Commentary: Internet Does Music Better (Oct 1, 2009)

From what I witnessed from listening to music on Internet radio, I enjoyed a wide variety of alternative music that 91X won't play when Clear Channel was running it in the late 90s and early 00's. I listened to a wide variety of comedy and dementia music and spoken word classics that never made the airwaves locally, and oddly enough, goes mostly ignored locally. Electronica has become the music of the Internet age, while radio has shunned it in favor of featuring new hot chick singers who sing flat but look good on the pop and country stations.

I've been blogging about the devolution of commercial radio since 1998 a few years after I got on the Internet and put up a website, and sad to say, radio's bottom line attitude since 1996 has driven me and many people to newer forms of radio like Internet, satellite, mp3 on CD-R, iPods, wireless phones, and so forth. People are giving local radio music stations the thumbs down as radio's ratings continue to tumble and fall, high-priced personalities are being cut in favor of syndication and voice-tracking, news departments are being folded into a distant radio station from hundreds of miles away, and it's all because radio has failed to do one thing: keep up with what people want to hear.

It's simple. People want to hear good new songs, but nobody except a few independent music directors know how to do that. Clear Channel can't put on music people over the age of 25 would like, so people over 25 seek new music that they would like on podcasts, satellite, and Internet radio. Radio is focusing music so narrowly on the 18-34 age demographic that it's become worse than a joke; it's an insult.

People like to hear good old songs on the radio. Too bad the folks at the radio stations just don't get it. They take away the good songs from the 50s and 60s because they only want their audience to be in the 18-34 range, and songs from those decades are deemed too old to program for them. Why do you suppose oldies, classic rock, and old school funk from my teenage years are still popular choices for the locals to listen to? I like to hear them along with good new music on one station, and it sucks that I have to tune in Magic to hear Kool and the Gang and have to tune in 94/9 to hear MGMT.

Personally, I'd like to see somebody come up with one station that plays the best of the old and new music without all of the unlistenable junk that corporate radio loves to dish out.

On the Internet, it can be niche to serve a niche audience. Broadcast radio by nature has to appeal to a broad audience to get the ratings. Playing all the good hit classics and the best of the new songs that fit the spirit of the classics may very well be what people want to hear so they won't have to switch around the dial to hear what they like, and switch away from a piece of junk with flatlining vocals they can't stand.

We've witnessed the death of the midday live and local radio jock, the phasing out of DJ shifts with an "AND" in them, the homogenization of music playlists where you hear the same playlist on the company-owned stations everywhere (boring!), a reduction of the number of oldies, classical, and nostalgia radio stations because they simply attract AARP-eligible listeners, and all of that crap that's driven many listeners mad. The over exposure of Ryan Seacrest may cause Clear Channel to fall flat on its face as people defect to non-Clear Channel radio in other forms.

When I'm home, I almost never listen to local radio. There's just nothing compelling for me to tune in except when there's a good ballgame on. I can listen to funny music, classic new wave music, electronica, blues rock, surf rock, and stuff heard on Margaritaville, a channel run by Jimmy Buffet. Hear anything like it on local radio? I haven't heard much of it at all.

Radio stations say that they are using Internet technology, but it has yet to be reflected on the stale playlists that they continue to program. Radio's not taking any chances to bring in new listeners and to keep the ones they have from leaving.

Could radio be now in a Catch 22 situation? Local radio can't hire live music-knowledgable deejays because radio isn't getting the listeners, and listeners won't listen to local radio because they won't hire live music-knowledgable deejays anymore. Listeners don't want sock puppets on the airwaves to dictate what some man in a suit from a thousand miles away wants the listeners to hear, yet radio just doesn't understand that it's what they're doing that's driving away the listeners.

The corporate structure of radio just isn't working. It's what's ruining radio. It's what inspired people on the Internet to invent streaming and mp3s. It's what inspired people to create Internet radio stations featuring music radio won't play.

It's too late for broadcast radio to hide the fact that Internet has turned corporate radio on its head. The cat's out of the bag. People have woken up to the fact that there is good new music out there that radio won't play. People have torn down the gate radio has built between them and the musicians and are making the musicians that radio won't play famous. This isn't 1992 anymore. If radio wants to catch up, simply play what people want to hear and dump what they don't want to hear anymore, demolish the corporate evil empire buildings full of suits that don't have a clue and probably never hear the songs they're dictating the stations to play, let the radio station clusters do their business that suits what the locals want to hear, let the stations create their own playlists for the cities that they represent, let the listeners dictate what the playlists should sound like by using the Internet, hire back the local deejays with the money that's no longer going to the corporate CEOs that don't exist anymore in another city, create formats that are unique and have broad appeal, and above all, to get the bottom line, get something that attracts listeners to the station in the first place.