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Homogenized Music
Mansing writes "The connections between broadcast radio and music industry are well known. In the old days, payola was the method to increase a song's (or album's) exposure. But now, the same "free market" corporate music that infects the music industry is also infecting the broadcast radio industry as well. What makes the article so informative is not the business angles, but how business has changed what is broadcast. Seeing the parallels between the recording industry's force fed music and Clear Channel's "nothing is left to whim or chance" programming, I now understand how hard it is for any non-corporate sanctioned music to become widely heard."
outside of college radio stations, there's nothing left worth listening to, and this tells you why.
:)
can't someone show a business model to some exec. that shows that
good music=listeners=money?
instead of
crap music we're supposed to play=industry is happy=money
where's the listener come in?
oh yeah, as a stat on some marketroids excell spreadsheet showing that if you play enough Britney Spears, people's standards drop low enough to where they can sell their product.
if you can't tell, i hate almost all broadcast radio. it's been crap for years now and getting worse. i feel like an old man before my time.
this is complete crap. college radio! i hear the strangest most non-commercial shit ever on college radio. there is even a college station in L.A. that plays wall to wall industrial. these people have never heard of a dial on thier radio?
All forms of media really need to take their eyes of the ledgers and look toward the future... otherwise they'll be caught by surprise again.
With the net all neighborhoods are virtual and local.
-johnkarakash-
"History repeats itself, the first time is tragedy, the second time, farce." So quoth Karl Marx.
/.
/. with proposals to change the world.
Of course nobody would admit to being a Marxist or even a Marxian - think of all those killed in the Soviet Union and China.
But it seems that you can't keep a good idea down and those of the Marxist critical theorists of the Frankfurt School keep coming up again and again in
This is what capitalism does, people - it tends to monopoly, and restricts human development.
The great pity is that the left - and nowhere more so than in the US - seem unable to produce a decent theory of politics - the theory of praxis as it was once called - that connects the frustrations of those who post these articles on
Capitalism is still making us pay for the Soviet Union's experience of repression.
Memes need a name :)
Radio music is dead. You can tell by the ratings of FM stations. They pick up their biggest audience when the kings of fart jokes and naked chicks hit the air, i.e., Shock Jock Talk Radio. Howard Stern, Opie & Andy and their moronic minions of copycats are the only ratings FM stations are getting these days. Its no wonder that Clear Channel and Inifinity are looking outside of shoving ads into their customer's ears for revenue.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
"i hear the strangest most non-commercial shit ever on college radio."
:-)
:-D I have to put on a CD player to get my morning dose of Front Line Assembly...
This is probably why a lot of listeners stay away. Most people don't WANT to hear anything new, or risk their cozy bland existence by hearing anything which might challenge their concept of what constitutes "music". (end of bitter gripe). I do suspect that its very diversity is one of the factors hurting "college" or community radio - it's almost impossible to predict what will be playing when you tune in. Will it be death metal, reggae, christian rock, aboriginal talk radio or something completely unexpected? Personally, I like that. It's neat. I don't care for the Christian rock, but hey, turn off the radio for an hour, and later something else will be on
"There is even a college station in L.A. that plays wall to wall industrial."
Cool
Freedom: "I won't!"
The market is working just fine. The problem is that the majority are willing to listen to the homogeneous crap that CCU broadcasts. You can argue all you want that the airwaves are a "public good" and not just another form of property, but in the end of the day, someone is going to be arbitrarily choosing what goes on the airwaves no matter how the power to choose is apportioned. And if it's the public (read: majority) choosing how to use that good, you can be assured they're not going to waste that bandwidth on indie rock, metal, big-band music, or African tongue-clicking.
Instead of complaining, choose one of the alternatives: listen to satellite radio, internet radio, listen to CD's (the real ones, not those phony pseudo-CD's), etc. If CCU truly isn't performing a service that people want, advertisers will stop buying airtime and it will go bankrupt. I'm guessing that isn't about to happen anytime soon.
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i think the problem here is one of bandwidth... here in the UK, we have a small number of large indepedent radio networks, as well as regional stations that are currently peddling almost exactly the same type of music as each other, all going for the least offensive (to the average listener) and most bland music 'product' that they can find, in order to maximise advertising revenue - a 'one size fits all' system.
However, I can't see that this will last for long, as soon as any of the following technolgies reach the average consumer household: Net radio, Stand alone recievers for audio-only channels over satellite, digital radio (we are a long way ahead of the US in this field, I believe, as the BBC have pushed the technology) and increased spectrum avaialbilty due to theproposed switch off of terrestrial analogue TV transmitters (which the UK governement are keen on as they stand to rake a fortune in from selling the bandwidth off).
When any (or all) of the above technolnogies are mature, then it will be possible to deliver cost-effective radio to much smaller markets (with tightly targetted adverts), so the constant search for the lowest common denominator will no longer be the best way to maximise advertising revenue, providing a wide spectrum of choice will be more cost effective.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
There have been many eras. There was the bronze age, iron age, industrial age, and now we have the corporate age.
Each one of these ages gave more power to a select group of people. The corporate age gives the most power to the fewest people. This is showing up in the government and laws, in the schools, in every work place, and most dangerously how people think. RMS is an extremist only because of the times that we live in.
Check out the extensive coverage they've gotten over at Salon for the past year or so. There's about a dozen articles about various aspects of their business practices.
http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/Did you even think to research this before you spewed it out?
The
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
Everyone loves a good conspiracy, but I thought the .cc domain was from the Cocos Islands (unless Clear Channel owns their own island chain, too).
http://www.colchis.com/domain.htm has the info on that.
DC101 in the MD/DC/VA area plays decent music. sure, it's mostly the same corporate jam it down your throat rock that we've all gotten used to, but they've started playing a lot of songs by "Carbon Leaf", an independent band, and they sponsor unsigned local bands for a lot of the shows they put on. Welbilt is a pretty good band that just opened their Chili cookoff. anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that individual stations have more say in their programming that it at first appears.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
My suggestion:
"You better play what we say or you'll get this baseball bat up your a** !!"
Britney and N'Sync are good musicians playing good music.
I hope this is a joke, I see someone modded it funny. Neither Britney nor N'Sync are good musicians. They aren't musicians at all. Have you ever seen any of them play an instrument?
I'm not even sure you can classify them as singers. Has anyone ever heard any of them sing by themselves, without a studio full of equipment?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
That being said, some of you might find the college radio station better to listen to becuase you get to hear different stuff, things that you don't get to hear on mainstream radio. Now, did you ever seem to think that the reason that it's not on mainstream radio is because mainstream people think that the music sucks?
Commercial radio is there to make money, so they need to play what MOST people want to hear, not what you want to here. I like techno, most places don't play techno, why? becuase mainstream people don't like techno, in fact some people hate it (my brother included).
To say that college radio or internet radio is better then commercial radio is silly. Just becuase you don't like it doesn't rule out the fact that somebody must like it, because it's still around, and it's doing well. I've also found that there's some people (an ex-coworker comes to mind) that listens to non-mainstream stuff just becuase it's non-mainstream. I found it to be shit and could see why it wasn't played on the radio. This just goes to show, different people have different tastes, and just because you don't like Britney doesn't rule out the fact that a lot of people do.
Free Mac Mini
I live in Sweden. We have several Public Service TV and Radio stations. The biggest radio station is Programme 3, P3.
P3 play a lot of top-20 stuff, but fortunately smaller interests are seen to. One favourite is P3 Live, which airs four days a week -- a new band/artist every day. Very good and broad selection of music, and excellent live quality
Look around the playlists. There's everthing from Slitknot, Bob Hund, In Flames and lot's of lot's of bands you've never heard of and would never ever hear on a commercial station.
