Is it just me, or does todays Radio suck? When I was a teenager FM was cool, it had laid back D,jays and they played cool new music. That's were I first heard Alex Harvey, Hawkwind,Atomic Rooster,Zappa,The amboy dukes, Robin Trower,Roxy music,BOC,Captain Beyond,Audience, Bowie,Steely Dan,etc.
The AM of that day used to be Hit Radio, and played the top hits of the day.
FM today has become Hit radio, with a lot of cookie cutter stations all playing the same old hits, with a few of those old fm classic hits as well.
Does it only bug me, that they only play the one hit off the LP over and over again. When in fact the lp had even better tunes on it, but they never play them.
Recently with the advent of eBay, I have been able to collect a lot of rare and Great music that I never new existed before.
When my friends here the new tunes I have They get the same Idea that I always get, to start a new radio station that plays this unknown treasure. As well as the songs like "Candys gone bad" off of the Golden Earring lp with Radar love on it, you know the one.
You know what I'm talking about, am I alone here.
I must state that I live in a smaller town now, but we can still pick up the Jacksonville Florida stations. Does this kind of practice go on all over the country?
The new music of today no longer interests me with Rap and the Rock of today all sounds the same, with only minor exceptions like Radiohead.
WHAT do you think, is their some stations that I could pickup on the internet that would satisfy my craving?
would you like to be able to get in you car and tune the radio to a station like the one I described?
They suck, they blow, whatever. I envy those locations that have some good tunes, especially late at night.
When I was back home last summer I was introduced to a public access station there. It was killer and had been in operation for quite some time. There were plans of making it streaming on the net. This is in Lincoln, Nebraska. If anyone knows of an active link to this jewel please post it.
Twin Cities radio just as bad. 1 & 1/2 hour repeat on Plop 40 all sHIT stations. Total dumbing down by media conglomerates buying up too many stations in one market area.
CD Company Executives complaining of poor CD sales: Guess what? For sHIT tunes on the airways net NO SALES! Want to increase your sales? Encourage variety beyond the negative themed ghetto rap, whiny strung out druggie grunge crap, and teenage make whoppie nonsense.
I can't muster up any fond memories of radio stations from the past. Where I grew up the ones off campus always sucked. The whole thing was pretty much just a smaller version of the same malignant oligarchy that we're stuck with today. Unfortunately, the old, "Most people wouldn't know good music if it bit them in the ass." quote (from F.Z.) still holds true.
Bitch, bitch, bitch about the obvious...at least there is XFM and Sirius and million net-broadcast stations, which are pretty cool. And, if you cannot find good rock bands, blame yourself, b/c they're there.
Ohlala, "if you cannot find good rock bands,blame yourself, b/c they're there".
what is b/c? Where do you find them. How do you hear them, XFM and Sirius? That is partly what this thread is about sharing you cool raido stations and telling others how to get them.
I don't XFM and Sirius and I don't net radio b/c my lame internet connection. I do know they are pretty cool, though, far beyond radio programming.
Personally, b/c I am a major study-nerd, I rely on friends and their friends and so on, who are throughout the country being very hip. Often, I find them accidentally, including late night MTV and guitar mags. Other ways are to make friends with people at cool music stores (that's always a goldmine), go to club shows, find a particular music mag that suits you.
When I was young, WMMR used to play 6 aldums in their entirety with no commercials on Sunday nights. They called it the Sunday Night Six Pack. I spent every Sunday night glued to the radio listening to it. Nobody does this anymore. Todays radio does suck. And XM radio ins't much better. There is pumping in the music and this very low level high pitch whine because of the compression. And, don't try to listen to classical because it sounds horrible when the music gets complex. They sould have put the D/A converter in the head unit and used the same method as the new digital FM receivers. There would have been no need for compression then.
When I was living in the Central Valley of California (near Modesto) a few yrs. back a new country radio station came on the air called K-Ranch. For about 2-wks w/o commercials every country songs you could image this station played! There were so many great songs played that I never heard before. Not many great staions around my new hometown except for PBS. Radio isn't what it used to be! Way too commercialized/repetition. Luckily, there is a wonderful audio shop nearby which plays wonderful records(mostly)and CD's in a relaxed and friendly environment.
try: www.widr.org you should be able to listen online. They play a wide mix of music which can be very bad to very very good. As I write this they are playing something french with piano and harmonica and bass and a lazy trombone just stepped in, part of their usual eclectic mix which keeps me listening with great pleasure.
