Radio Is the Worst Place To Listen To Music, Says Jay Z (qz.com) 203
An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: In a candid interview between Frank Ocean and Jay Z that aired on Apple Music's Beats 1 radio station last week, the latter spent a good portion mourning the golden days of radio, where he got his own start in the 1990s as a hip-hop artist. Said Jay, about modern radio: "It's pretty much an advertisement model. You take these pop stations, they're reaching 18-34 young, white females. So they're playing music based on those tastes. And then they're taking those numbers and they're going to advertising agencies and people are paying numbers based on the audience that they have. So these places are not even based on music. Their playlist isn't based on music... A person like Bob Marley right now probably wouldn't play on a pop station. Which is crazy. It's not even about the DJ discovering what music is best. You know, music is music. The line's just been separated so much that we're lost at this point in time."
Radio diss'ed by artists on a streaming station? (Score:4, Funny)
Says one of the guys leading the creation . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Says one of the guys leading the creation . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this on Slashdot?
I dunno. Maybe because not enough people took 'a drink from the Firehose' and downmodded it?
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The entire concept is stupid. Let's go to a news site to see what will get posted tomorrow and mod it up / down just so we can see that news a day after.
The firehose isn't the answer. The question is how did this shit get past submission and through an editor.
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The other side of this problem is that not enough good stories get modded up. I've noticed that for some reason a lot of submissions get marked as spam. Don't know if it is a bug or just moderation abuse.
There just isn't enough good stuff in the pipe, and after a while of randomly having something you put effort into preparing modded as spam you just stop posting.
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Because Slashdot pretty much an advertisement model. You take these news aggregation sites, they're reaching 35+ old white males. So they're pushing out stories based on those tastes. And then they're taking those numbers and they're going to advertising agencies and people are paying numbers based on the audience that they have. So these places are not even based on tech news. The firehose isn't based on tech...
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I dislike country a lot, so me saying that such a such a country artist is terrible is not likely to hold much weight with potential listeners.
Saying that a country artist is terrible is a bit like saying that a rap artist is black. Not universally true, but fairly close to a safe bet.
Maybe Better Music Would Help? (Score:5, Interesting)
I do, and think it's critical (Score:3)
While the quality of music on radio may be worse than physical mediums, the importance of Radio is that it exposes people to new music and personalities. Not all are good, not all are bad so your appreciation varies. I was exposed to countless people and musicians because of Radio. Seems to me that this person has a vested interest in pushing a particular brand of medium, so expect their opinion to be self serving and with extreme bias.
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I listen to the radio at work or when I'm driving short distances. I also sometimes listen to radio at home when I am doing something and want music as background. It is much better than flipping records or tapes all the time. Also, if I listened to a digital playlist, I would be really tempted to choose the next song myself and would end up spending more time choosing than working. I have noticed this when listening to music on my PC - I spend a minute choosing whet to listen to, then ~3 minutes listening
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I think what a lot of people are missing with this topic is that most (all?) of the people who actually care about music have long since migrated towards the internet for music discovery. What incentive do radio stations have to play music that music enthusiasts like if music enthusiasts can sort through the entire history of recorded music on the internet in significantly higher quality?
The radio caters to people unwilling to use the internet to discover music, which should say quite a bit about the type
Perhaps "some", but not all (Score:2)
I don't look at the Internet alone for new music, I scan stations on drives and find things. Just like we did when I was a kid and had no internet. Using the internet for "discovery" means that you get someones recommendations based on your current taste or what's trending. That same principle occurs on the Radio, but if you scan you find new genres.
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Using the internet for "discovery" means that you get someones recommendations based on your current taste
This is true only if you use music-regurgitation services like Pandora. Don't use those, they're bad for your health. There are plenty of online radio stations that feature actual people making actual decisions about what to play.
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The radio caters to people unwilling to use the internet to discover music
Such as those with no cellular data plan to discover music during drive time and no time to devote to discovering music at home.
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Your post, in slightly more yellow-tone:
https://youtu.be/pLqfXlIq6RE [youtu.be]
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The same thing has been true of MTV for a very long time. It caters to a specific demographic, evidently junior high schoolers.
I suspect it'll get
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Try going back to the"golden age" of music, whenever that is for you. Look at the top 50 in any random week. It's mostly drek.
Time filters out the crap and makes those times seem better than they were. The is good music these days too, you just have to look beyond the pop chart.
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'Where are today's U2, Metallica, Pearl Jam and other great bands?'