Tonight is Kittie, and Entombed is coming up soon. Very nice.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Clear channel was pushing that top-level domain, and originally had changed all their radio and television stations and even provided sponsors websites .cc domains. (as in clear channel)
It does stand for Cocos Islands, but was being sold as meaning "Clear Channel"
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Try listening to TripleJ. Brought to you by the tax payers of Australia.
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So what? I haven't listened to music on the radio since high school. Why? Well I can decide what I want to listen to for myself. If you can't investigate new music on your own then the radio telling you what to like shouldn't be a concern of yours.
Checkout some independent or smaller labels. Labels like Matador Records, Prawn Song, Fat Wreck, and may others. It's a shame that labels like Grand Royal were forced out of business for not force-feeding the status quo. Read Nude As The News for non mainstream album reviews.
Find a band you Like and check out their influences. This is a good way to find new stuff to listen to. Like Led Zeppelin? Listen to Muddy Waters. Like Trey Solo? Listen to Count Basie, Sun Ra, or Little Feet. Like Primus? Listen To Rush. Ect.
GO SEE LIVE MUSIC! If you live near a large city there are tons of show to go see, there are some good websites dedicated to finding shows in your area. Check out Jambase for example.
Trade Live Music! There are several communities for the trading of live tapes, a large number of bands ok the taping of their shows and the thousands of tapes are out there for free. One Such community Etree is a great example of this.
Listen to College radio if you live near one!
Don't complain about the lack of variety on the radio, just don't listen to it.
Dr Money: At last, I have you under my power, Captain Internet! My minion forces of bad laws will keep your kind down... FOREVER!!! BwaHaHaHaHA!!!
Will Dr. Money squeeze the life out of the fearless Captain? Will Captain Internet make the world safe for good music again? Tune in next week for anothe exciting episode of...
CAPTAIN INTERNET OF THE CYBERPATROL!!
Capitalism does tend towards monopoly. But the monopolistic trend is countered by some things Marx never considered. Inventers, developers, people who just think outside the business box, they then provide more competition. Of course, the Monopolies will try to eat them up, but they can and do fail at that, and get washed up and forgotten.
While Communism, that's the Monopoly of the state, with no chance for competition, after all the State KNOWS what you need and want. Even if it's true for the majority, the Tyranny of the Majority is not something to be desired either.
So Monopoly, from Communism or Capitalism is bad. But at least with Capitalism, we have a chance against it.
Bill
It's this kind of situation that leads to a change in music. That's how we got punk rock in the first place. There won't be a rebellion until there is something to rebel against.
Advertisers run like hell from the 54+ crowd, especially the female segment. Why? I dunno. They're the ones with the disposable income, the best tastes, and are actually influenced by what they hear.
The 18 to 54 crowd has bills, prespent income (credit card debt), college tuition, and they're minds are already made up, don't care what they hear.
So, I make my money by targetting nonprofit appeals to the geezer crowd. The best bucks per appeal doesn't happen until you start mailing to the 60+ widows. And AARP perennially does real well, too. And you know their crowd.
So, again, why don't advertisers like the 60+ crowd, helluva lot of money to be made there.
the only commercial radio i listen to is talk radio, otherwise it's college radio. though i will admit i am biased because i work at one. having been involved with an urban (philly) college, non-commercial station now for about 10 years i can see how dedicated people are to the station.
we, WKDU 91.7fm play pretty much "music not heard on other stations". we are the only free format, student run station left in Philadelphia. our programming cover punk/hardcore, indie, reggae, techno/hjouse/trace and whatever else. one thing about our programming... we do not follow the generic college block programming for styles of music. basically every 3 hours the DJ changes and most all of the time it's not the same style of music. a program guide (online or in print form) is helpful, but most people don't seem to care. they still listen most all of the time. i guess being the last Philly student run station and the only one without programming (DJ picks 100% of their own music) makes us pretty much the only broadcast option for many people.
We have been webcasting for a few years now (and hopefully will be able to in the future if those damn fees don't kill us) and have seen a pretty good online response. though we are not always on 24 hours a day, we do not shut down for holidays or summer (Drexel U runs full year... 3 months quarters). our webcast listeners are a mix of people in the local area, and around the world. i guess the bonus we have over other internet radio stations is a bigger budget than many with cool musical tastes, a lot of DJs and a record/cd collection we have been building up since 1968. i'm all for people starting their own webcasting stations, but there are some things bedroom run stations can't do as easily (live bands, DJ marathons, buy a lot of rad hardware)
the coolest thing about webcasting is the ability for a station like ours to reach everywhere. there are a lot of decent little stations out there, but unless you live in the right area (area often being small due to low power transmitters), you miss out.
corporate radio will always suck, but thanks to the internet we all have more options.
Hey Taco! Any chance of getting a "Full of Crap" moderation option?
"We were half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold."
-- Hunter S. Tolkien
To save folks the time, here's a quick summary of the article: middle-aged manager of a group of radio stations tells us all how hard it is to make ends meet in today's radio marketplace.
Hint: Skip to the last 2-3 paragraphs and find the real point of the article. You'll be glad you did.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Click here or here.
outside of college radio stations, there's nothing left worth listening to, and this tells you why.
Nonsense. You might mean "only college stations play the kind of music I like," which certainly doesn't mean that other stations suck. Or you might mean that many commercial stations have short, safe playlists. But then there are stations that don't fit that mold.
This is just like the overgeneralization that commercial music sucks, when you'll find instead that all of the music played on college stations is, in fact, commercial. The myth among anti-media geeks is that CDs from Britney Spears and Mariah Carey are put out by Evil Money Grubbing Corporations, while music from Chemical Brothers and Radiohead is put out by Independent Freedom Loving Hippies. When, in fact, there's no difference.
So if I start moving all my domains to ".sr" (the assigned country code of Suriname), and promote them as "Silly Rabbit", this somehow changes who owns the TLD?
.cc TLD, VeriSign (through one of it's subsidiaries) does. It doesn't matter how many domains CC has registered, or what they say it means, the fact is that it's *not* theirs.
Clear Channel does *not* control the
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
All that the payola laws and hearings of the 60's did was take the power of music influence from the individual (disc jockey) and put them in the hands of the corporations. The large radio corporations of the day (rko, gannet, etc...) saw that the control of their content was being usurped to the talent of their stations. The DJ was the all important business and creative liaison at the stations. Record labels did anything to get to the talent, including bribes and perks. All the payola hearings and laws did (brought about from the investigation of the Miami DJ convention) was remove the personality from the equations. Enter the more influential role of the program and music director of stations in the late 60's and 70's. The only real exception would be the "progressive" radio essentially invented by Tom Donahue in SF. Payola was seen as a threat to the radio corporations of the day, God forbid that an indiviual (ie: dj) could have that much control over their (the corporations) widget. So a public spectacle was made. And the dj was villified as a wolf, while the real wolfs were in fact the corporations afraid of loosing control of their publicly liscenced product... that was supposed to be in "the public interest."
Today in the corporate mentality of the radio world, the individual, the station DJ or the program/music director has any real say as to the music being played on the station. All edicts are essentially made by the corporate programming heads. Everything from play lists, national contesting and yes... even talent. Most talent is run on an automation system (usually prophet) that essentially has destroyed the job market for radio talent and stifled any creativity and the talent pool, stagnating radio to where it is in the present day. Radio listenership is down in the last few years. There just not much compelling. As my daughter puts it, "radio sucks." Hopefully something will happed to shake it up soon, so some rebel out there can get back to creating something compelling again on the radio dial.
