In a Rolling Stone from sometime in the past year, I believe, I read an article explaining why radio is really going down the tubes. Apparently a lot of the blame can go to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which resulted in conglomerates being able to buy up multiple radio stations in a given market. This is how you end up with Clear Channel Comm. owning a ton of stations and Intercom owning a bunch of others and such. These corporations, instead of appealing to niche audiences, want all their stations to reach the widest possible audience, which makes sense, right? The simplest way to do that is to format all the playlists to play “safe” bland music that is calculated to be instant hit material. This is whay a lot of stations end up with these playlists that overlap quite a bit. I’m noticing that more and more by the way.
Apparently, this and some other tactics in the industry are making it very hard for indipendent stations to survive. And if they do fall, guess who’s going to buy it up and reformat it into something with mass appeal?
Seriously, there’s a lot of good programming on P3. P3 Pop (which really isn’t pop… it’s closer to indie), P3 Rock, P3 Live, P3 Demo, Önska, Clownen Luktar Bensin… all good shows IMO.
Radio stations do NOT primaraly program for the listener.
They program for the advertisers.
Everything is bland so as not to offend the people who buy the ad time. The listener is a secondary concern. The primary concern is, “Will the advertisers like it”.
Seriously, there’s a lot of good programming on P3. P3 Pop (which really isn’t pop… it’s closer to indie), P3 Rock, P3 Live, P3 Demo, Önska, Clownen Luktar Bensin… all good shows IMO."
Dyrga_Yes…The Clown smells like gasoline? lolol
where do I find this p3 station…here in Västerås I seem
to only be able to find mix megapol…I have heard
whispers of better offerings, but I’m clueless…
There was a great series of articles in Salon a while back documenting the calculated demise of radio. It was there that I learned about “indies” (which, despite the name, could not possibly have less to do with independent labels or bands), who are people hired by the labels who essentially pay the radio stations to play the label’s music. (This is all done via a careful technical tango to avoid outright payola, which is still illegal, but the net result is the same.)
If file sharing is supposed to bring the music industry to its knees, then I’m not downloading fast enough.
I was surprised to see Simetra mention WRFL (“Radio Free Lexington”), our independent college station. They are, indeed, all that. I’ve been acquainted with a lot of their DJs from time to time, and while they occasionally fall into the “indie-er-than-thou” trap, the station is clearly run by people who love music.
We are also fortunate to have two other college stations–WUKY, UK’s NPR station, and WRVG from Georgetown college–that have tapped into Lexington’s abnormally large folk/alt.country audience. We have it good right now–we can only hope it lasts.