Your 'kids these days' is showing, and that's before your stereotypically boomer/gen-x crack about The Chainsmokers. Metallica was one of the most commercialized acts of the end of the 90's, and U2 might as well be a Brand with a theme song. Both groups notoriously over-produced albums to appeal to consumer tastes to the point where Metallica was a joke in the hi
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Maybe you should stop watching MTV. There's plenty of amazing music out there. Plenty. Always has been, always will be. Try this guy, you won't like everything, but you'll like something.
Human Pleasure Radio [humanpleasure.co.nz]
Also, of course, U2 are rubbish.... :-)
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Wait are there actually music videos on MTV? Every now and then to prove some kind of point, I go to their website and look at their schedule to prove to someone that there is 0 music on that network. Where and when are music videos shown on MTV? Genuinely curious, I don't have cable TV any more.
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Music today is a far cry from the 20th Century - very manufactured, very simple, very made-for-money and very forgettable.
Are you implying that Sturgeon's Law is a recent invention? Electronic instruments and digital mixing have ruined music? Records from the 50's didn't have their fill of, er... filler?
Business practices changed as the industry grew, and that's clearly the problem. However, I've seen little change in the general quality of the products.
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This was written by someone who clearly doesn't remember Wham!, Thompson Twins, Flock of Seagulls, Rick Astley, Milli Vannili, Debbi Gibson, Paula Abdul, etc. Music has always been like this. You're just engaging in observer bias, because the only stuff you know about from 30 years ago is the 10% that wasn't crap, and people still want to listen to.
You have it lucky kid. When I was a teen, MTV was our Youtube, and we had to just watch whatever they broadcast and hope the next one would be good. We got reg
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Where are today's U2, Metallica, Pearl Jam and other great bands?
You appear to have forgotten to include examples of some great bands and accidentally copied "U2, Metallica, Pearl Jam" from an article about rubbish dinosaurs.
FIFY (Score:2)
Jay Z is the worst music to listen to, says me.
FIFY
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Jay Z
Rap's not even music [bobrivers.com]
He has a point... (Score:5, Insightful)
He has a point... about commercial radio (Score:2)
Jay Z was of course talking about commercial radio, and he's totally right. Or so I believe... I can't remember the last time I willingly listened to commercial radio.
There are commercial-free radio stations that actually care about music (and the musicians, and the listeners), and aren't beholden to advertisers.
Of course, as has been the case for decades, there are still lots of good low-power college radio stations, with their ever-changing formats. The downside there is that you never know sort of music
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Over here in the UK, we had the mighty, the master, the supreme genius of John Peel.
Don't you still have Tim Westwood?
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Over here in the UK, we had the mighty, the master, the supreme genius of John Peel.
Don't you still have Tim Westwood?
For those unaware of the glory that is Westwood, here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:
"In interviews, Sacha Baron Cohen has stated that Westwood, including his accent, was an inspiration for his fictional Ali G character."
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John Peel's loss causes me sadness to this day, I always thought that one say I'd meet him down the pub, or at a gig, but his shoes have not remained unfilled. BBC Radio One still has real DJs playing real music, you really should listen again - assuming you don't already.
He was, though, you are right, the master. Against whom all other radio DJs will always be judged.
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Have you not heard of BBC 6Music [bbc.co.uk]?
Any number of their DJs do exactly that.
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There are still plenty of these types of shows, and many of them still survive (mostly) on the BBC, even in spite of the fairly savage cuts of the past few years. It's especially the case in local radio, with the like sof BBC Introducing, which gives new bands a chance to get their stuff played.And this filters up to the national stations like Radio 1 and 6musc. Up in the north of England, people like Nick Roberts in Newcastle and Bob Fischer on Tees do a stirling job. And they manage to get a lot of new an
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Compare Mr Cross [wikipedia.org], with Mr Peel [wikipedia.org]. He was not your usual human being.
Even Bob Marley is a result of a formula (Score:3)
I think it's understood anything played on any radio format is as a result of a formula. Even Bob Marley who was initially marketed as a Rock band in England to the extent of having guitar riffs dubbed over the music to change the sound. This being said in my experience growing up it was always the independent small, and college radio stations who seemed to carry an authentic sound, more so because the DJ's were all working for passion and not $$.
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This being said in my experience growing up it was always the independent small, and college radio stations who seemed to carry an authentic sound
You're fortunate not to have lived in a city where NPR and the local Bible college snapped up all the noncommercial frequencies (88.1 to 91.9 MHz), to the point where the local extension of the state college was crowded out.