Er, could it be that people like what they hear because they only hear what they're given to hear, and not the other way around (that they hear only what they like)? If people actually were exposed to a wide variety of music on the radio, they might suddenly discover that they like other music, besides manufactured factory-farmed "bands" like Britney et al.
Perhaps an example: the Insane Clown Posse, who, although (yes) they're on a major label, have so far managed to sell multiplatinum on several albums with NO commercial airplay whatsoever. On the other hand, I'd say they're the exception that proves (in either sense) the rule.
In any case, a pithy thentiment from the Dead Kennedys keeps playing through my head:
Could it be they put out one too many...lousy records?
Who do we tell to get off the air NOW?
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
When I lived in Michigan there were a couple radio stations, WHNN & WIOG which pretty much fit that same bill. Result: I stopped listening to them.
I've often wondered, even aloud to others, why radio stations insist upon overplaying music. I once had the complete Led Zepplin collection, but go so sick of hearing it over and over on the radio (usually on a radio at work) that I sold off all but two albums (Physical Graphitti & In through the out door, which didn't get much airplay.)
I still have to be in a very narrowly defined mood to listen to Phil Collins, so scarred am I by years of radio beating me over the head with his music. Pretty good stuff, but not when you hear it all the time. (There was even a radio station which planned a Phil Collins-Free weekend, it was so bad.)
I've got a collection of about 400 CDs (mostly bought in the 80's) most of the newer stuff is alternative, classical, jazz and euro-pop. At the pace I once bought music, I'd think the RIAA and affiliated scum would like to cultivate that, but the influences which built my collection were listening to music from other people's collections (which the RIAA appears dead-set against and even prosecuting me if they could nail one incident. There's the rub, eh?)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
OK Tired of radio and MTV? Me too! Who the heck decided that bad Eddie Vedder impressions would be popular this year?
Here's some bands worth checking out: (reply and post your own)
Neutral Milk Hotel
The Microphones
The Shins
The Dismemberment Plan
Need New Body
The Mountain Goats
Boards of Canada
... and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Sparklehorse
Belle & Sebastian
Brighteyes
Matmos
The Hot Snakes
The White Stripes (yeah, they've got a video, but they rock harder than anything since Zepplin)
music has always been comercial and pandering to trends, but in the past five years or so it has gotten *much* worse. There has not been a single innovative band to make it to the popular stage, music hasn't seen anything like this since the dark ages of the late 50s/early 60s. Think about it, what was the last novelty hit? What was the last song that got popular just because some DJ thought it was amusing? It's been quite a while. The early 90s saw innovative acts like Nirvana, Beck, and Liz Phair getting tons of airplay, and now we just have 1001 Pearl Jam/Creed rip-off acts. I won't comment on the R&B teen pop, that's obviously commercial fluff, and it wouldn't bother me if there were good things elsewhere. When we had the New Kids on the Block, we also had U2 and REM. Rap is, thankfully, still going strong, it probably has a good 10 or 15 years of life left in it.
Rock and Roll is approaching death. It will soon be as dead as Jazz. It will still be made. There will still be people doing amazing and creative things with it. But it's period of cultural relevancy is nearing the end.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Strokes/White Stripes garage/blues punk thing will take off. That would be cool.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I don't know about Capital, but Radio 1 (I assume that's what you mean) certainly doesn't play the same songs all day everyday. I think their daytime program is playlisted (lots of info about that on their website), but they have some great shows in the evening. John Peel, most notably.
Radio is crap - we all know that.
So what do we do? We download. We seek out old and different things to hear - sometimes it's an old Tom Waits song, or perhaps something from "Grease" that was playing the summer you first fell in love in junior high school - maybe it's something new from Moby that you have no idea if you really like or not. I would guess, though, that if they really took a look at what people were downloading, filtered out the 14-20 year olds, they could find a really half-decent radio playlist in the works.
OK, but then, you have the obvious 'segments' of the market - you find twenty people downloading old Gold Band cajun recordings and 300 downloading 1967 SanFran psychedelica - no need to lump them together, just create two streams and inject your advertising every fifth song or so.
If I were a record label, I would *welcome* people downloading old stuff from my catalog that I didn't happen to be pushing at the time - you get one person donloading an old song, he's just a sick - but imagine you get fifty people (fifty people!) a day downloading an old song. "And friends they may think it's a movement..." (Or at least a meme...) (Sorry, Arlo.)
Using one of the p2p apps, did you ever use the option to "See what else this guy has"? I mean, if I find someone who has a great old Django tune that I've never heard, I want to see what else he's got laying around. Often times, I see a song in their list that I may have on CD but haven't popped in for a while - guess what? I'll probably pop it in and give it a listen.
There is a tremendous amount of information on listening habits out there that is not being used.
Imagine a programmable radio station wher you could select the type of music you want to hear based upon what people download - imagine it in some form of pseudo-sql:
Select (*.mp3 > 160Kbps) from alldownloads where user has downloaded "Gavin Bryars" and "Portishead", exclude $porn, exclude $top40...
Bad example, but it could be a lot of fun...
Once I found a guy using giFT (FastTrack) who had such an incredibly good selection (and a kickass connection) that I wrote a shell script to check his new downloads everyday - his kind of unbiased good taste is something is something that I would *pay* for. (Though I would never pay for a *corporate* selection in a million years..)
OK - it's late here and I've had too much wine...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Universities played an extremely important role in the start of radio, as they did in the Internet. Like the Internet, radio originally began as a noncommercial domain, but commercial interests persuaded Congress to change that. As a sop to the universities, they reserved some quantities of spectrum for "educational" broadcasting in the FM band at the low end of the spectrum.
These days it's very rare for my FM tuner to show a reading higher than my body temperature...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Make your own music?
I am really sick of this particular sentiment on slashdot. Anytime someone complains about the sorry state of a given industry, there are always people who pipe in, "Hey, you don't like it, change it!"
Well, guess what, not everyone has the wherewithal to be experts at EVERYTHING! I'm a fairly intelligent guy, with a few areas of expertise, but I have no musical talent whatsoever. Sure I COULD make my own music, but even I wouldn't want to listen to it.
The Mudhens. My favorite band lately. kind of folk-rock-latin-alternative stuff. give it a shot, you'll probably like it.
They're not really like anyone else out there, so I can't give an analogy. Or maybe I'm no good at analogizing bands.
Either way, check them out.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I'm convinced that the Internet is what will lead to the demise of the recording industry and the broadcast industry.
As it is today, radio and record sales are the two main ways for an artist to become popular, sell out their shows, and make money. However, there is a high barrier to entry; the recording and broadcast industries want to profit, and so they only support music that will make them money--regardless of quality.
But the Internet allows all artists to be heard, by all people, with no strings attached but the size of your pipeline. Since artists never get paid for record sales to begin with, it hardly matters whether their music gets copied online--so long as it's good, they'll still sell out their concerts.
Ten to twenty years from now, the recording industry will be a crumbling colossus. People will get sick of being force-fed their music, of having to pick between identical blonde models with equally bad style, of seeing the same old stuff on the charts every week. By then, the Internet will have become powerful enough that any artist who wants to be heard, will be.
If you wanted your own daily radio show, Clear Channel would sell you the time for about $1,200 an hour.
Wow! That's really sad and kind of cool at the same time. It shows that a lot of their stuff really is basically extended commercial time, but it's also a chance for something else to slip in the lineup.
Think about it. For about $300 grand (yes I KNOW that's a lot), pretty much anyone could have his own show for an hour a day on weekdays, all year long. Now they probably wouldn't let you do anything "subversive" like rant on about corporate radio sucking, BUT: why not get a coalition of several dozen smaller labels together to get a show?