Nothing like a college readio station that is always trying to find new music, it is almost the only thing I listen to.
Corporate radio of today is absolutely terrible. Besides satelite radio(which I'm not really familiar with) one must stick with public radio and college stations. College radio is now and always has been the only real breath of fresh air on the airwaves.These stations have always been my main source for mew music and artists that would never, never be heard on big radio. Cheers, Lee
Yes, they do suck. There is very limited dynamic range on most stations these days. Most pop recordings in the first place are poorly recorded with limited dynamic range. Everything just sounds LOUD.
Rockinroni, yes, they s---. But I wonder if it's radio itself or the listener. I find, with age, one simply becomes more discriminating. So when one looks, a lot more appears to blow now than ever before. Perhaps the personal age of innocence has an expiry date. Of course once one knows where one's preferences lie, one looks less elsewhere, and when one does, then with... benign ambivalence(?).
Slightly off-topic, but sometime ago I looked for some web radio stations to see what the hype was about. For classical I found a few were sometimes ok (kuni, wpr, wgbh, kccu, kosu, ksui,cbc r2, bbc r3). Most, I notice are college efforts. In the brief aside, I used this list, perhaps a usable site for finding interesting (web) radio for rock too. As bandwidth increases, one may hope that good stns in all areas will emerge with decent quality. For now, w/o question (since I don't have a tuner anyways), it's still LPs and CDs for me.
I agree with most of you in this thread on most of the points raised. I grew up near Detroit in the 70's and early 80's. At its peak, Detroit had 4 AOR stations (FM, of course) and the pickin's were good for someone with that taste (for AOR, that is). By the time all that "new romantic" crap of the early 80's started, I had abandoned radio entirely.
It wasn't until university that I rediscovered it on campus. As many of you have pointed out, college/university radio has always been a great source of "new music". Unfortunately, at that time, the university radio station had about a 5 watt transmitter and could only be heard on campus (heaven forbid you go across the street---you'll lose the signal for sure!)
but I digress...
Radio became so non-user friendly that I never even owned a tuner until just a few months ago. I am using it to educate myself in a new-found love of jazz. There is a pretty decent (member supported) jazz station in Toronto (near home) that I have been listening to a lot lately. I don't have a large (or small, for that matter) collection of jazz, especially old stuff, so this station is a boon to my burgeoning appetite for jazz.
Maybe the reason that this station seems so good to me is that it is member-supported, like PBS. Or maybe it's that I can hear BBC world service news every now and again.
Anytime anyone keeps talking about 'the good old days' I expect another of to sound like our parents. It is true that the so-called alternative stations of the late 60's and 70's don't seem to be as much 'out there'. Of course, one must measure this against what was 'there' when these stations first appeared. It was all pop AM-crap and normal FM was dominated by Jazz, classic and elevator music. How many of us discovered rock on the AM dial? How many kids today discover their own music--as opposed to their parents' music--now, on FM?
Remember there is one purpose to radio: to sell advertising. Or, to be more specific to sell things. The powers that be have realized that alternative radio does not attract the advertising dollars that the average humm-drum crap can. I live in a major metropolitan area and I drive the passengers in my car crazy as whenever a Dj comes back on, I push the button and find more music.
EVEN A PIECE OF A SONG IS WORTH MORE THAN A COMMERCIAL
That is my justification if I bug someone too much. No, it is not a "guy thing with the remote". I just hate commercials. I do pause to hear the news, though.
So, I am obviously not the target audience. Why should a radio station play my music when I just keep changing channels? I do suspect, though, that there will be some alternative web based stations that many of us will listen to...and it would be much harder to change channels. So folks, lets get a list together of favorite stations that are streamed to the computers and have some fun. DSL can be wonderful, allthough one can get decent music on a regular telephone lines. I was in France a while ago and I was able to listen to my home-station on my friend's computer.
Speaking of days gone by radio, does anyone remember Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford on KAAY-AM, Little Rock?
He was a real ground-breaker in playing "subversive" music and had the balls to put on stuff that no one else would touch on commercial radio. And as might interest you, Ron, one of the "standards" for Cliff was Captain Beyond's "Dancing Madly Backwards".