Depends on the radio (Score:2)
Where I live there's a public radio station that plays a wide catalogue of new and old rock/alternative, a public radio station that plays a narrow, rotating catalog of current dance/pop from around the world and a public radio station that plays a very wide catalog of classical music. What matters is where the money comes from. If listeners chip in then they get a station that has human DJs that select tracks based on their tastes rather than marketeers monies.
Jay Z opinion matters here? (Score:4, Insightful)
I honestly blinked twice and double checked that I was on Slashdot after I've read that title. I was like, "Jay Z opinion? Here?"
So, putting aside the near zero value of an Hip-Hop artist opinion in a science website, I'm not sure what's so surprising about that statement. Internet took the crown of music entertainment and radio is trying to survive with talk show and exclusivity of new hit music. But, on a consumer point of view, I don't see the problem as we never had that much easy access to music as ever before and new artist can more easily spread their music without the recording studio. The only downside I see is about artist with smaller audience where streaming revenue are less than nothing.
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Hip-Hop artist
Geez aren't we being generous with descriptions today, though I guess at my local gallery of modern art there is a canvas hanging completely covered in black with a 2 A4 pages of text explaining what the "artist" was thinking when he made it, so I guess given that low bar we could call him an "artist" too.
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Not what I'd have chosen (Score:2)
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So, then, don't listen to the pop stations (Score:2)
"It's pretty much an advertisement model. You take these pop stations, they're reaching 18-34 young, white females."
Life Below 92 - college and non-commercial stations are below 92 on the FM dial, playing some of the widest range of music that you'll ever hear.
.
Also scan the dial for a few weeks. Around here there's an alternative rock FM station that plays some tunes definitely targeted towards the pop music crowd.
Look around, the music is out there.
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Yeah, but only barely. A tiny handful of stations compared to the larger, more powerful commercial ones barely supplies enough good music over the course of a week. I gave up on radio years ago, and got sick of the good songs they ran into the ground. Anymore I find bands I like by word of mouth or hearing them on soundtracks (like Killswitch Engage or Paramore).
Be it Jean Luc Ponty, or Type O Negative, too many great musicians and bands of various genres just don't get fair airplay.
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I don't know what you're talking about, I've heard Cannibal Corpse followed by Death on the radio. Maybe the problem is the stations in your area suck.
Well, true, that's no doubt part of it. They do suck, and hard. Philly area.
When I go up to New England for a week in the summertime, radio is much better.
All I hear are Taylor Swift songs (Score:2)
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...Any station that is playing current music has certainly limited the range of music being played. ...
Any station that is playing current pop music has certainly limited the range of music being played. - FTFY
Art for the sake of art rarely turns a profit (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how much Jay Z would be worth if his music wasn't completely designed to pander to his target audience's preferences? Seriously, this guy is mad about the commercial aspects of a company that helps the music industry to market their art to their core demographic? I mean come on... The only art that wasn't designed for people to enjoy is usually sitting in the garbage can unless someone happened to like it or make it "hip and trendy". Art in general is designed by the artist for the consumer.
Hell, our greatest and most famous works of art in history were commisioned!
It's always been about the money, except in a few very rare cases. None of these artists would enjoy their job if they weren't getting paid for it, so the argument that radio is using music as a platform for turning a profit (through advertising) isn't really an argument at all. They're all doing the same thing.
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I dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars They criticized me for it, yet they all yell "holla" If skills sold, truth be told, I'd probably be Lyrically Talib Kweli Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense But I did 5 mil - I ain't been rhyming like Common since
--Jay Z : Moment of Clarity (irony included, free of charge)
Targeted Demographic=Narrow Market (Score:5, Insightful)
The same thing happened with retail malls. The only stores and products remaining in them are those that appeal to young female impressionable impulsive buyers. Again the rest of the demographic found little appeal, abandoned retail stores in droves, and major chains (Sears, Macy's, JC Penney) are closing anchor stores around the country.
I abandoned radio ten years ago because the new music no longer appeals to me and the ads were becoming longer and more frequent. There are a lot other people like myself who don't fit the demographic of young impressionable females who have also grown tired of radio. Radio (and television) is no longer about supporting refreshing new art, it is about drawing listeners to advertisers. And those advertisers pressure the marketing department to play music that draws in impulsive buyers. We hear the same brain-dead drivel being rotated over and over and over.
There's a reason why streaming services have blossomed. There's a lot of good program material that isn't getting played on television/radio, and people will go elsewhere to find them.
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I don't fully know how to explain malls declining. The obvious answer is Amazon.com and maybe that's pretty much the sum of it. But there's a social aspect to malls that you can't get from online shopping. And who likes socializing more than impressionable teens?