Clearchannel stations are by nature large-market ones, and if you picked a slot at like 3 or 4 pm, you would get kids after school and it would be before the "rush hour" slot that's so valuable. Say 50 labels chipped in, they could each get at least a couple songs on per week, and take some time to promote local shows, websites, band interviews, and all that.
And since the labels themselves are putting together the shows, rights shouldn't be an issue. I'm sure I'm missing a dozen reasons why this wouldn't work, but it SOUNDS so neat... *sigh*
This is what capitalism does, people - it tends to monopoly, and restricts human development.
Yes, let's look back at the golden age of Communist Radio! Where popular music is replaced by government propaganda.
And if you tell me that a true communist country has yet to be seen, I will barf.
Yeah, so the small radio stations sold to the big guys, and clear channel has a monopoly. If they abuse the monopoly, the could be facing trouble down the road.
In the meantime, our CAPITALIST markets helped create this thing called the Internet, and it is already being used to compete against the radio stations. (Socialist MP3 traders notwithstanding.)
"And like that
Radios play what people want to hear. When people don't want to hear it anymore, it will be gone. I don't blame big corporations for the songs on the radio (there are better things to blame them for, pick your battles) - its the people who make and break bands. And personally, I find the songs on the radio these days more listenable than ever before. Evidently all my radio stations are owned by the same people now, but I've hardly even noticed.
Everyone noted there are alternatives. I've even had a hard time finding mainstream music on the internet. It's all like indie and experimental. Then of course there is mp3 sharing as well.
But if you want the songs on the radio to change - go do something about it. Support your favorite bands - go to their shows and give their cds to people. If you want new music go to clubs and find it. Look at Linkin Park, I heard of this band forever ago before they had a record out. People had seen them and everyone in Orange County was talking about them. And I was also pretty suprised to hear the Strokes on the radio, they're a pretty indie sounding band. But there was techno before its short radio boom and it lives on after in smaller circles. Someone talked about punk, which also had a radio hayday (circa early epitaph) but in general has been able to survive as its own thing. And a lot of punk bands and a ton of punk fans don't want them to be on the radio. The radio is dependant upon what vocal people and their money like. Whether the radio station is owned by mom and pop or a corporation, if they want to survive, that's what they'll play. Point being, from the audience standpoint, it doesn't matter who owns it. and eventually Vegas Radio will get played when the corporation realizes they've saturated the market with too many of the same sounding stations. And they'll realize it eventually.
Carbon Leaf is a band from Richmond, VA. (where I happen to live). They have an mp3.com page too. They're a good recorded band, and an incredible live band, sort of a rock/country/bluegrass mix with increasingly heavy Celtic influences (their version of Mary Mac kicks arse!). The also won the American Music Award's New Music Award this past January, and the CMJ Music Marathon.
There's actually several decent live bands in Richmond, and I for one would rather pay for a live show than a CD. You wanna piss off the RIAA? Support local, unsigned bands. Spend your money on concert tickets (where most artists make their real $$) rather than CD's.
Communism isn't neccesarily monopoly of the state. There is such a thing as stateless communism, and it happens to be the 'government' which all humanity used for thousands and thousands of years. Still do in some places, those groups we've not assimilated or murdered. Yet.
Tyranny of the Majority is not something to be desired either.
Lucky us, we've got both in the US! Tyranny of the majority in our political matters, and monopolies in your economic matters! Yea!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Is there a directory of college radio stations and their freqencies online anywhere? I live near a major well-known (though private) university and I'd like to see if they've a student-run station I can listen to to see if I have a reason to ever tune my car's radio away from the local NPR station.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Yes! People are amazed when they learn that Led Zep has recorded more than the same three of their songs constantly played on the radio.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
If something is truely "good", or at least something that would be popular to sufficient people to sustain the band, it will be heard. Look at Fugazi. They are a D.C. area neo-punk band that does not have merchandise, is not on a major label, and does not make videos. The receive little to no radio airplay outside college stations, and are completely self-sustaining. They continue to charge only $5 admission to their shows and their CDs (I believe) are $10 post-paid from their record label (which they own and operate).
If you want to do it, and you are talented enough, you do not need major labels or commercial radio.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
In Columbus, OH Clear Channel rules the airwaves. The have also don it in a smart way. Our main local AM station is talk/news all of the time and what I listen to the most. Then there's WNCI home to the Morning Zoo. They have a GREAT morning show that makes me laugh every morning. Thank god they consistently are on top of the Arbitron ratings. That show has local flavor (always plays Buckeye tunes and have Buckeye bits during football season, and whenever an OSU team is doing well), is fun as hell to listen to becuase they just have some of the most off the wall crap. They even have a band called the Zootsuits that sing parody tunes. Very good. Now after they go off, well, let's jsut say the music sucks alot.....too much Britney Spears and 'Nsync type stuff. Occasionally they play something good. After the morning, it's back to 610. Of course they have some syndicated stuff during the day....Rush, Glenn Beck (replacing the ICKY Dr. Laura) and the afternoon dirve tim eyou have local guys John Corby, after him you have the show with no name (Sterling), and then late night Steve "Boom Boom" Cannon. After Cannon goes off you have Art Bell for you X-files folks and in the am you have local radio god Bob Connors. All in all they are nice to listen to and they have the Hineygate parties during every home buckeye game. The weekend seems to be adding a bit more of the automated crap, but they still have a local gardening show and a couple of local hosts. Clear Channel has left the top rated stations alone here in Columbus. That's a good thing!
Gorkman
The reason why XM and Sirius satellite radio exists today is the fact that we have megacorporations owning large swaths of terrestrial radio stations that have pretty much market-researched all the fringe (and some not-so-fringe) music formats out of existance.
Right now, most radio stations play the following formats: Adult Contemporary, Hip-Hop, Heavy Metal and Country & Western formats for new music, plus a tightly-controlled selection of oldies. What happened to stations that play Classical, New Age, ethnic, Easy Listening, and wide-selection Oldies music?
This is where XM and Sirius satellite radio fills the niche. With some 100 channels of audio programming to fill the result is a major resurgence of music formats on these systems that are sorely missed on terrestrial radio today (like the formats I mentioned).
Yes, I give the nod to college radio stations that are playing a very wide selection of music, but alas, the vast majority of college radio stations don't have powerful enough signals to reach a wide audience like the more mainstream terrestrial broadcasters.
In the meantime, our CAPITALIST markets helped create this thing called the Internet...
The Internet was created by the DOD, part of the evil statist socialist government. I guess it must be worthless then, not being created by the holiness of free enterprise.
Get a clue.
.cc domains. They exerted defacto exclusive control over the domain until their marketing campaign failed. The 600 residents of the Cocos Islands have zero control (or interest) in the .cc namespace.
.sr domain, you essentially have all the rights of "ownership".
At the time of the promotion 18 months ago, a Clear Channel affiliate was the exclusive registrar of
So if you control a massive Fortune 500 company called "Silly Rabbit", and make a deal with Suriname or some other obscure coutry in partnership with VeriSign to exclusively market the
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
CD101 was the one thing I missed when I moved from Columbus to Cleveland. Cleveland radio, with the exeption of a few hi-or-miss college stations (most notably WRUW 91.1FM out to Case Western Reserve University), is a mess of corporate top 40 garbage. It's a good thing my car has a CD player.
Every once in a while I fire up the CD101 webcast to see what I'm missing.
Monopolies exist under all different forms of Government. One thing we do have is choice (which is definately a result of people thinking outside the box as you describe). So ClearChannel runs most of radio. There are tons of Internet radio stations popping up. Satellite radio now offers quite a bit of choice. Additionally, nothing is stopping independent radio stations from popping up. The ultimate choice is just buying the music and listening to what you want; the U.S. produces an extremely diverse selection of music/programming. Where there is niche demand, there are niche suppliers.
