Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked!
. . . of the shittiest, dumbest, least original music the world has ever seen. Seriously, fuck this guy. Why is this on Slashdot?
I don't listen to radio. I do watch MTV however. Almost all of the "hit songs" with "expensive music videos" rotating on MTV are simplistic compositions that are not the work of a "great artist". Music today is a far cry from the 20th Century - very manufactured, very simple, very made-for-money and very forgettable. Where are today's U2, Metallica, Pearl Jam and other great bands? Where are music albums with 10 tracks where 6 to 7 of those tracks are actually good? It seems to me that music has fallen victim to a "it has to make money from teens, it has to make money from teens, it has to make money from teens" mindset that produces only forgettable music tracks. Its the same thing that happened to movies - who in God's name needs to 30 same-feeling horror/comic book hero movies every year? The solution is simple - ALLOW GENUINE ARTISTS TO PRODUCE SOMETHING ACTUALLY GOOD. The rest is design-by-committee, made-for-quick-bucks trash that nobody will even remember in the 2020s. We had actually talented artists in the 20th Century. Now we have The Chainsmokers for music and film directors who can't pace a movie or frame a shot properly.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
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.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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 $$.
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
KEXP... nuff' said.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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).
Not if Johnny Cash pays you a visit.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Says the guy who has stakes in paid streaming music services.
Oh course free-to-air radio is now suddenly shit in his opinion.
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?
"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.
I think a lot of what was independent radio moved online where it can reach a bigger base that isn't limited by physical geography. With the advent of the podcast anyone can have a show about anything and reach the entire planet (Local internet censorship rules apply. Check your country's rules.) which means its possible to support doing that as a full or part time job.
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 found some group that's getting ~$46,000 per month for their podcast through donations. Fuck if I know what Chapo Trap House is or what their podcast is about, but the name alone sounds like the same kind of unique oddity that would have been on a small radio station at one point.
Previously, I probably would have never been able to discover almost any of that content. Maybe being a small local success that never quite took off and had a larger regional or national platform has adds a certain charm or mystique, but I can see why some of those content producers would want to move beyond that. Hell, if you're really niche, you may truly need a global reach just to get enough people to justify calling it an audience.
I'll grant you that it might be sad to see radio go. I've got some fond memories of listening to the local radio or even calling in a few times, but I honestly don't listen to much actual radio since I don't have a long commute to work and modern smartphones have made it easy to store hundreds of hours of music and podcasts. I can be my own curator of content.
Who cares what Jay Z says?
That would be "NOT ME".
Someone please tell this self-important blowhard to shut up and fuck off.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...