes! Eclectic, and if you text or call, a human will often respond.
    • tinyplanets 2mo ago
      Long Live KEXP!
• chubot 2mo ago
  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/ 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 https://wkdu.org/playlist/71388
  • unethical_ban 2mo ago
    Nonprofit radio stations are the last vestige of the old days. NPR, college-run stations, and public access.
• newsomix9xl 2mo ago
  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.
  • 1bpp 2mo ago
    But the human ones are probably jockeying disks now anyway :)
• protocolture 2mo ago
  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.
• prmoustache 2mo ago
  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?
  • oasisbob 2mo ago
    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
  • userbinator 2mo ago
    This is a tradition over a century old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_sign
  • mobilene 2mo ago
    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.
  • projektfu 2mo ago
    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.
• t0mpr1c3 2mo ago
  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.
• mlmartin 2mo ago
  It's not quite the same, but I do like firing up https://radio.garden/ 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.
• zippyman55 2mo ago
  1982 KMEL 107.1 out of San Francisco.
• bob1029 2mo ago
  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.
• jochem9 2mo ago
  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
• gabriel666smith 2mo ago
  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.
  • Ntrails 2mo ago
    > 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-funding-and-spending-changed-2010-2024 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-public-services-labour-government/local-government https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/fixing... Great rabbit hole for my Wednesday morning! :D
• deleted 2mo ago
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• Uninen 2mo ago
  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.
• dvh 2mo ago
  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.
  • pasc1878 2mo ago
    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.
• petepete 2mo ago
  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.
  • veltas 2mo ago
    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.
    • lkramer 2mo ago
      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.
      • dredmorbius 2mo ago
        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.
    • trinix912 2mo ago
      I could pick the LW up at night in my car from Slovenia!
  • Loughla 2mo ago
    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.
    • 2mo ago
• mrkramer 2mo ago
  "Video killed the radio star."
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    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
    • rightbyte 2mo ago
      Probably just capital moving towards the new thing?
• guelo 2mo ago
  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.
• RyJones 2mo ago
  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.
  • mobilene 2mo ago
    <waves frantically> Hi! How did we overlap at WMHD and never run into each other?
    • RyJones 2mo ago
      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.
• chickensong 2mo ago
  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.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Choice paradox. When there's too much, it's as bad as too little.
  • nephihaha 2mo ago
    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.
• Angostura 2mo ago
  I cherish BBC Radio.
  • GJim 2mo ago
    Heh. Just BBC Radio 3 or 4 alone is worth the licence fee.
• adammarples 2mo ago
  Shout out to WFMU. Listen, donate.
  • mold_aid 2mo ago
    Always try to find time for the Evan Davies show
• spaghettifythis 2mo ago
  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-politicians-from-the-door-at-rnz-tvnz/ 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 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 https://nzcf.org.nz/events/nzcf-events/big-sing
  • kanbankaren 2mo ago
    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.
    • _whiteCaps_ 2mo ago
      I get it in the mornings here in Vancouver, BC.
      • 2mo ago
• mold_aid 2mo ago
  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.
• UncleSlacky 2mo ago
  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/ https://www.iheart.com/live/wkrp-10724/
• slfnflctd 2mo ago
  > 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.
• TYPE_FASTER 2mo ago
  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.
  • wahnfrieden 2mo ago
    CIUT from UofT is good
    • ChoGGi 2mo ago
      Dang I still miss CKLN
  • verall 2mo ago
    kutx and koop on the same frequency are great
    • usefulcat 2mo ago
      KUTX is 98.9, KOOP is 91.7?
• doodaddy 2mo ago
  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/ https://itapemafm.com.br/
• smath 2mo ago
  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.
• mobilene 2mo ago
  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.
  • leeter 2mo ago
    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.
    • mobilene 2mo ago
      Not controversial, not even within the DJ community.
    • JohnFen 2mo ago
      Agreed. That was the beginning of the end of good radio.
    • win311fwg 2mo ago
      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.
  • bsenftner 2mo ago
    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.
• ProllyInfamous 2mo ago
  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.
  • driverdan 2mo ago
    > 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?
    • ProllyInfamous 2mo ago
      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).
• ChoGGi 2mo ago
  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.
  • bluGill 2mo ago
    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.
    • kmeisthax 2mo ago
      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/ https://xkcd.com/988/ [1] don't forget.
      • bluGill 2mo ago
        Though it goes both ways: non-boomers are not listening because radio has nothing to offer.
      • ChoGGi 2mo ago
        Heh, I haven't seen that xkcd before now, that sure reinforces my sympathy towards service workers.
    • ChoGGi 2mo ago
      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.
• hasbot 2mo ago
  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.
• QuiEgo 2mo ago
  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.
  • budman1 2mo ago
    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.
• valeg 2mo ago
  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...
• donaldihunter 2mo ago
  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?
  • zparky 2mo ago
    looks like it! https://radio.garden/listen/ksan-fm-107-7/iWCTdfjj https://radio.garden/listen/ksan-fm-107-7/iWCTdfjj
• deltarholamda 2mo ago
  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.
  • SamuelAdams 2mo ago
    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
• jccalhoun 2mo ago
  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.
• gruzzlymug 2mo ago
  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).
• NuclearPM 2mo ago
  Radio always sucked to me. Full of annoying ands and annoying hosts.
  • gman2093 2mo ago
    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.
• couchand 2mo ago
  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 https://8ballradio.nyc Radio Free Brooklyn - https://www.radiofreebrooklyn.org https://www.radiofreebrooklyn.org Who else has favorites to share?
  • Tallain 2mo ago
    Radio Paradise (https://radioparadise.com https://radioparadise.com) has been my go-to for years. Discovered a lot of great new music through here.
    • yhager 2mo ago
      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)
  • seanicus 2mo ago
    CHIRP radio https://chirpradio.org/ https://chirpradio.org/ in Chicago is so, so good. Very very eclectic.
• anthk 2mo ago
  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.
• proee 2mo ago
  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/ https://echoes.org/
• madebychives 2mo ago
  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!
• troyvit 2mo ago
  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.
• beej71 2mo ago
  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". :) )
• gosub100 2mo ago
  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.
  • budman1 2mo ago
    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.
    • gosub100 2mo ago
      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.
• usefulcat 2mo ago
  Shout out to my local KUTX (https://kutx.org/ 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.
• sloped 2mo ago
  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.
• twirlip 2mo ago
  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.
• jeffnv 2mo ago
  I love radio more than ever now thanks to KEXP and KCSM!
• giardini 2mo ago
  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.