The bigger issue is unfair practices (much through the lobbying government) that limit choice. Trying to kill Internet radio through ridiculous fees or banning technology (like an mp3 player), which results in limiting the alternatives to programmed radio. These are just a few examples.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Just like George Lucas and the other vendors of schlock film don't have to worry about the millions of over-30 people who don't watch 40 movies a year, the Warners and Sonys and such don't really care about the millions of over-20's who only buy a handful of albums each year, and get a lot more bang for their buck by peddling one mega-star whose every bit of merchandise kids will eat up. The savvy mature music listener isn't enough of an economic force to displace the Brittney Spears and boy-bands from the center stage, or from the radio.
Promotion/resale != ownership
Did you actually read that article you linked to? It says that Clear Channel entered an agreement to promote and resell - it did not say that Clear Channel owned, controlled, or otherwise influenced the TLD.
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
Last weekend I went down to the beach and a local radio station was having a "battle of the bands" (corny, but it was cool) where they had several local bands play sets. Not only were they helping local bands to get play time (and the bands were quite good), they also specifically billed themselves as the only non-corporate "anti-clearchannel" radio station around.
Whenever I hear about clearchannel I think of the movie "Airheads"
Travis
Dream Theater
Jawbox
Dar Williams
Heather Nova
Nevermore
:)
Clear Channel is losing billions/year. Also, read the series that salon.com has run on CC.
Best Slashdot Co
> Yeah, so the small radio stations sold to the big guys, and clear channel has a monopoly. If they abuse the monopoly, the could be facing trouble
> down the road.
Unless of course they can buy enough influence in Congress to get the right legislation. After all, the strategy is working so far for the RIAA, MPAA, and isn't doing too badly by Microsoft, either.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Those Salon pieces are an excellent companion to the Post piece. They show how CC is not only killing radio, it's damaging the music industry and making it even more difficult for new bands to make a go of it.
Best Slashdot Co
I'm not sure how "voluntary" many of these sales were. They weren't compelled, in the sense that property is occasionally condemned for a new road or public facility, but that's about all you can say about it.
Imagine for a moment that you're the owner of a local station (or small chain), and someone like Clear Channel decides they want your radio station. You're making enough to meet payroll, sponsor some community events, but you don't have deep cash reserves. Then CC comes in and tells you to sell for a lowball price.
You refuse - and they tell all of your advertisers that there's a new sheriff in town. If they sign exclusive agreements with CC stations, they get an ad rate substantially lower than what you can offer. It's far below cost to CC also, but they can pull in money from other stations nationwide.
But if they don't agree to that exclusive agreement, they're blacklisted by CC stations. Accounts are closed (even if that involves penalties), and even after they're removed from the blacklist (when CC is the only game in town) they'll never get prefered customer rates.
How long do you think you'll hold onto customers? A few may say with you, but anyone running ads on multiple stations will be forced to dump you. And all CC needs to do to target your advertisers is hire an intern to listen to your station and jot down what ads they hear.
This isn't an abusive monopoly since CC doesn't yet have a monopoly in that market, but it's as unfair as an unlimited stakes poker game where one player has $100 and another has $1000, and you can't not play.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Fuckin A. I dunno who you are, but you have exquisite taste (meaning, of course, they match my own). I first discovered Ayreon on Napster when I found an mp3 of Bruce singing with them...
Anyway, good stuff.
Remember, folks, they're in this for MONEY. So they're looking for widest appeal. That's right. The bland stuff. The stuff that offends as few as possible while retaining an interest group.
Look at it another way: You pay to see bands you like. A bar would book a band that attracts their clientele. If the band is good, expect a cover charge.
That's all well and good. Now do this without the cover charge, for a population of hundreds of thousands, on a daily basis. Do you even begin to see the problem?
Yeah, radio is bland. It's mostly boring because you really don't like what they're putting on the air.
But don't let me stop you. If you feel so strongly, why not put your money where your mouth is, and rent some radio station time for a month. Try to come up with music that will amuse and engage your listeners every single day. Oh, and while you're doing this, try to come up with some way of attracting advetisers to pay your bills.
Good Luck!
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
While the article talks about Clear Channel's massive amount of stations, I don't think most people realize just how many stations they have until they see a list of them.
So, on that note, check out the list of stations that Clear Channel owns:
http://www.cjr.org/owners/clearchannel.asp
Go ahead, pick out the stations in your town. There are 5 in mine, and all of them are just awful; they play the same songs on an almost daily basis.
The idea that ideas are even "property", an sich, is a pretty new thing, going back maybe 200 years at most.
Trying to frame the notion of ideas in the context of the Marxist debate over "property" (which really only works for physical things of economic value: excludable and limited) is conceding the real (cultural) battle.
DNA just wants to be free...
Still one of the best independent stations around is, as Rain Man said:
97x... Bam... the Future of Rock and Roll
97x... Bam... the Future of Rock and Roll
97x... Bam... the Future of Rock and Roll
I Heart Sorting Networks
I recently heard about how many of the major UK stations broadcast Pete Tong's radio show (on friday evenings), which apparently showcases the best of the cutting-edge dance electronica. From what I understand, he chooses a playlist based solely on his own opinion, and has since become rather respected in the dance community, to where you've really made it if Pete Tong plays your song. What's your experience with this? Is the show good? Any more info?
c-hack.com |
Station call letters need to be read on the hour, immediately followed by the name of the city in which their licence is registered. After that, most usually announce the city they primarily serve.
For instance, my local modern rock station, WWDX has a recording that at the beginning of every hour says "92.1 The Edge, WWDX, St. Johns, Lansing" in a 'edgy' radio voice. Where's St. Johns? I don't even know. But Lansing's definitely the market.
-Grant
My stupid web site
Yes. W is where we put the New Country Hits stations. K is for Pop Music and Alternative.
I probably don't need to say this, but just to keep any non-United Staters from being ill-informed, the parent comment is extreme bullshit.
-Grant
My stupid web site
What I don't understand is why ANYONE listens to radio? At all?
I listened to radio in the 80s because I was a kid (read: poor) and new music I liked came out every week. I recorded music off the radio and that's why I sat listening to the radio for hours, waiting for the song I wanted to be played again and hoping the DJ would shut up rather than talk through the intros and fade-outs.
Later in the decade, when I got employed, I went back and bought CDs of all the music I liked. That's about the same time I stopped listening to radio. It wasn't a conscious decision, it's just that I had the music I wanted on CD and, in my opinion, good music tapered off near the beginning of the 90s.
Now we're in the year 2002. Poor teenagers (as I was in the 80s) no longer have to listen to radio to record the music they want, they just download it from P2P. Those that are truly interested in "new/non-commercial music" can also just pop online rather than hoping that there is some local "non-corporate" radio station that plays the weird music they're after.
The fact is, regardless of what station you listen to, corporate, non-corporate, reggae, whatever, it's doubtful you'll like every song they play. In fact, you probably won't like half of them. When you factor in commercials and the DJ talking you're lucky to hear a couple songs you like over the course of an hour. Why bother? I just pop in my one of my mix CDs and I know every song I hear I will like.
I only listen to radio 1) sometimes when I'm driving cross-country by myself I turn on a TALK station, it kind of keeps you company and keeps you "engaged" in the discussion. 2) when there's nasty weather or nasty traffic I surf the stations looking for some station reporting on it. I usually have better luck on AM.
Other than that, why bother and why care? Download the music you like, burn it, listen to it. A whole lot less complicated and more likely you'll enjoy the music you're listening to.