The perception that today's radio stations are a sorry substitute for the broadcasting of yesteryear is probably correct. A number of factors have come into play: 1. fewer and fewer independent local and regional stations, as the broadcast giants consolidate their holdings; 2. use of "formulas" for broadcasting -- top 40, etc. -- that are pretty much the same across the country; 3. heavily compressed broadcast signals; 4. focus on profitability rather than quality; 5. the virtual demise of good classical and jazz programming.
If this seems like a gloomy outlook, then consider what we have to look forward to following yesterday's ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (known inside the Washington, DC, beltway as a "captive agency"). The ruling by the FCC will permit a new wave of consolidation among newspaper, TV, and radio companies, which will place even more power in the hands of a few media giants. Newspapers will now be able to own TV and radio stations in the same city, and the broadcast networks will be able to own even more stations at the local and national level.
Consider, for example, that the radio group called Clear Channel now owns more than 1200 radio stations in the U.S. -- let me say that again: 1200 stations, and growing!!! Or consider that Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns Fox News Channel and the Fox TV network, as well as 35 TV stations plus 20th Century Fox movie and TV studio. Nationwide, a single owner will be allowed to own stations that reach as much as 45% of TV households (up from 35%).
So, if your perception is that radio stations are becoming more and more homogenous in their broadcast content, you have only more of the same to look forward to....
Wdhsvbgod, where can one go out nowadays for a night of cosy etc. live jazz in TO? I used to swing by George's from time to time (many yrs ago), plus another place on the waterfront whose name I can't recall now. I wonder if old haunts have been joined or replaced by the new (maybe the Silver Dollar does jazz nowadays?;-) Fond memories... Anyways, I've always felt it would be uplifting if more metropoles celebrated summer &/or winter with a Jazz festival. Montreux & Montreal can do it, so too even little Ville de Quebec; why not (name-your-city)?
Precisely--they suck and we can expect them to get worse. There was a "comminuty owned" radio station in Charlottesville, VA that was, and still is, one of the best that I have ever heard. Then I moved to NYC and expected to be able to find here, of all places, at least one or two decent options. One decent jazz station. That's it. Otherwise, in one of the biggest and presumptively most diverse markets on earth, a horribly banal sucking void of homoginized tripe. Don't waste your time, look for music elsewhere. (Yes, I am bitter).
As a follow-up to my previous post, let me share some excerpts from yesterday's lead editorial in The Seattle Times (one of the few independent newspapers left in the country, although one could argue that it's not a very good paper):
"The FCC has made it easier for big owners to buy up TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers like so many yachts...The commission asked large media chains what they wanted, and listened to them. It asked the American public what it wanted, received 750,000 responses, and ignored them. About 99.9% of the responses from the public were opposed to what the FCC did. It's time for America to ignore the FCC.
It's time, specifically, for Congress to declare that the FCC was wrong and the American people right, and to enact into law the restrictions the FCC has just ignominously diluted.
At stake is American democracy. That is because a democratic republic requires citizens who can find many points of view. And that is what is being lost here...
To this concern, FCC Chairman Michael Powell has been as uncaring as a stone god. He and his fellow believers unleashed a new round of mergers and acquisitions that will leach the industry of its remaining local flavor. What we shall get is raunch, blather, and blandness. The alternative is to fight back --- in the courts, in Congress, and, most of all, in a hurry."
If you agree with this editorial, as I do, then it's time to E-mail your elected representatives in the House and Senate and call for a Congressional vote on the new FCC ruling.
I sgree and stopped listening to radio stations 20yrs. ago.It is all commercial now. If you have underground stations just starting out they usually fair better because they have not been sanitized yet.
KROQ in LA was the last radio station I ever liked then I moved back to the East Coast and I have not found any stations between NYC and Maine that can do it for me.
Being older i sometimes listen to talk radio.Howie Carr is pretty good,but I really do not agree with all he has to say either. I like Howard Stern also.
Face it there are no great bands like there was when we were younger if you are 40 plus.
XM radio is the best thing to happen to radio in my life time. The programming is absolutely first rate, and I would almost be willing to bet a years subscription to anyone that had it that they couldnt find a station that they absolutely loved, and considered the best radio station they have ever heard, if not two or three.
I used to hear about new bands from mailing lists and friends. Now I hear about new bands from mailing lists, friends, and XM radio, and in particular for me XMU on XM radio.
I can't live without it now, I have an XM radio in my car, my wife's car, and in our boat.
