If things weren’t bad enough for trad Radio with Net Radio and Podcasts… there’s also Ipods. People can hold entire music libraries on their Ipods, and, if they wish, try to sequence songs with Itunes. Now, I’m not convinced that Itunes is the greatest music sequencing tool ever made, and I’ll come back to this in a future post. But Ipods are cute. They stroke egos. They give you ownership of your stuff. Why let Radio control your soundtrack when you can take your stuff with you and bathe in the warm glow of your fabulous music taste? Case closed, right?
Well… not quite. There’s been talk about Ipod fatigue. Recently Emmis noted that Radio’s challenge is to outdo what individuals can set up on their Ipods. I think there’s a point there, but I’d be very interested in the solution. At the same time, check this link for an observation that I agree with. I often find myself dissatisfied with the material I’ve loaded to my Ipod. I find don’t really have the time or inclination to overhaul my active listening library. Part of this must be the way music has been commoditised. We gain ease of access; we lose the thrill of the new. But part of it must be that I really don’t care to do the whole catalogue geek thing with my own record collection. I like surprises. I like new music, and creative use of existing material, and I want that from Radio. Especially since I can’t get wonderful Pandora in the UK now.
Back at the battlefront, I have no problem at all with Radio being able to thrill and excite so it outdoes my Ipod. In fact, I’d love it if Radio did that to me more often than once in a very great while. Sadly, I think most trad Radio does have a problem with just that approach. There is no shame at all in giving the listener what he or she wants to get an audience, and I’ll post on this soon. It’s what else you do in between your tried and tested repertoire that is today’s battleground, and I just feel that stripping libraries back to the same old bones doesn’t cut it with web-savvy 21st century listeners. That’s the challenge, and it calls for different thinking. Right now, Radio is simply handing audiences, especially younger listeners, over to Net Radio and, maybe temporarily, Ipods.
Where do we go from here? Well, I’ve got ideas, but I’d love to hear some suggestions for some added value. I’ve already argued for more local material. But how about new presenter approaches? How about stealing and reworking ideas from thirty and forty years ago when Radio was king? Or should we be like newspapers (here’s a detailed piece from the current New Yorker) and just resign ourselves to a slow death as more and more tech-driven alternatives seduce our listeners away?
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One Comment
When I take a spin up or down the radio dial I am just nauseated. The same crap over and over that was played twenty, thirty years ago, over and over. Thing is, that music was good and is good, but after 10,000 listens you just want to stab your ears out.
The local stations advertise themselves as the home of Rock, or real rock, or whatever, truth is that they are the golden oldies stations and don’t even know it. Seriously, playing the Def Leppard, Led Zep, Aerosmith, tunes back to back from 20 or 30 years ago. Would a rock station back in 1970 suddenly launch into a string of Tommy Dorsey tunes? Hell no, they were playing what was new.
If Radio wants to be of value, then it should be doin what it did in 1970,
introducing us to music we might never have heard before. Pre-filtering the 1000’s of new releases, sorting the good from the mundane and saying come here and find the music for your future instead of music for your past.