Wilco is proving that the bottom line about sales is the quality of music. They were at 13 on Billboards chart last week. Big lable? not any more, they bought their album back from mr big. Their latest album was available online forever and a day before its market launch. People still bought it, and are still buying it.
Clear Channel owns stock in XM. The info can be found in the links from this previous story about FightCloud CDs
those stations wouldn't be popular if the music wasn't popular (for whatever reasons that music is...
The music is popular because Clear Channel makes it popular.
the fact that those mom-and-pop stations voluntarily sold their stations
How are you sure it was as voluntary as you claim? How are you sure they weren't somehow blackmailed into it?
It means those people who feel they are disenfranchised need to start their own radio stations, non-commercial
The low-power FM program you speak of has been, in effect, discontinued. From http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/getstat.html: "Applications for construction permits for new LPFM stations or major changes to LPFM permittees or licensees cannot be filed until the next application filing window period. We cannot advise as to when the next application filing window might be." This is government-speak for "We cannot guarantee that there will be a next application filing window." According to this list of prior window dates, there hasn't been a new filing window in nearly a year.
or commercial
If you are commercial, you and your advertisers will be harassed by Clear Channel, as coyote-san wrote.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even though the subject matter (use of marijuana) and show's name ("Club Cannabis") were agreed upon beforehand Clear Channel backed out. It should be noted that it was a sales representative of Clear Channel who came up with the idea for the show and had already sold ad spots (they got 4 minutes per show)
What kind of company is Clear Channel. When asked to comment company spokeswoman Pam Taylor said, "We don't talk to Salon."
Playing with Clear Channel is like playing with M$: "If you go to bed with the dogs don't complain about getting fleas (or rabies).
pherris
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
The playlists were generated exclusively by listener votes. Ballots were everywhere around town and on every island where the signal could reach. They were tallied every week.
You'd vote for ten songs to put or keep in rotation, ten songs to dump and three songs that would be a hit if radio played it (those songs received proportionately more vote weight).
It made for an eclectic mix, with votes from outside the main demographic also receiving more weight. I heard hundreds of songs on RFH that I'd never heard before, and never heard since--but I loved almost all of them.
Sadly, since the music was so diverse they couldn't claim a single demographic and placed last in the Arbitron ratings that are so necessary for advertising dollars. The station collapsed in 1997 for lack of revenue, despite most of the djs being paid near-volunteer wages.
I know for a fact that the station was the most listened-to station when it was on the air, but the screwed-up Arbitron rating system forced them out of business.
You can see how eclectic the playlist was at the top 300 archive. And also why it was doomed to fail. Back in 1994, this was not corporate music, even though much of it has been adopted by corporate radio since then.
So if I start moving all my domains to ".sr" (the assigned country code of Suriname), and promote them as "Silly Rabbit", this somehow changes who owns the TLD?
.cc stands for the Coconos if 90% of the people have been convinced that it stands for 'clear channel'? Not really. Think of the frustration RMS feels when his GNU system is almost always referred to as "Linux" giving him zero credit for having written most of the system ... now imagine trying to explain to someone living in Colombus, Ohio (or another medium-sized city with only Clear Channel stations to listen to, and no other real choice) that .cc doesn't stand for what every rock, country, and talk station has been telling them it does, but for an obscure collection of islands somewhere 'out there' instead. You'll be even less well received than RMS has been.
.cc under their name, but it certainly looks as though they tried, and had they succeeded it would not have been the first time in recent history that mass media would have succeeded in redefining what was 'true' and what wasn't ... that is one of the things that make these media cartels so powerful, after all.
Effectively it does, if you control all of the radio and television that the majority of people in the US can get their information from.
If you repeat a deception, even an outright lie, long enough and loudly enough people will believe it. Does it really matter that
Granted, Clear Channel doesn't appear to have succeeded in their effort to rebrand
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Taste isn't something that people just have, it's something that develops in relation to what they're exposed to. The British Invasion of the mid 60s happened because because the kids who made up its troops had been exposed not just to Elvis but to Chicago blues, and so developed their taste by working the stuff out on their own instruments and adding their local dance hall sensibility. Then - what almost never happens today - other people figured out how to promote and sell it. The white American audience, already with a taste for pop and rock, developed a taste for what the British kids were doing because there was something obviously stronger and more resonant to it - which turns out to have largely been their direct sourcing of the blues. The taste of the public and musicians moved upwards in linked spirals, with an associated spiral of marketing and promotion.
Taste is no excuse. Bad taste on the part of the public is a failure of marketing. Bad taste on the part of musicians is a failure of distribution of authentic influences. There are many different kinds of beauty, but ugliness is all the same. And there's more money, in the longer term, to be made by selling the quality product - even if you're always selling against the stupidity of the market, even if short-term pure exploitation and hype seem to be winning the game.
The real problem is that higher standards of taste aren't confined to the aesthetics of mass marketed art, but extend into standards for politics and stewardship of the Earth. That's why the music industry was reined in in the early 70s, and why children today are raised to the equivalent of the Monkees and the Partridges, exclusively.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If payola was the reason for the dullness and sameness of broadcast radio, then why is it that you only hear the same 10 songs on 80s channels? Ditto classic rock stations? If paying for playtime on top hits stations explains why they're dull and the same, then there must be a *different* reason for the dullness and sameness on every other kind of commercial station...
Or, perhaps it's all just due to corporate conservatism and a 'stick-with-what-has-worked' do-nothing take-no-risks attitude. Look at network television and reality series #4232, or the computer games industry and RTS FPS game #2189, or the movie industry and stupid action flick #12092. Occam's razor, people. It's not payola.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Each track is assigned a "burn" score, a measure of how "burned out" the target audience has become; when the score passes a certain level, the tune disappears.
This is what pisses me off most of all. Obviously, they play the "hits" to death. But what makes the stations so unbearable is that you only hear one song from any given artist in a week or month. As soon as a new single is released, you never hear earlier songs form the album again. More than anything else, this shows me that the stations are just a big marketing tool with no taste in music. Sickening.
Evil is the money of root.
... looks grim.
/.ers are, from what I can tell, aren't mainstream.
Radio is a business, like any other. The object is to spend less money than you take in. Turn a profit. Keep your owners (investors, individuals, corporate sire, whatever) happy. The income for these stations comes from advertising and selling air-time to whoever wants to buy it. The reason "it sucks" is because the advertisers want to get their message to their target audience, and they have very specific target audiences. If "market research" shows the mainstream target audience wants to hear a non-stop beat-mix of Brittney Spears and Weird Al Yankovic, that's what the station will play, because that's what the advertisers will pay to advertise on.
The "mainstream" listeners are the targets. They don't really care about the niche markets or the fringe because there's no advertising money in niche markets or the fringe.
Why are listeners abandoning radio? Lots of factors. 6-disk in-dash CD players for the morning commute. MTV or the CD player at home. MP3 collections on the file server. Simple bordom with "mainstream" mass media music. Tired of 40% commercials. Whatever.
Are college stations, pirate stations, or internet broadcasters an alternative? Of course they are. Are they "better"? If they serve -your- niche market, they certainly are - for you at least. It's one reason I have an internet station of my own - I can cater to my own tastes.