Mezmo, I don't know what type of music you like, but when I lived in NYC and on LI (48 years), I listened to college radio since the mid-seventies and there were many to choose from. My favorites are WNYU 89.1 and WUSB 90.1. I believe they couldn't be received thru your (tv)cable however. I moved to Melbourne, Fl 2 years ago and this place is barren wasteland. The local college station WFIT changed their format to smooth jazz a few years ago from what I was listening to up north, (winter vacation the last 11 years down here so I've heard the downhill direction of this station). Meet one of the DJ's who now owns a underground cd store but it still isn't like NYC. Amen for audio streaming.
Most stations do suck today. Too many ads and yes, the same songs over and over and over, and yes, there are better songs on those albums. Today's stations are geared toward pigeon-holing listeners into neat demographics for selling commercials. However, in the Bay area we have KFOG which is pretty good, at least they do have some variety. I like our local college station too. I used to like our local classical station, but lately it's ad after ad after ad, and they seem to play the same stuff over and over, comparable to the replay of the "top 40" of classical. Ugh!
Radio definitely sucks. One decent alternative is the Americana music channel on DirecTV. Sound is okay, but the great part is that they play music that cannot be found on the radio. It has introduced me to a number of singers/bands that I would not have heard otherwise.
Ah yes, radio is like anything else, money talks. We live in a world of mergers and comglomerates where huge profitability is paramount and all things that don't fit nicely into the corporate concieved mainstream are increasingly harder to come by. That is why recording artists who are deemed not a good comercial prospect can't even get a recording contract or are told exactly what to write to be signed. For example many years ago a group called "The Crackers" signed a contract and recorded their first album. The company decided it didn't like the name "The Crackers". The album was released and the group wasn't informed by the company that the company had changed the groups name until the day before the release.The album's title is "Music From Big Pink",you know the rest of the story. Cheers, Lee
I tend to agree with the original post of Rockinroni. Which is why I got my car wired for Sirius satellite radio - - had it for about three months and *love it*! Best thing since sliced bread! Sixty (60) music channels - commercial free - and, in addition, you get many decent channels (with and without) commercials. Well worth the $12.99 month subscription price - and then some.
I don't actually live in Toronto, but I am only about an hour-and-a-half away and visit occasionally. I have been to George's too, but that was a lifetime ago. I have two small kids and don't get out to hear live music of any type much anymore.
Oh well, they'll be grown and gone before I know it and the music will still be there. For now I just have to cozy up with my system and a glass of wine (or two, or three...).
Yes sir. I remember fondly the local night DJ playing album rock, of his choosing (!), each evening. Maybe it was because we had the same taste in music, but the variety was there, and I looked forward to hearing something new most every night. It is an argument that, in the 70's, there was more quality rock n roll than today. I think it was because many of the musicians had a learned background in music that they employed in their creations.
To think that they would play an entire new album each week, sometimes with a countdown for easier timing of your tapedeck, was amazing.
I'm up in Brunswick, Ga. The Jax "classic rock" stations have a playlist of maybe 200 cuts and you hear the same thing over, and over, and over, and over...
Pretty pitiful. See you at the Jacoby Symphony Hall, if you want a really fine music experience!
Yes, we all know that most radio blows, and has for quite some time now. The really scary implication of this lies in the musical atmosphere that the 'artists' of tomorrow grow up in today - I think we've already seen this factor come home to roost with the MTV generation, and it's only getting worse. The irony about this, at least as far as pop music goes, is that it was the product of the mass-media culture spawned during the second half of the last century, but now that media culture's continued amalgamation seems to have strangled pop's artistic development. And the funny thing is, the industry's starting to pay the price now for having finally gained the near-complete control they were always after, in declining sales. For my money, this all began back when CD's and videos combined to kill off the medium of the single...Congrat's fellas, you've murdered your golden goose, and will spend the rest of your lives trying to suck the marrow out of a corpse.
Wdhsvbgod....Your right. Jazz 91 is member supported and plays good music. If you are near Roch. N.Y. there is also WJZR 105.9. The nice part about Jazz 91, you can request them to get some music (try out) to play on the air. I finally got them to get some Joe Beck tunes. Good stuff. But overall, radio does s--k, I really feel sorry for our youth who's music has no meaning or just. Thank God for auto cdplayers. If your nearby, check them out. Later.
Thanks for the tip about WJZR. If I connect my tuner to my TV ariel (which I no longer use for TV!), I might be able to pull it in from where I live. Then again, I'd be paranoid about lightning strikes!
