At one point in time, music radio was the heartbeat of America.\u00c2\u00a0 But it hasn’t had that spirit in a long, long time.\u00c2\u00a0 In an era of iPods, and music blogs, and P2P trading, can music radio survive?<\/p>\n
The Ravyns sang on the soundtrack of "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" about being raised on the radio.\u00c2\u00a0 America was addicted.\u00c2\u00a0 Transistors were glued to the ears of baby boomers.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Radio was a club, a hangout.\u00c2\u00a0 If you listened to the radio you not only got music, but news and lifestyle information.\u00c2\u00a0 The deejay, who was your most trusted friend, presided over a virtual world that delivered all your needs.\u00c2\u00a0 And then, when music radio went to the FM, there was a reaction against fast-talking jocks.\u00c2\u00a0 These new best friends were just like you, slow-talking, and they played exactly what they wanted.\u00c2\u00a0 And what they played, you wanted to hear.<\/p>\n
It hasn’t been this way for so long almost nobody can remember.<\/p>\n
There became so much money in music radio that it became conservative.\u00c2\u00a0 The deejays were just voices in between researched music and commercials.\u00c2\u00a0 And the public tuned out.<\/p>\n
Yes, radio listenership has been declining for years.\u00c2\u00a0 Is it coming back?<\/p>\n
I’m not talking about talk.\u00c2\u00a0 Talk radio has the vibrancy of the music stations of old.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s alive and unpredictable.\u00c2\u00a0 But in an era where you can pull up a station’s playlist on the Net, why do you have to actually listen?<\/p>\n
The heart of music radio, the village square aspect, was squeezed out twenty five years ago.\u00c2\u00a0 But music radio survived because it was the place to hear new stuff, to get turned on, to get your fix.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, radio took a huge hit upon the advent of MTV.\u00c2\u00a0 MTV was adventurous in a way radio was not.\u00c2\u00a0 MTV was edgy, it would break records.\u00c2\u00a0 But now MTV is calcified, and radio is Wall Street.\u00c2\u00a0 Are we experiencing a death spiral?<\/p>\n
You now hear about music from your friends.\u00c2\u00a0 Or in chat rooms, blogs or other virtual worlds.\u00c2\u00a0 Every band known to man has a MySpace site where you can experience its wares.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re tuning in to radio to hear new music, you’re surfing the Web with Windows 98.\u00c2\u00a0 Each station only plays a narrow swath of tunes, and does so over and over again.\u00c2\u00a0 Your tastes are not that narrow, and you don’t want to endure commercials.\u00c2\u00a0 So you use your iPod in your car, or you listen to talk.\u00c2\u00a0 Music radio is for pussies.<\/p>\n
This is satellite radio’s problem.\u00c2\u00a0 The perception.\u00c2\u00a0 That it’s no different from terrestrial radio, except for the absence of commercials.\u00c2\u00a0 And, you have to pay for it!\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 You can get turned on to new music there.\u00c2\u00a0 But people don’t seem to care.\u00c2\u00a0 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!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s hard to sell people what they don’t know they want.<\/p>\n
Or maybe we’re just in an era where spoonfeeding is passe.\u00c2\u00a0 Why have the information dripped out over time when you can get it all instantly online?<\/p>\n
You think P2P killed the major labels?\u00c2\u00a0 What really put them in the dumper was the decline of music radio.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s where they exposed their wares, a broader spectrum than MTV ever exhibited.\u00c2\u00a0 But now that people have tuned out, there’s very little traction.\u00c2\u00a0 And the numbers are going downhill.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re depending on music radio to make your numbers, you’re on the road to extinction.<\/p>\n
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At one point in time, music radio was the heartbeat of America.\u00c2\u00a0 But it hasn’t had that spirit in a long, long time.\u00c2\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-radio"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-co","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}