TV is a different story. Streaming is just a better way to watch. I keep an antenna around just for the shared-ex
KEXP (Score:3)
Public Broadcast Radio (Score:3)
Commercial radio is just like music for the masses, with the same top chart songs every two hours. Even the stations that broadcast years old music (mostly 90s and 00s) end up repeating the same songs as if the artist only have one or two hits. The radio DJs sound like Homer J. Simpson, the cuisine critic. Everything is a delight, everything is great. Sorry man - that is not my cup of tea. I like diversity, I like discovery (and also Daft Punk's record too).
Money may not be the root of all evil (Score:2)
But looking at hollywood or at the music industry, it seems like a major source of degradation.
A Jay Z CD (Score:2)
A Jay Z CD is the worst way to listen to music.
OK, maybe the quality beats a Jay Z cassette.
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The hiss from the cassette is better than the rest of the sounds coming out the tape player, so no, a Jay Z cassette is better than CD.
Radio is dead (Score:5, Informative)
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Radio died January 3, 1996 with the passage of the Telecommunication Act of 1996. It basically allowed big corporations to buy up all of the smaller independent stations in a region and homogenize the content to the same bland mush that advertisers like and which generates the fewest angry letters to the station. Luckily we have the internet now so broadcast radio can go quietly into the night.
Hey, except for JackFM - they're a local station that just plays whatever they want!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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kozt.com has some pretty good "adult rock" that isn't over-commercialized. It's owned by a former Program Manager of KLOS. Many of he DJs are of the old KPPC/KMET flavor.
No commercial link to me. I just like the station and the people that run it.
It's what radio used to be before corporations bought out the airwaves.
(FWIW, I used to listen to KNAC back in the late 60's. For a trip down memory lane, read "Radio Waves" by Jim Ladd)
Sure (Score:3)
Says the guy who has stakes in paid streaming music services.
Oh course free-to-air radio is now suddenly shit in his opinion.
Cord AND FM Broadcast cutter (Score:2)
I gave up on broadcast radio years ago due to the overwhelming domination of the ads. Satellite radio with no ads, or streaming my Apple Music subscription to my car audio.
Jay Z didn't even mention half of it, IMO! (Score:2)
He has a point, but there's much more that's contributing to the death of radio.
One of radio's big problems, IMO, is the sound quality. Standard FM is noticeably poorer sounding than a CD, or even a compressed MP3 at a decent bitrate. Reception fades in and out and you get static while driving around, etc.
The "solution" was almost worse than the problem, though.... "HD" FM radio. The way it's usually implemented, broadcasters split up its bandwidth so they could have "HD1" and "HD2" alternative stations alo
He's right (Score:2)
Jay Z... (Score:2)
...doesn't really understand how commercial radio has worked since, well, forever.
It's never (except for the smallest enthusiast-stations) been "about the music". The 'customers' of radio (and TV, for that matter) aren't the consumers. THEY ARE THE PRODUCT BEING SOLD. The customers are the businesses that are paying for ad time.
He's a dumb shit, is that any surprise?
How's Tidal doing, dude? (answer: lost $28 million last year) http://www.esquire.com/enterta... [esquire.com]
First year: 540k subs, lost $11 million
Last y
Is market fragmentation really a bad thing? (Score:2)
Large scale display advertising is dwindling. Online advertising is much more precise, it gets sellers much closer to the holy grail of only spending money on advertising to the people who actually end up buying. So if radio is becoming more fragmented like social media, surely that just means that artists have a better chance of reaching their intended audience? Instead of your traditional Irish / Brazilian Zouk fusion tune being lost in the maelstrom of generic pop music, it now finds a place to play on a
Who cares? (Score:3)
Who cares what Jay Z says?
That would be "NOT ME".
Someone please tell this self-important blowhard to shut up and fuck off.
I agree (Score:2)
I agree on the basis of the headline alone.
I used to listen to drive-time radio on a talk station because there was a zoo-type program in the Orlando area that I actually found kinda listenable. Over the years it go to the point where I sometimes can get to work without hearing a single second of it - nothing but commercials. And that's a 15 minute drive, at least. How the hell can you play 15 minutes of solid commercials?
Sorry, radio. You can go fuck yourself.
COMMERCIAL radio stinks (Score:2)
The good ol' days (Score:2)
You know what else happened a lot in the good ol' days? Rappers killing each other.
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"You take these pop stations, they're reaching 18-34 young, white females."
News for nerds: White bitches hate Jay Z.
