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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."
. . . of the shittiest, dumbest, least original music the world has ever seen. Seriously, fuck this guy. Why is this on Slashdot?
Over here in the UK, we had the mighty, the master, the supreme genius of John Peel. And boy, did he do something for music. He single-handedly launched the music careers of countless artists. There is a reason that Glastonbury, that most wonderful and muddy of places, renamed 'The New Bands Tent' to 'The John Peel Stage'. Who can you name on your local / national radio stations who actually does 'a show about music'? DJs today play songs, they don't engage with bands outside of carefully crafted commercial moments. Weird to say, really, but on this I pretty much wholesale agree with Jay Z.
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.
Elok
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.
Dissenter
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
Narrowing the targeted demographic to young females is a bad marketing strategy. Besides radio, television and retail malls had the same target audience - young females who are impulsive buyers and impressionable. Television eventually became saturated with poor program material and the ads became longer and more frequent. That had no appeal to the rest of the demographic and they drove away a large body of viewers. For the last ten years there have been a growing number of viewers who gave up broadcast television and cut the cable. The only time I watch TV is in the hotel room when I am traveling, and it has gotten steadily worse - with the barrage of ads, a 90 minute movie is dragged out to three hours with literally 10 minutes of ads for every ten minutes of program (I timed it).
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.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
"Pop stations" are not "radio". He is not describing anything new here. "Pop" stations have always sucked compared to more specialized stations that focused on a specific genre. While there certainly was a commercial aspect in the later too there was also more experimentation and a little crossover. It was not uncommon for a "rock" focused station to play a Bob Marley tune just because it was really really good.