At one point in time, music radio was the heartbeat of America.  But it hasn’t had that spirit in a long, long time.  In an era of iPods, and music blogs, and P2P trading, can music radio survive?

The Ravyns sang on the soundtrack of "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" about being raised on the radio.  America was addicted.  Transistors were glued to the ears of baby boomers.  But that was when there were three bland TV networks and the only way you could feel connected to your brethren was via the radio.  Radio was a club, a hangout.  If you listened to the radio you not only got music, but news and lifestyle information.  The deejay, who was your most trusted friend, presided over a virtual world that delivered all your needs.  And then, when music radio went to the FM, there was a reaction against fast-talking jocks.  These new best friends were just like you, slow-talking, and they played exactly what they wanted.  And what they played, you wanted to hear.

It hasn’t been this way for so long almost nobody can remember.

There became so much money in music radio that it became conservative.  The deejays were just voices in between researched music and commercials.  And the public tuned out.

Yes, radio listenership has been declining for years.  Is it coming back?

I’m not talking about talk.  Talk radio has the vibrancy of the music stations of old.  It’s alive and unpredictable.  But in an era where you can pull up a station’s playlist on the Net, why do you have to actually listen?

The heart of music radio, the village square aspect, was squeezed out twenty five years ago.  But music radio survived because it was the place to hear new stuff, to get turned on, to get your fix.  Then again, radio took a huge hit upon the advent of MTV.  MTV was adventurous in a way radio was not.  MTV was edgy, it would break records.  But now MTV is calcified, and radio is Wall Street.  Are we experiencing a death spiral?

You now hear about music from your friends.  Or in chat rooms, blogs or other virtual worlds.  Every band known to man has a MySpace site where you can experience its wares.  If you’re tuning in to radio to hear new music, you’re surfing the Web with Windows 98.  Each station only plays a narrow swath of tunes, and does so over and over again.  Your tastes are not that narrow, and you don’t want to endure commercials.  So you use your iPod in your car, or you listen to talk.  Music radio is for pussies.

This is satellite radio’s problem.  The perception.  That it’s no different from terrestrial radio, except for the absence of commercials.  And, you have to pay for it!  Satellite radio, when done right, and it often is on XM, provides a haven of music discovery overseen by deejays as passionate and worldly as those in the heyday of the late sixties and early seventies.  You can get turned on to new music there.  But people don’t seem to care.  The radio listening experience has been degraded to such a point that the youngest generations have never experienced good music radio and aren’t looking for it!  It’s hard to sell people what they don’t know they want.

Or maybe we’re just in an era where spoonfeeding is passe.  Why have the information dripped out over time when you can get it all instantly online?

You think P2P killed the major labels?  What really put them in the dumper was the decline of music radio.  That’s where they exposed their wares, a broader spectrum than MTV ever exhibited.  But now that people have tuned out, there’s very little traction.  And the numbers are going downhill.  If you’re depending on music radio to make your numbers, you’re on the road to extinction.