I thought that was part of his core audience, at least one would think by the amount of his dreck that gets major market air-play...
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My complaint is even stations unaffiliated with each other seem to be timing their commercial breaks at the same time. I have six presets in the vehicle and all of them are playing commercials at the same time. Tha
Station identification (Score:3)
My complaint is even stations unaffiliated with each other seem to be timing their commercial breaks at the same time.
How much of that is related to national radio regulators' requirement that all stations announce call letters at the same time, plus competition with other "publishers" (radio stations selling ad space) for advertisers?
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national radio regulators' requirement that all stations announce call letters at the same time
Assuming this is true in the US, what problem does this regulation purport to address?
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national radio regulators' requirement that all stations announce call letters at the same time
Assuming this is true in the US, what problem does this regulation purport to address?
I don't know. Wikipedia's article about station identification in the United States [wikipedia.org] doesn't describe a clear rationale for the FCC's requirement that licensed radio stations state the call letters and city of license near the top of each hour.
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Chthonic rules.
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I didn't really get that until I visited Finland in 2008. Great people there, but the environment is kind of bleak in a beautiful kind of way and there is a LOT of drinking. In the winter, everlasting darkness is a mindblower.
Streaming uses cellular data (Score:2)
with the internet and things like SoundCloud there is effectively no barrier for any music to reach any listener in such a context.
Except the price of a cellular data plan. FM radio in a vehicle needs no AT&T&T&T subscription.
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Re:But radio plays a lot of Jay Z (Score:5, Informative)
No, he's saying that corporate programming managers are too timid to take risks.
It's hard to understand what's been lost if don't remember radio from when most radio stations were independently owned, and of course manually operated by an on-site engineer and broadcaster.
Yes in a major city there might be a handful of top-40 "hits" stations, a handful of talk or sports radio stations too, but aside from that almost every station on the dial had an unique and reflected some personal perspective. Often they were labors of love, with owners or DJs promoting genres of music they enjoyed personally, like classical or jazz, or towards the end, hip-hop.
This wasn't a case of being destroyed by a disruptive technology, like newspapers. This was a case of a deliberate rules change which allowed corporations to own a large fraction of radio stations in a market, combined with the ability to automate radio stations across the country so that they are in fact exactly the same no matter where you go, with allowances for slight regional differences like the preponderance of Christian radio across the South.
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Often they were labors of love, with owners or DJs promoting genres of music they enjoyed personally, like classical or jazz, or towards the end, hip-hop.
The only good radio stations I've found in the past 10 years have been non-commercial stations. Commercial radio is a wasteland.
Silly Valley has a great jazz station. Seattle has a nice EDM station (well, its half top-40 pop stuff, but there's a lot of EDM). These are old-school single-format stations, not the sort of "public radio" that plays a different genre every hour. So if you're lucky, you might find a single worthwhile station near you, if you hunt around the dial.
(Also, as you note Christian rad
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There are even sites like Patreon that have set themselves up to make it easier for people to do just this. I went to their website and f
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No, he's saying that corporate programming managers are too timid to take risks.
It's hard to understand what's been lost if don't remember radio from when most radio stations were independently owned, and of course manually operated by an on-site engineer and broadcaster.
I'm almost the same age as Jay Z, and I used to work in Radio when I was a teenager. Even back then, we had one corporation that owned the top five radio stations in town. A top 40 station, a rock station, classics, talk, and easy listening.
Commercial radio has always been about advertising, even then. They simply covered all market segments so any they could target any ad to any age group. What has probably changed is that is no longer cost effective to run an expensive radio license for smaller niche ma
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No, he's saying that corporate programming managers are too timid to take risks.
They don't really have to anymore though. They can let users find their own good new stuff they like on streaming services, and just play the stuff that people seem to like from there. The only reason why "risks" were ever taken before was because they had to do that to get new "content" into the stream.
but aside from that almost every station on the dial had an unique and reflected some personal perspective. Often they were labors of love, with owners or DJs promoting genres of music they enjoyed personally, like classical or jazz, or towards the end, hip-hop.
It would be amusing to see a modern remake of WKRP In Cincinnati. These days WKRP would be owned by Clear Channel, and a show about it would basically be The Office / Office Space.
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Clear Channel killed the radio star.
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The 18-34 white females I'm aware of aren't biased towards white artists. They lust for the pop crap rap that hangs on sex and being macho. They love Beyonceeee being bleeped out. Pure anesthesia, though.
Jay-Z is right, but he's making money on it.
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"Pop stations" are not "radio" (Score:4, Insightful)