There’s a human connection element to old radio that streaming will never replicate. And I worry that it’s gone from modern automated radio too.
It used to be if you were driving down the road and heard a song you liked
Hearing a song you liked on the radio hit harder then playing it yourself because you knew that there was another human nearby at that moment in time that had picked it out and played it. You were physically tethered to them through invisible waves through the sky. Lonely road trips felt less lonely. Late night work shifts felt less alienating because there was somebody ELSE working late.
When I opened https://radio.garden/ and spun the globe the first time, I tuned to a radio station somewhere in Africa, and it gave me tingles to think that in Lagos at that same moment, some bus driver was surely listening to the same music.
It absolutely does - allegedly there’s 6 million listeners to the biggest breakfast radio show in the UK and 4 million to the second biggest. That’s 10 million in a country of about 55 million adults.
In the 90s I knew a guy in high school who walked around the school in a black trenchcoat with portable speakers tucked inside that were continuously playing Western movie themes. I can only imagine how that bit of creativity would go over these days.
I suppose it was rare enough and somewhat fun in the 90s. Maybe that guy was doing this for others to enjoy as well, or to appear singular (whether it worked or not).
Nowadays it wouldn't appear particularly exotic (portable speakers are ubiquitous) and people playing loud music (from speakers or phones) seem to do this for themselves without caring about the surrounding people, that's just highly egotistical and self-centered. It's usually not music I personally like too.
That's not fun, it's just annoying. There's already too much noise in our cities.
But if you do it right, playing (singular) music for others, reading the room and all, I'm sure it can still work.
This still exists today. When a new song gets released on YouTube for example a group of people close to it in latent space gets it recommended. By seeing a recommendation of a song in your feed you are part of a cohort of people with similar tastes.
You can still listen to the radio while driving, many people still do that, I still do that. I agree though that in essence streaming is a very alienating experience.
I don't know. I mean if that is the criteria then livestreams surely fix this because there is another human at that moment in time also and you can even interact with them. Or do you like the passive interaction that they should just play music and shut up
Yes, and I agree with a sibling comment that livestreaming is the modern equivalent, if not in ease or quality but in spirit. It's also why, despite having many movies in my library, I enjoy turning on TCM to watch old classics. I know that thousands of people at any given time are probably watching the same piece of history I am, right then.
It is a shame. I think it’s especially a shame for children and young people.
A counter to radio remaining relevant is “I can listen to whatever I want, via this digital technology”.
Fine - but young people don’t yet have a complete mental map of what culture they enjoy.
In the UK, funding for libraries and the arts (public radio, the BBC) has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity. I think that’s true in the US too.
Despite this, young people have an unprecedented amount of access to culture. Or, at least, any form of culture that can be digitally replicated.
Soulseek and Anna’s Archive are wonderful projects. But they only have as much utility as the person using them can put into the search bar.
We’re increasingly entrusting cultural education - what to put into the search bar - to algorithms that are designed not (as the BBC’s mission statement is) to “inform, educate, and entertain”, but to retain attention.
Even worse: many of these (eg, Spotify) hide real access behind subscription fees. If you grew up broke, like I did, you will understand how inaccessible this real access is.
The most motivated young people will continue to find the workarounds piracy offers, and to find other routes for cultural education.
Any young person who isn’t in that upper percentile of motivatedness might increasingly be left out. You can attribute that to a choice they have made - I think that’s wrong.
I think the joy of broadening one’s horizons is available to all, and is also difficult to learn and a strain to continue to practice. I think it must be taught.
I think this is especially true and important when everyone has a constantly-available option of algorithmically-selected pleasantness.
Human radio DJs are not optimized for pleasantness, or to serve you relevant ads based on your conversations with them. At their best, DJs are educators.
Anyone who grew up listening to radio knows that, and knows the pleasure that comes from learning not to change the channel when something new and uncomfortable-feeling comes on, just in case it ends up being something you fall in love with.
> In the UK, funding for libraries [] has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity.
Focusing on one thing here, for convenience. The problem remains that costs are up far in excess of budgets - austerity be damned! We are forced to prioritise, cutting the generally useful but "non-essential". (There is often a legal duty to the essential things)
Is a great breakdown. To illustrate my argument see Table 1. Real-terms spending per person by service area, various years (2024–25 prices)
> Within total service spending, per-person spending on children’s social care services [] increased by 11% in real terms. Spending on adult social care [] was also relatively protected, falling by only 2%. This meant much larger cuts to other services: more than 40% in the case of housing, culture and leisure, and highways and transport, and nearly 60% cuts to planning and development.
We cut what _could_ be cut, and that's a prioritisation call.
But some weird happenstance I've only recently started listening to radio, and I find it pretty good? The commercial stations are basically all unbearable, but my metro area has a half-dozen public/community/campus stations that can be enjoyable or interesting.
I just drove home, and spent 20 minutes listening to a host on the radio talking to a researcher about evolved preferences for non-mates in humans. It was pretty interesting, and not something I'd have stumbled upon otherwise.
I enjoy the radio. I have a few stations I’ll cycle through at home and in the car. But all nonprofit/college /etc.
Most US commercial radio is very bad. I don’t really understand why the playlists are so small, and why they don’t even occasionally play lesser-known songs by the big acts. Like, why don’t classic rock stations play deeper cuts by Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, etc. instead of the same hit singles over and over for decades? How can that be what listeners want? People who work in retail environments with a repeated playlist usually say they hate it for obvious reasons.
It’s as if those TV stations that show The Office and Seinfeld every night showed the same five episodes every week.
A large chunk of people turn off/change the station on anything they don't like, which may be because of even slight unfamiliarity. I remember myself being this way when very young. Even today playlist radios sometimes have popular tracks in the format that I really hate, and this can also cause me to switch. This is even worse if that track is sure to be played 10+ times a day...
Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.
People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.
And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.
I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone, except purely to test out whether it worked. I wouldn't make phone purchasing decisions based on whether or not it had a FM radio. A regulation requiring it in the ostensible name of safety would make phones somewhat more expensive and I'm skeptical that it would even help improve safety in an emergency significantly.
> I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone
One killer feature for phone-sized portable FM radios is live sports!
Some sports that have TV broadcasts but no radio broadcast will pipe the broadcast audio over an FM channel within the stadium.
