The Death of Radio
When I was a teenager, the best way to find out about new music was listening to FM radio. In the Boston area we could listen to the big mattress and other album oriented rock stations and always find new and interesting music to listen to. Today however, the FM dial is now a great wasteland if you are interested in new music. Try this experiment. Grab a pencil, a piece of paper, sit in your car and scan the FM dial and keep track of how many stations you actually hear music that was recorded in the last 10 years. It is really quite depressing. Here are my stats (data collected in Nashua NH at 7:24 AM on December 2, 2005).
Type Station count Percent
-------------------------------------------
Talk Radio 11 37%
Commercials 9 30%
Oldies 7 23%
Christmas Music 2 7%
New Music 1 3%
That's 1 station out of 30 playing new music during prime commuting time. I wonder how this could have happened.
I play FM radio stations from all over the world via a linux server in the attic transmitting to uPnP media servers all over the house.
Pick a country, choose a genre, and then pick from tens of radio stations. Plenty of progressive radio stations out there, maybe not in 'radio' range though.
On the move, I podcast overnight my favourite radio shows onto an mp3 hard disk in the car for the next day.
Posted by Drew on December 02, 2005 at 09:14 AM EST #
A few notes about these figures. First, I was using my main radio which is DAB rather than FM. Major retailers here are no longer selling old analogue radios, as DAB is growing (the FM dial in London is clogged with pirate stations that interfere with the licensed ones). DAB has more stations than FM - hence my total of 46.
Second, I don't keep up with all the latest hip-hop, r'n'b and pop hits, let alone contemporary asian music - therefore there were a lot of stations where the music was new to me, but I couldn't be sure whether it was recorded in the last 10 years. This is the 'unfamiliar' category. Generally you can identify from the production anything recorded before 1990. (I also classified the Spice Girls as 'oldie', even though their song might have been just within the last decade). I reckon most of the 'unfamiliar' music was 'new', but even if only half of it was, that still makes a total of about 25% of the stations playing new music.
The first column is my results starting 7.42am on a weekday, to be comparable with yours. I also did the same test 12 hours earlier, as I expected the results to be different in the evening. In fact they're not that different. The main difference is that a lot of music stations do 'breakfast shows' that are more talk-heavy than the rest of their programming.
Finally, I don't know how it is the US, but most of the stations playing oldies are clearly labelled as such (e.g. Classic Gold, Virgin Classic Rock, Planet Rock, Magic, Life). So if you're interested in hearing new music, you can easily avoid them. In fact, I'd estimate that, if you want to hear new music, between a quarter and a third of the stations on the DAB dial will do a reasonable job of meeting that need.
I personally listen to four of them regularly, hopping between them according to their emphasis at different times of day. I also timeshift a fair bit of my radio listening via online streams and (to a lesser extent) podcasts.
So, the picture in the UK is quite different from the US, because of different history, different technology (which is partly because our country is so much smaller) and different regulation/ownership (my favourite music stations are all BBC ones).
I hope that's interesting.
Posted by David Jennings on August 25, 2006 at 10:08 AM EDT #