Is radio dead? No. But it's ill. If the radio markets all collapse and the big conglomerates start abandoning stations we may see a change back to "the good old days" when stations took risks and used variety to compete for listeners. I just wouldn't count on it.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
I'll concede that most of the stuff on college radio sucks. And I'll give it to you that most of the stuff on commercial radio is good (if you define good as "liked by a lot of people." Which is really the only way you can define good, but that's another story). But there's a huge middle ground of really amazing music that you'll never hear on commercial radio. I just posted a short list of my favorite ambient and downtempo works. Specifically, Thievery Corporation and Nightmares on Wax make great records with catchy tunes, any of which could be a hit single. Why aren't they on the radio? They don't have a major label to force their songs into rotation. You'll see linux exposed as a corporate scam before you hear Ani DiFranco's latest album, Reveilling/Reckoning played on a commercial station. Why? It certainly doesn't suck. I've been known to listen to the Reckoning side 3 times a day, and I don't even like her politics. The reason is the same as before. Her label doesn't have the money/power/connections to get them airplay. Theivery and Ani both own their own labels (ESL and Righteous Babe, respectively), and apparently have chosen to give the finger to the major ones. These are the folks you should buy CDs from if you really want to stick it to the RIAA. A drop in sales of a major label can always be blamed on something like the economy or piracy. But a drop in sales, while at the same time, smaller labels see sales soaring? All of the sudden your pirate scapegoats are gone.
Yes, it is the most logical conclusion that what we see on MTV and hear on Clear Channel's stations is the best we can get, if you only compare it to wierd college stuff and crappy indie rock, but it's simply not true. There's a lot of better stuff out there. I listen to it all the time.
c-hack.com |
These people have looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Has anyone mentioned internet radio as an alternative? Ok, it's broadband only in terms of possible audience... but that doesn't stop me from listening to Bassdrive.com all day, everyday.
Sure it is usually non-mainstream music. Who cares if it doesn't appeal to the widest, most general audience?
The key of internet radio is that you can usually find what you like. I have stations that play early 90's jungle, hard-step, tech-step, garage two-step, jungle-ragga, acid jazz, russian pop/rock, independent US hip-hop, french hard core.
Ok so it might just be me listening to it. Oh, boo-hoo. Either you listen to what you like with the distinct possibility of ostracising yourself from the mainstream, or accept the shill Godsmack/Creed/DMB so you can talk to other folk about music/hit bigger shows with your friends. Of course then you can pay your 400 bucks for a Rolling Stones ticket.
And that is another thing: underground/independent metal, rock, death metal, electronica, detroit house, hip-hop, and jazz have all survived very well without any help of the mainstream. Steve Albini, Martin Adkins, El-P. Sometimes you have to accept that most people aren't looking for what you are serving.
But if you like this kind of thing, this may be the sort of thing you kind of like.
What is music when you despise all sound?
They do exist, but the fact that they can and do exist means that competing interests can exist and arise as well.
In a Communist society, everything is mandated from The State, which generally ends up enforcing purely Intellectual ideals upon a very human populace which almost inevitably ends up suffering very terribly. When 'the box' is mandated by The State in 'the interest' of The People (as opposed to just 'people'), thinking outside that box is generally (historically) punishable by death, directly or otherwise.
Socialism is lots of fun to think about it when you're a frustrated twenty-something in America, feeling like everyone is having a good time but you and your dysfunctional friends at the poetry slam, and that if we could just 'bring down' the 'megacorporations' and let everyone have everything for free, everything would be so cool and you could all hang out, protest and smoke pot in peace and never have to go to work, but in reality, it is Democracy and Capitalism that has put you in a situation where you have the safety, stability and resources to get on a thing like the Internet with your computer and babble wistfully about Socialism to begin with!
**>>BELCH
A little OT, but interesting. The more I get into blues, the more I find myelf saying "hey, that's a Zeppelin song!" Check this out:
You Shook Me, I Can't Quit You Baby- Willie Dixon
Whole Lotta Love- based on Willie Dixon's "You Need Love"
Gallows Pole, In my time of Dying- not sure, but I swear I heard them on some obscure blues CD
When the Levee Breaks- Memphis Minnie
Nobody's Fault but Mine- Blind Willie Johnson
Is this thievery? I don't think Johnson was even credited (someone correct me if I'm wrong). I'd say, no way. Simply covering a song makes it your own. And I for one have no problems with Zeppelin coming to America, homogenizing our music, and feeding it back to us. It's all good.
c-hack.com |
It's a constant source of amazement to me that the big record labels keep whining about their revenues dropping due to piracy. Did it ever occur to them, even once, that their declining sales just might be due to the fact that people simply don't like what they're putting out? That they may not care for what they're hearing on commercial radio?
Fifteen years ago, I was buying 5-20 CD's a MONTH. I found much to listen to in terms of 'New Age' (primarily instrumental, related to Jazz) artists like Ray Lynch, Michael Manring, Checkfield, Pat Metheny, etc., to say nothing of rediscovering all of my rock-and-roll faves from earlier years.
Guess what? Almost all of what I bought were copies of what I had already heard on commercial radio. KKSF, in the Bay Area, to be exact, plus a few other stations playing "classic" rock.
Granted, there have been a few of the more recent vocal groups and singers that have caught and held my interest; Don Henley, when he went solo from the Eagles, Bruce Hornsby, Bryan Adams, etc. HOWEVER -- The real reason my CD buying has dropped like a rock (maybe two a year if that) in the past decade or so is because I'm not hearing hardly anything worth listening to, either on or off the radio.
Music, to me, is a form of storytelling. Whether it's fact, fiction, or somewhere in between doesn't matter to me as long as it is sung with a good voice ('from the heart' is a good way to put it), and with DECENT music to back it up.
By 'decent,' I'm referring to the idea that the singer also be the songwriter, if not also playing their own instrument. Jimmy Buffett is a great example. He has a band, yes, but he also plays guitar and Lord only knows what else, and he writes his own material for the most part.
I think what I miss the most about today's (alleged) "pop" music is that much of it is as empty of real meaning, of real 'heart' if you will, as the Mojave Desert is empty of water in midsummer. Real musicians put a lot of their own personality and feeling into their work, and that's what makes it unique.
Anyway, it seems (to my ears) that the only "good" stuff is showing up on the few independent stations left, and on "web radio." This pisses off the big labels, though, because they now seem to think that music should be lip-syncing "pop stars," dressed in glittery costumes with colors that no living creature would be caught dead in, putting on a show that I don't think even a Las Vegas producer would touch with a 3.048 meter pole.
Can't have any real creativity running around now, can they? It shines a bad light on their predigested pap-spewing money-machine, and makes the way they've been trying to trample fair-use rights look even more greedy and stupid than it already is.
Unimaginitive jerks...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
The Internet was created by the DOD [zakon.org], part of the evil statist socialist government.
No, the backbone of the early internet, and the initial sites, were FUNDED by the government, and created by many private companies that bid for the contracts. Then the internet EXPLODED when the capitalist market started to see the potential for it. None of which would have happened had our government truly created and ruled over the internet, as would have happened in the USSR or China. (The closest we'll ever come to a communist/socialist government.)
"And like that
I don't know if anyone else mentioned it (and apologies if they did - I didn't read the whole thread), but Salon.com ran a series of articles last year (roughly) that exposed the extent of this radio silliness... Much more info than this article, and an uglier painting too.
The zillions of dollars of debt, it seems to me, are going to be the downfall of clearchannel. Okay, so they aggregated 30% of the US market for a while... after another while, it all falls apart. Lather, rinse, repeat. Isn't there a Norse myth like this?
I'm really thinking about buying an mp3 player for my car. I can put hours of music on it. No commercials, no interruptions, no repeats in the course of my drive. Yeah.
The middle mind speaks!
Well thank god you're here to show the un-enlightened sheep the way.
Yeah, actually, thank God people like him are here. Typical reaction to someone with taste and a voice. Call us "music Nazis", but we hate boring music.