Of course for sports that have a radio broadcast, you can tune directly to it.
Depending on the sport, it's really nice to get player background info, or some sports have mics on players that get piped through the radio in your ear.
I suppose Auracast could be used for that, which is a broadcast audio feature of Bluetooth Low Energy [1].
My Bluetooth pods have it. I'm not sure how well it's supported, I don't think I've ever entered a place that uses it (or I didn't notice), so I could never try it.
Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example. It's just a choice of the manufacturer to do not implement it completely, sometimes in hardware, sometimes in software. Several years ago there was SpiritFM application for Android that allowed to use FM radio on smartphones that sometimes never supported FM radio... oficially. So the only missing piece is sometimes only the software. As a result I think it wouldn't cost somewhat noticeably more to have that feature.
I don't know about "most smartphones," but the FM bits were commonly a built-in with Qualcomm and some other chipsets for a coon's age.
Even the OG Motorola Droid, of 2009, had the parts inside for an FM radio. They just weren't connected to an antenna and the default software stack didn't include any access to those parts at all.
Flagship Qualcomm-equipped Samsung phones up to the S20 or so tended to be ~similar: The FM tuner guts were usually in there, but they often weren't available to use, and even then they sometimes lacked an antenna.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. :)
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In my time, I've enabled FM radio on a few different phones that weren't advertised to have that function, sometimes with root-only hacks from grimy corners of the internet, and sometimes by just installing some software that just happened to have the right hooks.
Twenty years ago this would have been wrong with a kernel of truth. Today, it's just wrong. There were chips that integrated all this but they weren't that popular in the West and ultimately nobody cared.
And it's not a tiny kernel of truth, even iPhone(2007) had Wi-Fi/BT combo chips with FM radio. Apple was partly responsible for death of FM radio, by not implementing the software feature. That's also literally 20 years ago.
I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
> I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
"somewhat" as in the ballpark of a few cents, definitely less than $1, because it's already there in the reference designs and deliberately removing it would actually take extra work and cost far more.
I remember all the no-name/generic MP3/MP4 players had an FM radio, while Apple's iPods did not. They deliberately chose not to include one, and definitely not because of cost.
Agree. The only problem about radio is requiring wired headphones to serve as antenna.
Do flagship Snapdragon SOCs still have radio? Thinking about next GOS compatible Motorola-branded device, the first device GOS will support with Snapdragon.
My current Android phone has a FM radio that doesn't even require a wired headphone as the FM antenna is built-in. If you connect your BT headset, the FM station is heard through the BT headset in full stereo.
Of course, it is a Chinese brand who haven't forsaken FM radios. Apparently, Europeans still prefer a FM radio on their smartphones that Chinese brands that sell in Europe still retain them.
Here in USA, people don't seem to care about radio.
I loved pirate radio in London in the 90s. It was so vital. There was nowhere else that you could hear tracks that new unless you were at a club or the handful of record shops where DJs hung out. You could phone in and they would give you a shout out! We would record the Sunday specials on Kool FM and listen to them the rest of the week. Good times.
It's not quite the same, but I do like firing up https://radio.garden/ on occasion and rotating through international channels (after getting around the geoblock in the UK). Theres a random Arctic Outpost AM broadcasting from Longyearbyen I stick on for background noise.
I remember few years ago listening to a radio interviewer with popular folk singer, the interview was over the phone so host at the end said that some day this singer should visit them in studio for proper interview, to which the singer replied: "If I visit you in studio for interview, will you play some of my songs?", to which the host with slight embarrassment admitted that they are not allowed to play outside the playlist.
The BBC often does as you say and even if the interview is down a phone line they will play a record. Some shows have the musicians playing live.
Other UK stations do similar.
I've been working on a streaming platform for musicians as a passion project for the last decade partly because the analog radio shows have become a dying breed. Web-based indie radio shows are lots of fun because they're very close to the best radio shows from my own youth when most radio DJ:s still were curators and experts in the music they played. And they have the feeling of community and genuine passion for the hobby.
There's definitely still demand for quality radio shows but I guess it just makes more money if you play whatever the big studios pay you to play. But its the same thing with television as well; many indie channels on YouTube produce MUCH better content than anything you can see on the traditional TV or Netflix.
Also listened in the car but since they've recently shut down the LW tower I can't receive it anymore in the midlands, only occasionally get FM signal.
It might not work in your scenario, but I too listen to radio a lot and found the signal issues annoying. My car is pretty old and doesn't have aux/bluetooth input so I can't plug in my phone and use the Sounds app, but I got a bluetooth to FM signal transmitter and now listen to my phone through my car radio, including a lot of streaming radio.
I listen to radio a lot. NTS, FIP, Concertzender. It's a great way to discover new music and have some human presence.
Recently a DJ with excellent music taste and a deep radio-perfect voice died. I was devastated when I got the news. The two remaining radio shows in his slot were something I'll remember forever. One unbelievably raw, as it was only two days since he died, the other beautiful, as everyone came with music and stories to remember him.
Most people today can hardly remember when radio was curated live. Perhaps if you were near a small station you might have had the experience. Most major markets were completely corporate by the early 90s.
I know, my first career pick was radio, and by the time I was in college at a college radio station in the late 90s. That career path was dead unless I wanted to be in marketing or sales, which I had no interest in.
Little factoid about my username, it was my pirate station call letters from when I was running my own small station with a hand built FM transmitter in the 90s.
It died mid 80s for me too. That was when the monoculture, where everyone was listening to the same thing, just disappeared. I was just a kid so I never knew what happened. All I knew was that when I was itty bitty, I could turn the dial and find mostly the same stuff everywhere. Mid 80s onwards and it was all fractured. That fracturing continued to the point where it’s like there’s a genre and a band for every taste…which is cool, but now we don’t have a broadly shared cultural experience anymore. Ditto for television. Basically, the scarcity is gone. On the one hand, cool, but on the other, society weirdly suffers.
Well, sort of. My radio presets back in the 2000s were 101.7 WFNX, 104.1 WBCN, 107.3 WAAF, 100.7 WZLX, and 92.9 WBOS. Of those stations, only WZLX remains.
The greats - in my opinion, WBCN and WFNX - are long off the air. They were powerhouses of culture, both local and national. WFNX was the first to play Nirvana's Nevermind; Bono of U2 once said that "...without BCN, we'd all be (expletive)'d, let's face it."
