Radio Is the Worst Place To Listen To Music, Says Jay Z (qz.com)

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."

Comments

Radio is dead

[jandrese]

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.

Re:But radio plays a lot of Jay Z

[hey!]

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.