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Right, there are basically two things I listen to in my car these days. Music or podcasts coming off of my phone, and FM radio news. But other than that, poor i
by bane 12y ago
Right, there are basically two things I listen to in my car these days. Music or podcasts coming off of my phone, and FM radio news. But other than that, poor industry choices killed FM years ago as a viable place to find anything worth listening to.
In my market, Clearchannel and friends pretty much screwed up the music stations and nobody listens to them by choice. They either played the same tired songs over and over, pumped so many commercials into their broadcast there was effectively nothing to listen to (and coordinated commercial breaks between various stations so there was no reason to switch) or "changed the format" of popular stations without warning or alternative, wiping out decades of legacy.
I remember when it happened with one of the most popular and historic stations in the D.C. Baltimore area, WHFS. I was driving to lunch, jamming out to some great music, they cut to a commercial break and the commercials suddenly started talking about the latest Latin American bands. I ignored it, until about 10 minutes later when I realized this was no longer a commercial, but the broadcast!
According to WP, the station's staff didn't even know about the switch until about an hour before it happened.
AOL, despite all the bad things you can say about them, was headquartered in the same market, and ran a large-ish (at the time) internet radio system. They ended up launching a streaming radio station with pretty much the same format. But HFS was gone.
The local alt/prog rock music market has never recovered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHFS_(historic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHFS_(historic)
I've tried to listen to music radio recently, and I think during my hour long commute, I encountered maybe 4 songs, the entire rest of the drive was absolutely packed with commercials and station filler. I also found that stations try to coordinate their commercial breaks with each other, when one goes on break, good luck finding another station of any genre that's not on break. And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It's just unlistenable.
Supposedly, everybody is broadcasting better things on HD radio, but I'm not even sure if new cars I'd by support HD radio, they only advertise XM.
- tomjen3 12y agoMake a playlist on Spotify. They are actually not bad at suggesting reasonably similar artists and that way you get all songs and no filler.
- lawnchair_larry 12y agoNobody has time to make playlists, that's why they use radio.
- mark-r 12y agoI think HD support is now just a given, they don't bother mentioning it. I also feel FM is a superior format to HD in most cases. The compression required by digital to fit into the spectrum is just too excessive for my taste. The only reason the stations are into it is so that they can sell the same commercial time multiple times for each of their digital sub-stations.
- mikeash 12y agoIf Wikipedia is to be believed, HD radio can transmit up to 300kbps, which is more than enough for extremely high quality sound. If quality is worse it's because stations are choosing to trade off quality for more channels, not because the technology forces it.
- TylerE 12y agoThey do, they usually jam on several subchannels so the quality is nothing special. Plus, if the signal drops a bit you get stuttering/drop outs/desyncs, not graceful degredation.
- rplst8 12y agoI also think the 300 kbps rate is limited if they continue to broadcast the analog signal as well.
- zachalexander 12y agoI suspect what's actually happening is that they are playing lowest-common-denominator music, which few people are thrilled by, but which more people are interested enough in to stay listening to. Put differently, there are lots of people that might listen to Latin American music, and very few of us who listen to prog rock. Prog is actively repellent to ~90% of people.
- kristopolous 12y agoThis is a common argument but the numbers don't back it. Radio station listenership had tanked and market penetration of pop music with respect to total sales volume is going down. The most popular song rarely constitutes over 0.5% of sales for a given week. The only growth segments I read about are for NPR and non commercial stations. The real idea is that they want the most cheap to produce, easiest to sell commercial on format. I don't believe that they care much about who listens to it.
- bane 12y agoYeah, I agree, large media companies have tried to commoditize music and chase profits by squeezing blood out of the stone they've created. But like the sibling commont by kristopolous points out, ratings have absolutely tanked, and I personally believe it's because even lowest common listeners want to hear something other than commercials or the same 3 songs all day. Even people who like Taco Bell don't eat it every meal. I think a more challenging problem is that with radio rapidly dying, the music publishers still act like they're the prime advertising medium, and that online streamers should be brought in line with the traditional radio model. The industry is a mess and I can't help keep thinking that it's because they brought it on themselves.
- bufordsharkley 12y agoThe noncommercial band of the FM dial is a godsend-- college and community radio stations exist in nearly every city, and serve a very special niche in allowing human-curated broadcasts to exist. (No commercials, no repetition) I'm perhaps a bit biased-- I work as a program director for one of the bay area noncommercial stations (KZSU, 90.1 FM), and help with the Soundtap project.[1] [1] http://soundtap.com/ http://soundtap.com/
- hellbanTHIS 12y agoSoundtap is awesome, thanks
- gpvos 12y ago> And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It's just unlistenable. In that case, which losers are paying for these ads?