Oedipus, a well-known Boston DJ since the 70s (who got started at 88.1 WMBR, MIT's station) and program director at WBCN, said of it: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed radio... Corporations were now allowed to own multiple stations in the same market and across the country. Stations were no longer programmed locally."
Meanwhile, WAAF went online-only in 2020. WBOS got delegated to an HD2 subchannel in 2004. Likewise, The Boston Globe picked up many of the radio personalities for the online-only RadioBDC, now Indie617, but that seemed dead by the mid-2010s. I hear the former WFNX DJs Henry Santoro and Julie Kramer may still have some limited presence on 89.7 WGBH.
I was recently happy to find Adam 12 (formerly of WFNX (formerly of WBCN)) still DJing on 105.7 WROR.
88.9 WERS (Emerson College's station) is doing a great job of carrying the helm of Boston music culture. Occasionally I'll also tune into 90.3 WZBC (Boston College's station), which is a more "traditional" and less "commercial" college radio station.
Just outside Boston are likewise some public and community stations with good programming - 88.3 WRPS (Rockland's public radio station) and 101.3 WFNX (Scituate's community station - love that they picked up the WFNX callsign!) are pretty good, if you're in range.
I'm reminded of Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog with her late night radio station in a lighthouse, or Lily Tomlin in Prairie Home Companion saying "Now radio's just a bunch of people yelling at each other and computers playing music". Although I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a GenZ girl doing something I had forgotten about: channel surfing.
You don't necessarily need to be near a small station these days, college stations can stream online. I listen to WXPN (UPenn) that way regularly: https://xpn.org/ (player at top of the page).
Hah, one of the only tolerable commercial-ish stations in AB is Edmonton's 89.3 CIWE that broadcasts Freeform/First Nations content - also rebroadcasts to 88.1-HD3 in Calgary.
There's so much good radio to be had since the arrival of the internet. Not even talking about online-only, but actual radio stations who also stream. Maybe there's less cool broadcast stations in any given area, but our overall exposure via internet is incredible. Just search for free-form radio. If you have a college in your area, you probably have interesting radio and DJs on the airwaves.
The article ends with giving up, ipod + KPFA news, which just seems wild. Never has there been a time where there's more music available.
KUHF used to run classical music programming nearly exclusively up until 2011. Since then it's been relegated to their HD-2 channel and ran by some computer algorithm. If all you have is an old analog radio there is genuinely nothing to listen to around here.
Jim Grey and I knew all the same people at WMHD yet somehow never ran into each other. I was an annoying high school student. Ron Dippold (he ran usenet votes for a long time) was there, among others.
When I was digging through old VHS tapes, I digitized a couple TV spots and put them on youtube; passing them along to Jim.
Best advice I got when I got to San Jose was from an old recruiter - she must have been 30!
She said the Bay Area is big, but the Silicon Valley is small.
I think about her advice a lot.
The radio world is even smaller. I tried out at WZZQ when I was in high school, but didn't make the cut.
The only radio show I ever particularly liked was Jeff Gilbert's "Brain Pain" in the late 80s, on KCMU 90.3. He played metal music, particularly from the local Seattle bands.
What was fun about it was his irreverent sense of humor, the silly contests he'd run, the ads that made no sense, and all the drugged out band members he'd invite to the station.
I still have several cassettes of Brain Pain. Lost treasures, I presume. I wound up buying many of the albums he spun.
I treasure Radio On Internet (thanks Russ (Silicon Valley joke)) so much. There's so many less but still so many independent/community/college radio stations all over.
Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org jazz/blues/local is incredible (so help ye who has to listen through the local music announcements though!) and also with a hd2. https://ksjd.org has some fun variety. https://coloradosound.org is great rock, as is https://koto.org in CO. There's nearly nothing that makes me so happy as https://mountainchill.com in telluride co; a station that makes it clear how narrowly grouped together most stations are & that just is so good.
I also listen to a bunch of others, which i'd characterize more as tier 2; good but often more ads or less reliable a win for me. weqx, wmrw-lp, kozo-lp, weru, wmpg. wsri and wwod (both "the river" 93.9, and occasionally from the right elevation in NH overlapping in signal amusingly enough).
A lot of these stations have good track listings too, broken down by the DJ, sometimes that you can play on demand. It's incredible how much excellent interesting fantastic music you can scout out or listen to.
I used to listen to endless endless reams of shoutcast stations online. But man that has really really died out something fierce. There used to be so many interesting niche stations there. It still got me started looking widely at radio stations, as a decent fraction were just regular radio stations too. Realizing how badly commercial radio would never give the goods, would play the same pop stuff all the time, and have lots of ads? Man it was sad, but there were so many excellent other things to tune into! Alas on the dial, it's largely been couple massive corporate and political/religious (all very right-wing, Powell Memorandum on and on) titans taking over as much radiowaves as they can, as stations fold and go under, in the hard times of keeping your head up in the world today, getting the building, gear, and staff's bill's payed. (Especially with the administration trying to destroy the arts broadly, gutting National Endowment for the Arts!)
I'd absolutely love for folks to throw more stations they enjoy out here. https://radio.garden is of course wicked fun to browse generally! Gets submitted every so often, often garnering some significant love. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=radio.garden
I really appreciate this comment, so I'll try to return the favor (in small part) by sharing one pretty special to me: WYCE, https://grcmc.org/wyce. Hope you enjoy.
I was still listening to Jim Ladd and Uncle Joe on Sunday nights… maybe 15-20 years ago. They’d play a whole album, say Dark Side of the Moon and tell all the stories about it, sometimes even with recorded interviews they’d done.
Today there’s KCRW locally and it’s good though getting blander.
I have Jim Ladds book, autographed. My friend went to a book signing and got it for me. It’s signed “They say it’s your birthday — Jim Ladd”.
I also saw him when he toured with Roger Waters for “Radio KAOS”. “Good night Jim.” “Good night, Billy.”
I really enjoyed him when he was at KMPC/KEDG with JJ Jackson. That station struggled to find its way, starting early on with Pat “Paraquat” Kelly and Cynthia Fox, along with Guy Kemp at night (kind of a comedy/zoo shtick — I found his show really funny). I remember calling in once when Joe Satriani was just getting airplay, and the guy who answered was yelling “Are you hearing this? Are you HEARING THIS!?”.