You know what else? It's because of those sheep that I can't turn on my radio in Dallas without grinding my teeth to stumps. I sure wish someone would show them the way, and maybe it'll be this guy. What's it to you?
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
I know this will come off sounding like a shameless plug for a radio station, but the folks at CD101 [cd101.com] in Columbus really have it right. They are one of the only non-corporatized radio stations in the city, and have won the local "Columbus Magazine" award for best radio station for the past 10 years or so.
Yea, a bit south of you down here in Oxford, OH we have WOXY 97X which is a killer indie station.
Too bad I am more of an electronic listener than indie rock, but they do play a bunch of stuff I like.
Does the Andyman-a-thon have anything to do with Andyman's Treehouse? I am moving to Grandview in two months and trying to feel out the scene.
You are good. Here's how your predictions match Fort Wayne, Indiana, a city of about 200,000:
I'm betting they have a modern hard rock station (Staind, Disturbed, Kid Rock, Korn, Godsmack)
Extreme 102.3.
a "Good Times, Great Oldies" station
Sunny 106.3 (1940s to 1960s) and Oldies 101.7 (1950s to 1970s).
a Classic Rock station which for some reason mixes in quite a bit of 80s hair metal
WBYR-FM 98.9 The Bear.
A top-40 station that caters to the teenybopper crowd
WMEE-FM 97.3.
a "No-repeat workday" light-rock mix-it up station for the office-crowd
WAJI Majic 95.1 (1970s-today)
"Talk-Radio" with call-in shows hosted by a crowd of conversers who hash and re-hash the same 30 minutes of subject matter over and over their 3-hour show segments.
WOWO and WGL (both on AM).
We used to have a dance station (Killer Bee 106.3), but it attracted too many under-18 listeners (the ones that don't yet have money to pay advertisers) and was pressured to redefine itself into a modern hard rock station (Storm 106.3) and then a moldy oldies station (Sunny 106.3).
Will I retire or break 10K?
How can you say the station with "Elliot in the Morning" is decent at anything?
If one was to look up "suck-ass sellout corporate radio station with typical asinine dork 'radio personalities'" in the dictionary, DC101 would be the example.
And then we have WHFS "Modern Rock" - supposedly 'Alternative' - alternative to what? Country and Western? Turning the goddam radio off?
It's too bad one of the last good radio stations in the area, WRNR (Eastern Shore / Annapolis), can't beef up their signal into the DC area. But then they would just be assimilated into the DC radio shitpile just like all the rest.
If I sound a little pissed about the state of DC radio - it's because I am. My car doesn't have a tape or CD player!
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
actually, elliot also plays "mary mac" - my personal favorite. They played most of the songs off welbilt's album a week ago and had them in studio last week. I look forward to more of the same in the future.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
Tyranny of the majority? I'd say using the word "Tyranny" is kind of a loaded word, and redundant. Nobody wants Tyranny of anything. The fact is, the only good form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. The only problem is locating a benevolent dictator. The same applies in locating a benevolent president, congress, parliment, or outright votership as in a "pure" democracy.
Bottom line is, people suck, and should not be trusted to govern. themselves or others. period. Unfortunately, there just ain't no alternative.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That's why I have a 10 disc CD changer in my car.
With the exeption of a classical station I occasionally listen to, I haven't listened to commercial radio in years. College stations excepted, but then, they don't have the problems Clear Channel and any other "popular" music format stations have.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
You can't measure number of radio listeners.
That's why natioanally syndicated shows like Dr Demonto are more common in small towns than big cities. It works like this: The syndicating group (in this case, Westwood One Radio Network) wants to change the radio stations that carry their show based on how big an audience it reaches. But since they can't actually tell how many people are listening in your area, they instead base the price on how many *could* be listening in the area. Therefore radio stations who's broadcast area contains more population have to pay more to carry the syndicated show, regardless of how many people in that area actually tune in to the show.
So then the Dr Demonto show is too expensive for a radio station to carry in a big city, but acceptably priced in small towns.
So how is this relevant? Well, they wouldn't be using such a sloppy pricing scale if they actually had a means of measuring number of listeners. As flawed as the Neilson's are for TV ratings, radio doesn't even have anything *that* good.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Here's the problem with this theory: monopolies are in the best position to take advantage of new technologies and become monopolies in them as well.
Case in point: IBM. IBM was founded in the 1800's as a punch card monopoly. A variant of the Jacquard loom allowed you to sort, perform simple sums, etc., on stacks of punch cards, and every big buisness had built up a library of punched card stacks (literally a data warehouse). And IBM was the #1 supplier of punch cards and punch card equipment, holding a monopoly over the market as great as it ever held over the computer market. When computers were introduced in the late fourties/early fifties as buisness tool, IBM moved into computers to protect it's punch card monopoly.
IBM held onto it's monopoly position in computers using tactics as scummy and evil as any Microsoft has used (see Big Blue for details) for over 30 years. They only made one mistake: they made a computer where IBM did not make the CPU and write the Operating System, the original PC. Which lead to the fall of IBM and the rise of the Wintel duopoly. I make a very strong case that the IBM monopoly, started in the 1880's, is very much alive and well, just not IBM's anymore.
Every other monopoly I am aware of has fallen to goverment action. Every one. From United Shoe to Standard Oil to AT&T. Long before technological innovation could overthrow them (if, indeed, technological innovation *can* overthrow a monopoly- an unproved assumption).
That's what I think will happen as well. As nanotech, AI, robotics, and other advances provide us with an economy of abundance decades down the road, a new form of "communism" (economic, not political) will probably slowly evolve. (Or maybe we'll end up with the darkside: corporate feudalism... or maybe a worldwide totalitarian state with John Ashcroft as its first Dicktator. I don't know... ask Harry Seldon)
Capitalism won't go away completely however. No matter how efficient we get, we've still got five fundamentally scarce resources to balance infinite human wants: time, energy, matter, space and intelligence.
--
Power to the Peaceful
People have been keeping secrets since the beginning of time.
I'd venture to say that the Venetians guarded their secret so closely because they understood the critical difference between an idea and a physical object. I'm sure they weren't worried about the eyeglasses themselves except as ordinary physical property.
There may be arbitrarily many pairs of eyeglasses (which cannot be easily shared), but there is only one idea of a specific method of manufacture, which must by definition be shared among those who "possess" it.
If posession of a physical thing meant the same as the posession of an idea, consider what it would be like if the eyeglasses were treated in the same fashion as the ideas about their manufacture. They certainly wouldn't be selling them.
DNA just wants to be free...
Technically Marxist communism is merely workers being in charge of the companies they work for. Something like an employee-owned business that doesn't sell portions of itself on the stock market would qualify. Somewhere along the line it became synonymous with full-on socialism and that connotation has never once gone away.
The silly thing is that communism and capitalism are not opposite ends of the same spectrum as people seem to believe. Take for example the Amana commune - an appliance-building money-making collective.
The real opposites are full-on capitalism and full-on socialism. Both are extremes, in one case leading to a monopoly in charge of everything, and in the other leading to a government in charge of everything. In *BOTH* cases, the problem is that any sufficiently gigantic organization is no longer beholden to the people that made it big, and can abuse its power without reproach. And that's true regardless of whether the gigantic organization is a government or a corporate monopoly. When there's only one game in town, it's bad news for the little guy, either way.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Sadly I only heard of them in 1999, so I never got to see them live (and I live in Athens! Graaa!) though I have had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Jeff once or twice. He's an interesting fellow.
Fortunately last year I saw the Circulatory System, and Mr. Mangum sang on 4 of the songs. His voice is so... bizarrely amazing.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
What!? Three!? I've only heard Stairway to Heaven and Black Dog! I thought there were only two sides of a record!
That is all.