Zaikesman very good post yes this is another problem we have had for a while now as someone stated earlier the people I don't know what to call most of them, They can't sing, write music, play interments. All they know how to do is sample others music, not all of them but you know for the most part this is true. The popular music of the day the stuff most of the kids listen to today is not music. Yes I’m an old fart but when is the last time you saw a new good guitarist. Used to be almost every band had a guy who could do more than just play a few cords over and over.
They must be somewhere but where can you find them?
Get your butt out and go to a club! Ask around about who is good and they are there to be discovered. My parents don't like the music I listen to, and I doubt I will like the music my kid listen to.
That doesn't mean there is a lack of good music out there.
Unclejeff, I disagree with your analogy about the state of todays radio vs. 50 years ago - it was much more local and diverse then. You can pick a trivial tune off the hit parade, sure, but you're ignoring the rich stew of musics from which rock & roll developed. Also, you're confusing the continued evolution of a pre-established art form with the birthing of something really new - do you actually think that in our current mass-media climate, a new musical art form on the scale of rock & roll could spontaneously arise? I don't believe that's happening any time soon, and that the continued viability of rock as a post-golden-age but still-able-to-regenerate art form is being stifled like never before. Keep this up for long enough, and even the quality of the underground withers over time, as new generations coming up lack the exposure to a stimulating, organic artistic environment (remember, it's a pop art form, and that implies some degree of mass accessability and participation in its growth) that forms within them the raw material necessary for new important artistic movements. Rock is a dissapated and stratified art form whose remaining energy is either yoked to a money machine or toiling in obscurity, and whereas radio once nurtured it, it now does its best to squash the life out of it.
Right on Zaikesman! Todays Radio Sucks. Mtv,VH1,BET ,what ever I have, to listen to music, it's unlistenable,most of it is just a bunch of degenerates gyrating Their pelvises in my face. I don't know about YOU, but I find it vile and insulting to say the least. This is the modern Pop I guess. They can all drown in their degradation as far as I am concerned. Do you think there any hope we can climb out of this muck, and get back on the road to some Pop music where people don't act disgusting, and they again play instruments?
Nrchy, my Parents like rock & roll. My mom is a big Elvis fan. Jposs, I don't go to clubs and anyway Kids can't go to clubs. where are they supposed to go to become indoctrinated. This is what Zaikesman is talking about.
Well if there is no acceptible solution, I guess your done. Just forget about it. What good does complaining do? You all are complaining about top 40 garbage, and, looking at 1965 Billboard, top 40 has always been a waste. Edgy, innovative artists don't make it to radio. Radio is done. Its been done for years now. Find new solutions, its really not that hard. I've never listened to radio and don't have problems finding new bands.
Kids can go to clubs. Hell, I was going at 14, and there's all-ages shows. My guess is that you all have been in to popular music, but don't care for where has gone. And now, without the spoon-feeding delivery, you just can't find where the good, cool stuff is at. Well, I wouldn't worry too much about tomorrow's artists. Those people are with it enough to cut through the pop and join a more interesting scene.
Ohlala,I hope you are right about the future, you are right about top 40, never really my cup of tea, although some good bands did surface there a as well.
To start from the top all radio wasn't always like this. Stereophile's r2d4 really doesn't do it for me either. That's why I find a lot of new tunes on ebay, Even though the LP's are most times over 30 years old.
"To start from the top all radio wasn't always like this."
Oh, sure. It would be great to cruise around listening to cool, local djs and good music. Cooler than the less personable XM and CDs. No one I know respects radio. What else can you do, but persue the alternatives? I saw some PC/Internet radio software for $20 on Amazon...I dunno...WGON? That would rule.
Ohlala, maybe Top 40 radio in the 60's was wasted on you, but it wasn't a waste. You take just about any Billboard Top 40 from the era you denegrate, and I guarantee you that around fully half those songs will be well-known and -loved classics to this very day, and will continue to be so on into the future. The same could never be said about today's charts. 1965 lies at the heart of the greatest vintages for influential singles in rock history. I'm not saying that everything deserving made the Top 40 in those times, just that an awful lot of what did was as good as it has ever gotten.
Ron, your reaction to the "degenerates gyrating their pelvises" which you find so "vile and insulting" echoes nothing so much as the criticism heaped on Elvis Presley in the 50's. Rock has always been about S-E-X at bottom...It's not that which is intolerable to us, it's the glaring lack of anything else in the way of creativity and expression to go along with it. Image isn't just everything now, it's the only thing.
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