Live radio.
It was nice with Ladd because he had his freedom, but a wider playlist.
MARS-FM, KROQ, KNAC, Pirate Radio, 91X (from Mexico, when you can get it, but they had some power).
But, a notable memory was 1989. Tiananmen Square.
Geno Michelini, KLOS, Five o’clock funnies fame, announced the breaking news of what was happening in China, and followed it up with Rush’s “Red Sector A” from “Grace Under Pressure”. I still get a little choked up thinking about.
I am too young to know about US radio in the 80s or 90s, but I enjoy some of the local and independent stations. I even collected some of their streams after I gave up Spotify: https://yaky.dev/radio/
For those of is living in and near Seattle (and as of recently San Fransisco) KEXP is still on the air and is still amazing as ever (if not even more so).
And a very American/mainstream-centric view of things. Radio (especially from the view of things in 2009) in more niche/underground circles was and in some regards still is a driving force of music curation and community in other parts of the world like the UK, parts of the EU and beyond.
Does radio have to be on the FM band? Do we count streaming like via YouTube, twitch and other platforms the same as Radio? I'd say yes. And in that regard, the spirit of radio and the format/feel the author recalls still very much exists.
I grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1. Literally the entire population of UK teens listened to that one station for ~20 years (though individuals would listen to different shows - John Peel's famous indie/punk/whatever show in the evenings was very different to the daytime mainstream stuff).
In Australia it was ABC's Triple J - similar story. Everyone tuned in to the annual top 100 tracks of the year.
That reach has not happened since with any media that I'm aware of. It was very unifying - we were all aware of the same songs, even if we didn't like the same songs. I can sing along to Duran Duran even though I was very scathing of them at the time, in part because I was force-fed Duran Duran every day on the radio.
IMHO, FM radio stations, broadcasting on government-attributed radio frequencies, are very different - both in nature and in how they feel - from the user of a big corporation's service streaming from someone else's computers.
I never got into the habit of listening to "the radio", in the sense of an AM or FM station broadcasting over the air on some frequency in a general metropolitan area. I remember listening to the radio stations my parents liked to listen to in the car as a kid. But by the time I was old enough to drive myself, I had already owned an mp3 player for a while, and if I wanted to listen to music in (my parents') car I could plug it into a cassette deck adapter - it's not like any local radio station near me was gonna play the Final Fantasy VII OST or a mix that went from Eve 6 to Jethro Tull to Blind Guardian to an bluegrass version of the Bubble Bobble theme I found on OCRemix. Plus, no commercials.
And if I wasn't actively driving a car at the moment, I probably had something I could be doing with a computer, perhaps involving a YouTube video, or just listening to my own extremely idiosyncratic music choices, that was more interesting than a local radio station, even if I technically owned some kind of device that could receive an FM signal.
Soon enough I had a smartphone and then a smartphone with a mobile internet connection whose cap was generous enough that I didn't need to think hard about how I was using it. And it turns out that having the entire internet available to me on a handheld device subsumes everything I might get out of listening to a radio station - including the modality of listening to audio while I'm doing something else, which might well come from an internet radio station anywhere in the world.
It occurs to me when I listen to a podcast while I'm working out at the gym or driving a car today (via my phone) that the actual auditory experience of this isn't drastically different than how people were consuming talk radio shows decades ago (down the fact that many of them have ads). The techniques for speaking in an engaging way to an audience, or having an engaging conversation between multiple people, are still valid; many podcasts I listen to address listener messages on the program, just like a weekly radio show might do - some even try to replicate the experience of a listener calling in live on a phone.
The business models that work today are of course drastically different than the ones that worked on radio decades ago, and the fact that audience isn't at all limited by physical location means that the sorts of audio content that gets streamed over the internet today are systematically different from what would've been the case on a radio show. I think this is mostly for the better though - more variety, more democratic access to the medium, and no FCC to regulate what you can and cannot legally say on regulated radio spectrum.
As far as I'm concerned, everything that's good about the content of AM/FM radio has been replicated on the general internet, and I have no particular reason to care if the radio signal carrying it to my ears comes from a licensed FM station or the 5G connection from my phone to a cell phone tower.
I was always a fan of talk radio. In the late 80s and early 90s there were so many diverse and interesting talk radio shows. And many times they were local and accessible, I was able to get on the air several times. But then Rush Limbaugh exploded and eventually angry right wing politics took over everything except sports and NPR.
>I signed off the air for the last time in 1994 [...] radio has changed drastically, and it just wouldn’t be any fun for me today.
I don't agree with this premise. FM Radio is definitely more corporate today, but I grew up in the 90s and my memories of FM radio are not fond.
For my whole life it has always been materially the same, shitty, experience: occasional good songs interleaved with mediocre ones and a hefty dose of annoying unskippable ads.
The difference is that when I was a kid we didn't have streaming or even mp3 players so we just had to put up with the ads. Today I can just play songs locally off my phone via Bluetooth. No ads, no DJs, just the music I enjoy.
Most stations sucked, but there were some more fun counter culture stations.
I remember KGLE (KEGL?) Out of DFW pulling shit on their radio shows like saying the city banned smoking in cars and people flooded city government phone lines with complaints and rants, which had a lulz component that we wouldnt see again till the 4chan days.
Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)
Nowadays I have a USB drive, though I understand that's rare. Can hardly find a (car) radio that supports modern sizes these days, probably by design.
>Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)
Yes, that's an accurate description of the hassle of trying to avoid unskippable ads.
A whole bunch of local stations got bought up by a web sales optimisation company. They do a really good job tbh. They leave the radio station in tact but just advertise their ability to make websites + google seo + advertise via radio and billboard in one package. If it keeps the station going its a nothingburger.
Theres also a local christian radio station I am only aware of because the guy fixing my fence was blasting it on his stereo. They were taking donations the entire time. I am sincerely not interested but they seem to deliver what their listeners want too.
There’s a human connection element to old radio that streaming will never replicate. And I worry that it’s gone from modern automated radio too.
