Internets Killed the Radio Star or A Long Distance Eulogy

I found a link to this crazy google box of all places the AMX-FX blog. It is basically an automated radio station in a box. What ever you what to say about Google they know what they are doing most of the time. Look at this interface:

It looks like it should be called Phisher Price’s My First Adult Contemporary Radio station. The other GUI’s look the same big buttons and bright colors. Even radio executive can operate it. This explains why songs get play about hot summer days when it is hailing out and vice versa. Seeing this, being on hold forced to listen to a piped in radio station for what seemed like forever and recently reading about how songs are picked for air play(see Loudness Wars post) I have come to a conclusion. Radio sucks and I don’t care it sucks. I do not feel any concern for it or sentimentality for something lost. It is not really made for people that love music. It is made who people that don’t really love music but need to fill the silence on their commute to work or for dentists to play in their waiting rooms. For people serious about music that really love it is irrelevant. It is no longer the gateway to all music. It is not required to find new music. It might actually be the worst way to find new or music just new to you. It maybe worse now, way worse, but I am not sure it has been all that different except for a few golden periods. The first days of rock ‘n’ roll DJ’s mattered. They took introduced people to new a whole new world of music and independently choose music they liked and promoted it. Then payola came and the man got his nasty hooks in and hasn’t let go yet. Then FM was born and for a for a while if was free form craziness until everyone started to listen. Both sadly were before my time. And being born and bred in the States it not like we had John Peel to listen to(well except for his brief stint in the states at the beginning.) We had talking vacuous hair do Casey Kasem. Yes a talking hair do…on the radio. OK, there are exceptions. I gotten listen to a little am station that was awesome(I remember it playing Public Enemy, Fugazi, John Cash in a row) until it was replaced by the 5th sports talk station on the dial. I know there are great college stations with just enough power to get off campus, etc. but most of it is horrible and has been horrible. The fact the it is growing worse is of no consequence to me. Fill the dail with more disposable pop. With more right wing radio. With more Spanish language stations. Let the unmanned servers silently spew the music chosen for soccer moms by marketing consultants. I will listen elsewhere thank you. Music is more portable than every. New cars are coming Ipod ready or at least play mp3 discs. There is satellite radio. There are numerous music sites that will keep you in the loop and help you discover music based on your tastes. There is more music to choose from and it is easier to find, buy, learn about, remix, etc. You could argue that there is some sense of community lost as radio dies. A town does not all listen to the same personality spinning the same records. But what sense of community is there when ever town gets the same music and same type of personality. With everything broken up into tidy genres. The same tidy genres everywhere. It is like McDonalds. It is the same shit everywhere. Soon, the Internet will be fast and everywhere wireless. With everything and everyone plugged into the web all the time. Orwellian nightmares aside that means all will have the ability to stream music to us whether we are home in the car, train, bus. Radio maybe become a communications back water and unappealing and unprofitable to big corporations. Then maybe the wild days of FM will return again and music will be played by humans just because they thought it was a good song and felt like playing it. To quote a talking head filling air space where good music once was, “Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.”