It used to be if you were driving down the road and heard a song you liked
Hearing a song you liked on the radio hit harder then playing it yourself because you knew that there was another human nearby at that moment in time that had picked it out and played it. You were physically tethered to them through invisible waves through the sky. Lonely road trips felt less lonely. Late night work shifts felt less alienating because there was somebody ELSE working late.
When I opened https://radio.garden/ and spun the globe the first time, I tuned to a radio station somewhere in Africa, and it gave me tingles to think that in Lagos at that same moment, some bus driver was surely listening to the same music.
Or at a stop light and the car next to you is listening/singing to the same song. Never happens anymore.
It absolutely does - allegedly there’s 6 million listeners to the biggest breakfast radio show in the UK and 4 million to the second biggest. That’s 10 million in a country of about 55 million adults.
If I turn up my volume loud enough, then the car next to me is going to be listening to the same song I am :)
If you really want a reaction here, announce that you use your phone speaker or a Bluetooth one out in public.
In the 90s I knew a guy in high school who walked around the school in a black trenchcoat with portable speakers tucked inside that were continuously playing Western movie themes. I can only imagine how that bit of creativity would go over these days.
I suppose it was rare enough and somewhat fun in the 90s. Maybe that guy was doing this for others to enjoy as well, or to appear singular (whether it worked or not).
Nowadays it wouldn't appear particularly exotic (portable speakers are ubiquitous) and people playing loud music (from speakers or phones) seem to do this for themselves without caring about the surrounding people, that's just highly egotistical and self-centered. It's usually not music I personally like too.
That's not fun, it's just annoying. There's already too much noise in our cities.
But if you do it right, playing (singular) music for others, reading the room and all, I'm sure it can still work.
Younger generation get this connection out of live streaming
This still exists today. When a new song gets released on YouTube for example a group of people close to it in latent space gets it recommended. By seeing a recommendation of a song in your feed you are part of a cohort of people with similar tastes.
You can still listen to the radio while driving, many people still do that, I still do that. I agree though that in essence streaming is a very alienating experience.
I don't know. I mean if that is the criteria then livestreams surely fix this because there is another human at that moment in time also and you can even interact with them. Or do you like the passive interaction that they should just play music and shut up
Yes, and I agree with a sibling comment that livestreaming is the modern equivalent, if not in ease or quality but in spirit. It's also why, despite having many movies in my library, I enjoy turning on TCM to watch old classics. I know that thousands of people at any given time are probably watching the same piece of history I am, right then.
It is a shame. I think it’s especially a shame for children and young people.
A counter to radio remaining relevant is “I can listen to whatever I want, via this digital technology”.
Fine - but young people don’t yet have a complete mental map of what culture they enjoy.
In the UK, funding for libraries and the arts (public radio, the BBC) has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity. I think that’s true in the US too.
Despite this, young people have an unprecedented amount of access to culture. Or, at least, any form of culture that can be digitally replicated.
Soulseek and Anna’s Archive are wonderful projects. But they only have as much utility as the person using them can put into the search bar.
We’re increasingly entrusting cultural education - what to put into the search bar - to algorithms that are designed not (as the BBC’s mission statement is) to “inform, educate, and entertain”, but to retain attention.
Even worse: many of these (eg, Spotify) hide real access behind subscription fees. If you grew up broke, like I did, you will understand how inaccessible this real access is.
The most motivated young people will continue to find the workarounds piracy offers, and to find other routes for cultural education.
Any young person who isn’t in that upper percentile of motivatedness might increasingly be left out. You can attribute that to a choice they have made - I think that’s wrong.
I think the joy of broadening one’s horizons is available to all, and is also difficult to learn and a strain to continue to practice. I think it must be taught.
I think this is especially true and important when everyone has a constantly-available option of algorithmically-selected pleasantness.
Human radio DJs are not optimized for pleasantness, or to serve you relevant ads based on your conversations with them. At their best, DJs are educators.
Anyone who grew up listening to radio knows that, and knows the pleasure that comes from learning not to change the channel when something new and uncomfortable-feeling comes on, just in case it ends up being something you fall in love with.
> In the UK, funding for libraries [] has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity.
Focusing on one thing here, for convenience. The problem remains that costs are up far in excess of budgets - austerity be damned! We are forced to prioritise, cutting the generally useful but "non-essential". (There is often a legal duty to the essential things)
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/how-have-english-councils-fu...
Is a great breakdown. To illustrate my argument see Table 1. Real-terms spending per person by service area, various years (2024–25 prices)
> Within total service spending, per-person spending on children’s social care services [] increased by 11% in real terms. Spending on adult social care [] was also relatively protected, falling by only 2%. This meant much larger cuts to other services: more than 40% in the case of housing, culture and leisure, and highways and transport, and nearly 60% cuts to planning and development.
We cut what _could_ be cut, and that's a prioritisation call.
edit: now in https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/fixing...
Great rabbit hole for my Wednesday morning! :D
But some weird happenstance I've only recently started listening to radio, and I find it pretty good? The commercial stations are basically all unbearable, but my metro area has a half-dozen public/community/campus stations that can be enjoyable or interesting.
I just drove home, and spent 20 minutes listening to a host on the radio talking to a researcher about evolved preferences for non-mates in humans. It was pretty interesting, and not something I'd have stumbled upon otherwise.
I enjoy the radio. I have a few stations I’ll cycle through at home and in the car. But all nonprofit/college /etc.
Most US commercial radio is very bad. I don’t really understand why the playlists are so small, and why they don’t even occasionally play lesser-known songs by the big acts. Like, why don’t classic rock stations play deeper cuts by Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, etc. instead of the same hit singles over and over for decades? How can that be what listeners want? People who work in retail environments with a repeated playlist usually say they hate it for obvious reasons.
It’s as if those TV stations that show The Office and Seinfeld every night showed the same five episodes every week.
A large chunk of people turn off/change the station on anything they don't like, which may be because of even slight unfamiliarity. I remember myself being this way when very young. Even today playlist radios sometimes have popular tracks in the format that I really hate, and this can also cause me to switch. This is even worse if that track is sure to be played 10+ times a day...
Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.
People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.
And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.
The removal of FM radio from cell phones was a big mistake. It should never have allowed. Radio is very useful in emergencies.
Lately I have been getting back in to internet radio, mostly via Elisa in KDE. Here is my favorite internet stream: https://hawaiireggaenetwork.com/
I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone, except purely to test out whether it worked. I wouldn't make phone purchasing decisions based on whether or not it had a FM radio. A regulation requiring it in the ostensible name of safety would make phones somewhat more expensive and I'm skeptical that it would even help improve safety in an emergency significantly.
> I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone
One killer feature for phone-sized portable FM radios is live sports!
Some sports that have TV broadcasts but no radio broadcast will pipe the broadcast audio over an FM channel within the stadium.
Of course for sports that have a radio broadcast, you can tune directly to it.
Depending on the sport, it's really nice to get player background info, or some sports have mics on players that get piped through the radio in your ear.
I suppose Auracast could be used for that, which is a broadcast audio feature of Bluetooth Low Energy [1].
My Bluetooth pods have it. I'm not sure how well it's supported, I don't think I've ever entered a place that uses it (or I didn't notice), so I could never try it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auracast?oldid=1346244865
Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example. It's just a choice of the manufacturer to do not implement it completely, sometimes in hardware, sometimes in software. Several years ago there was SpiritFM application for Android that allowed to use FM radio on smartphones that sometimes never supported FM radio... oficially. So the only missing piece is sometimes only the software. As a result I think it wouldn't cost somewhat noticeably more to have that feature.
The 3.5mm jack is the other missing piece required for that FM receiver to work - and that's not coming back any time soon.
My Moto X4's FM radio worked well enough without the headphones plugged in, but you needed really good reception.
I've never had a phone without one.
Good thing you're the majority of people, then.
>Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example
Who told you this? They are wildly different frequencies and encoding.
I don't know about "most smartphones," but the FM bits were commonly a built-in with Qualcomm and some other chipsets for a coon's age.
Even the OG Motorola Droid, of 2009, had the parts inside for an FM radio. They just weren't connected to an antenna and the default software stack didn't include any access to those parts at all.
Flagship Qualcomm-equipped Samsung phones up to the S20 or so tended to be ~similar: The FM tuner guts were usually in there, but they often weren't available to use, and even then they sometimes lacked an antenna.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. :)
---
In my time, I've enabled FM radio on a few different phones that weren't advertised to have that function, sometimes with root-only hacks from grimy corners of the internet, and sometimes by just installing some software that just happened to have the right hooks.
Twenty years ago this would have been wrong with a kernel of truth. Today, it's just wrong. There were chips that integrated all this but they weren't that popular in the West and ultimately nobody cared.
https://www.mediatek.com/press-room/mediatek-announces-world...
MTK still has the largest marketshare of smartphone SoCs worldwide and they still use their combo RFICs.
https://pccentral.net/q1-2026-smartphone-soc-market-share-me...
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/03/mediatek-leads-glob...
And it's not a tiny kernel of truth, even iPhone(2007) had Wi-Fi/BT combo chips with FM radio. Apple was partly responsible for death of FM radio, by not implementing the software feature. That's also literally 20 years ago.
How much would an additional frequency cost to add to a sophisticated radio?
I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
Thought it was that executives decided that forcing you into the media store was much more lucrative.
> I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
Ha!
would make phones somewhat more expensive
"somewhat" as in the ballpark of a few cents, definitely less than $1, because it's already there in the reference designs and deliberately removing it would actually take extra work and cost far more.
I remember all the no-name/generic MP3/MP4 players had an FM radio, while Apple's iPods did not. They deliberately chose not to include one, and definitely not because of cost.
Agree. The only problem about radio is requiring wired headphones to serve as antenna.
Do flagship Snapdragon SOCs still have radio? Thinking about next GOS compatible Motorola-branded device, the first device GOS will support with Snapdragon.
My current Android phone has a FM radio that doesn't even require a wired headphone as the FM antenna is built-in. If you connect your BT headset, the FM station is heard through the BT headset in full stereo.
Of course, it is a Chinese brand who haven't forsaken FM radios. Apparently, Europeans still prefer a FM radio on their smartphones that Chinese brands that sell in Europe still retain them.
Here in USA, people don't seem to care about radio.
I have a car with it - even HD - and I thought I would use it more.
But every time I try it out, the stations are playing a loud advertisement.
I loved pirate radio in London in the 90s. It was so vital. There was nowhere else that you could hear tracks that new unless you were at a club or the handful of record shops where DJs hung out. You could phone in and they would give you a shout out! We would record the Sunday specials on Kool FM and listen to them the rest of the week. Good times.
It's not quite the same, but I do like firing up https://radio.garden/ on occasion and rotating through international channels (after getting around the geoblock in the UK). Theres a random Arctic Outpost AM broadcasting from Longyearbyen I stick on for background noise.
I remember few years ago listening to a radio interviewer with popular folk singer, the interview was over the phone so host at the end said that some day this singer should visit them in studio for proper interview, to which the singer replied: "If I visit you in studio for interview, will you play some of my songs?", to which the host with slight embarrassment admitted that they are not allowed to play outside the playlist.
It depends on the station.
The BBC often does as you say and even if the interview is down a phone line they will play a record. Some shows have the musicians playing live. Other UK stations do similar.
I've been working on a streaming platform for musicians as a passion project for the last decade partly because the analog radio shows have become a dying breed. Web-based indie radio shows are lots of fun because they're very close to the best radio shows from my own youth when most radio DJ:s still were curators and experts in the music they played. And they have the feeling of community and genuine passion for the hobby.
There's definitely still demand for quality radio shows but I guess it just makes more money if you play whatever the big studios pay you to play. But its the same thing with television as well; many indie channels on YouTube produce MUCH better content than anything you can see on the traditional TV or Netflix.
I'm so thankful for the BBC.
I listen to Radio 4 through the day when I'm working on things that don't need my full concentration.
It's the alarm that wakes me at 0630 and I often listen to the news before bed.
Adverts drive me insane. It's a national treasure and I'd pay the licence fee again just for R4 + Sounds.
Also listened in the car but since they've recently shut down the LW tower I can't receive it anymore in the midlands, only occasionally get FM signal.
It might not work in your scenario, but I too listen to radio a lot and found the signal issues annoying. My car is pretty old and doesn't have aux/bluetooth input so I can't plug in my phone and use the Sounds app, but I got a bluetooth to FM signal transmitter and now listen to my phone through my car radio, including a lot of streaming radio.
I listen to radio a lot. NTS, FIP, Concertzender. It's a great way to discover new music and have some human presence.
Recently a DJ with excellent music taste and a deep radio-perfect voice died. I was devastated when I got the news. The two remaining radio shows in his slot were something I'll remember forever. One unbelievably raw, as it was only two days since he died, the other beautiful, as everyone came with music and stories to remember him.
You don't get this connection over streaming.
RIP Bob Rusche
Good radio died in the mid 80s.
Most people today can hardly remember when radio was curated live. Perhaps if you were near a small station you might have had the experience. Most major markets were completely corporate by the early 90s.
I know, my first career pick was radio, and by the time I was in college at a college radio station in the late 90s. That career path was dead unless I wanted to be in marketing or sales, which I had no interest in.
Little factoid about my username, it was my pirate station call letters from when I was running my own small station with a hand built FM transmitter in the 90s.
It died mid 80s for me too. That was when the monoculture, where everyone was listening to the same thing, just disappeared. I was just a kid so I never knew what happened. All I knew was that when I was itty bitty, I could turn the dial and find mostly the same stuff everywhere. Mid 80s onwards and it was all fractured. That fracturing continued to the point where it’s like there’s a genre and a band for every taste…which is cool, but now we don’t have a broadly shared cultural experience anymore. Ditto for television. Basically, the scarcity is gone. On the one hand, cool, but on the other, society weirdly suffers.
Boston has a whole bunch of live and college ratio stations still.
Well, sort of. My radio presets back in the 2000s were 101.7 WFNX, 104.1 WBCN, 107.3 WAAF, 100.7 WZLX, and 92.9 WBOS. Of those stations, only WZLX remains.
The greats - in my opinion, WBCN and WFNX - are long off the air. They were powerhouses of culture, both local and national. WFNX was the first to play Nirvana's Nevermind; Bono of U2 once said that "...without BCN, we'd all be (expletive)'d, let's face it."
Oedipus, a well-known Boston DJ since the 70s (who got started at 88.1 WMBR, MIT's station) and program director at WBCN, said of it: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed radio... Corporations were now allowed to own multiple stations in the same market and across the country. Stations were no longer programmed locally."
Meanwhile, WAAF went online-only in 2020. WBOS got delegated to an HD2 subchannel in 2004. Likewise, The Boston Globe picked up many of the radio personalities for the online-only RadioBDC, now Indie617, but that seemed dead by the mid-2010s. I hear the former WFNX DJs Henry Santoro and Julie Kramer may still have some limited presence on 89.7 WGBH.
I was recently happy to find Adam 12 (formerly of WFNX (formerly of WBCN)) still DJing on 105.7 WROR.
88.9 WERS (Emerson College's station) is doing a great job of carrying the helm of Boston music culture. Occasionally I'll also tune into 90.3 WZBC (Boston College's station), which is a more "traditional" and less "commercial" college radio station.
Just outside Boston are likewise some public and community stations with good programming - 88.3 WRPS (Rockland's public radio station) and 101.3 WFNX (Scituate's community station - love that they picked up the WFNX callsign!) are pretty good, if you're in range.
I'm reminded of Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog with her late night radio station in a lighthouse, or Lily Tomlin in Prairie Home Companion saying "Now radio's just a bunch of people yelling at each other and computers playing music". Although I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a GenZ girl doing something I had forgotten about: channel surfing.
You don't necessarily need to be near a small station these days, college stations can stream online. I listen to WXPN (UPenn) that way regularly: https://xpn.org/ (player at top of the page).
In my neck of the woods, Vancouver, Canada, nothing happened to radio. It was shit in the 1980s and it's the same today.
Wait! Except for one major improvement. There is a station CJNY ("The Journey") at 106.3 FM, which is run by Indigenous people:
https://www.cjnyfm.ca/about/
Hah, one of the only tolerable commercial-ish stations in AB is Edmonton's 89.3 CIWE that broadcasts Freeform/First Nations content - also rebroadcasts to 88.1-HD3 in Calgary.
> In my neck of the woods, Vancouver, Canada, nothing happened to radio.
The last sports radio station in Vancouver literally closed this month!
This is peak old man yells at cloud.
There's so much good radio to be had since the arrival of the internet. Not even talking about online-only, but actual radio stations who also stream. Maybe there's less cool broadcast stations in any given area, but our overall exposure via internet is incredible. Just search for free-form radio. If you have a college in your area, you probably have interesting radio and DJs on the airwaves.
The article ends with giving up, ipod + KPFA news, which just seems wild. Never has there been a time where there's more music available.
Is it disk jockey? As an IT nerd I am a disk jockey. Radio guys are disc jockeys.
Like as in spinning discs.
Can someone be a disc jockey and not know they are not disk jockeys? Not sure. Or maybe I'm mistaken
Human DJs at still around on college radio.
But the human ones are probably jockeying disks now anyway :)
Hm I actually heard some great and rare metal on FM radio in Philadelphia the other day -- and I was SURPRISED because I thought radio was dead too
I just Googled and it turns out it was https://wkdu.org/ 91.7 FM, Drexel University college radio! Woohoo something is alive out there !!
And I just found the playlist of the exact show I listened to, on Thursday July 16th - https://wkdu.org/playlist/71388
Nonprofit radio stations are the last vestige of the old days. NPR, college-run stations, and public access.
I cherish BBC Radio.
KUHF used to run classical music programming nearly exclusively up until 2011. Since then it's been relegated to their HD-2 channel and ran by some computer algorithm. If all you have is an old analog radio there is genuinely nothing to listen to around here.
Jim Grey and I knew all the same people at WMHD yet somehow never ran into each other. I was an annoying high school student. Ron Dippold (he ran usenet votes for a long time) was there, among others.
When I was digging through old VHS tapes, I digitized a couple TV spots and put them on youtube; passing them along to Jim.
Best advice I got when I got to San Jose was from an old recruiter - she must have been 30!
She said the Bay Area is big, but the Silicon Valley is small.
I think about her advice a lot.
The radio world is even smaller. I tried out at WZZQ when I was in high school, but didn't make the cut.
The only radio show I ever particularly liked was Jeff Gilbert's "Brain Pain" in the late 80s, on KCMU 90.3. He played metal music, particularly from the local Seattle bands.
What was fun about it was his irreverent sense of humor, the silly contests he'd run, the ads that made no sense, and all the drugged out band members he'd invite to the station.
I still have several cassettes of Brain Pain. Lost treasures, I presume. I wound up buying many of the albums he spun.
Still a few great ones hanging around, like WBER in Rochester: https://wber.org/
Adelaide, South Australia: https://threedradio.com/
Fiercely local, fiercely independent. Has been great for new music discovery for me for years.
Discovered WITR not too long ago, their selection is right up my alley (although it is arguably "millenial radio" rather than "college radio")
I treasure Radio On Internet (thanks Russ (Silicon Valley joke)) so much. There's so many less but still so many independent/community/college radio stations all over.
On the west coast, https://kexp.org of course. https://kcrw.com and their HD2 channel.
Middle of the country, https://wwoz.org jazz/blues/local is incredible (so help ye who has to listen through the local music announcements though!) and also with a hd2. https://ksjd.org has some fun variety. https://coloradosound.org is great rock, as is https://koto.org in CO. There's nearly nothing that makes me so happy as https://mountainchill.com in telluride co; a station that makes it clear how narrowly grouped together most stations are & that just is so good.
Coming closer to me, https://wtmd.org rock in Baltimore md, https://xpn.org in Philly for more. https://wzum.org jazz in pittsburgh pa. https://wdvx.com in knoxville tn.
I also listen to a bunch of others, which i'd characterize more as tier 2; good but often more ads or less reliable a win for me. weqx, wmrw-lp, kozo-lp, weru, wmpg. wsri and wwod (both "the river" 93.9, and occasionally from the right elevation in NH overlapping in signal amusingly enough).
A lot of these stations have good track listings too, broken down by the DJ, sometimes that you can play on demand. It's incredible how much excellent interesting fantastic music you can scout out or listen to.
I used to listen to endless endless reams of shoutcast stations online. But man that has really really died out something fierce. There used to be so many interesting niche stations there. It still got me started looking widely at radio stations, as a decent fraction were just regular radio stations too. Realizing how badly commercial radio would never give the goods, would play the same pop stuff all the time, and have lots of ads? Man it was sad, but there were so many excellent other things to tune into! Alas on the dial, it's largely been couple massive corporate and political/religious (all very right-wing, Powell Memorandum on and on) titans taking over as much radiowaves as they can, as stations fold and go under, in the hard times of keeping your head up in the world today, getting the building, gear, and staff's bill's payed. (Especially with the administration trying to destroy the arts broadly, gutting National Endowment for the Arts!)
I'd absolutely love for folks to throw more stations they enjoy out here. https://radio.garden is of course wicked fun to browse generally! Gets submitted every so often, often garnering some significant love. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=radio.garden
I really appreciate this comment, so I'll try to return the favor (in small part) by sharing one pretty special to me: WYCE, https://grcmc.org/wyce. Hope you enjoy.
I was still listening to Jim Ladd and Uncle Joe on Sunday nights… maybe 15-20 years ago. They’d play a whole album, say Dark Side of the Moon and tell all the stories about it, sometimes even with recorded interviews they’d done.
Today there’s KCRW locally and it’s good though getting blander.
I have Jim Ladds book, autographed. My friend went to a book signing and got it for me. It’s signed “They say it’s your birthday — Jim Ladd”.
I also saw him when he toured with Roger Waters for “Radio KAOS”. “Good night Jim.” “Good night, Billy.”
I really enjoyed him when he was at KMPC/KEDG with JJ Jackson. That station struggled to find its way, starting early on with Pat “Paraquat” Kelly and Cynthia Fox, along with Guy Kemp at night (kind of a comedy/zoo shtick — I found his show really funny). I remember calling in once when Joe Satriani was just getting airplay, and the guy who answered was yelling “Are you hearing this? Are you HEARING THIS!?”.
Live radio.
It was nice with Ladd because he had his freedom, but a wider playlist.
MARS-FM, KROQ, KNAC, Pirate Radio, 91X (from Mexico, when you can get it, but they had some power).
But, a notable memory was 1989. Tiananmen Square.
Geno Michelini, KLOS, Five o’clock funnies fame, announced the breaking news of what was happening in China, and followed it up with Rush’s “Red Sector A” from “Grace Under Pressure”. I still get a little choked up thinking about.
Live radio.
Some names I haven’t heard in a long time. I’m just old enough to remember KMET and Dr. Demento back then. ;-)
I am too young to know about US radio in the 80s or 90s, but I enjoy some of the local and independent stations. I even collected some of their streams after I gave up Spotify: https://yaky.dev/radio/
For those of is living in and near Seattle (and as of recently San Fransisco) KEXP is still on the air and is still amazing as ever (if not even more so).
Yes! Eclectic, and if you text or call, a human will often respond.
(2009)ish
And a very American/mainstream-centric view of things. Radio (especially from the view of things in 2009) in more niche/underground circles was and in some regards still is a driving force of music curation and community in other parts of the world like the UK, parts of the EU and beyond.
Does radio have to be on the FM band? Do we count streaming like via YouTube, twitch and other platforms the same as Radio? I'd say yes. And in that regard, the spirit of radio and the format/feel the author recalls still very much exists.
I grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1. Literally the entire population of UK teens listened to that one station for ~20 years (though individuals would listen to different shows - John Peel's famous indie/punk/whatever show in the evenings was very different to the daytime mainstream stuff).
In Australia it was ABC's Triple J - similar story. Everyone tuned in to the annual top 100 tracks of the year.
That reach has not happened since with any media that I'm aware of. It was very unifying - we were all aware of the same songs, even if we didn't like the same songs. I can sing along to Duran Duran even though I was very scathing of them at the time, in part because I was force-fed Duran Duran every day on the radio.
Community radio is still alive and well in Australia too.
RRR and PBS in Melbourne are still excellent and seem to still be a fairly big deal if bumper stickers are anything to go by.
Yep and all available online as well. I listen to PBS every day.
IMHO, FM radio stations, broadcasting on government-attributed radio frequencies, are very different - both in nature and in how they feel - from the user of a big corporation's service streaming from someone else's computers.
I have yet to see a streamer match what Click and Clack did on the radio..
1982 KMEL 107.1 out of San Francisco.
I never got into the habit of listening to "the radio", in the sense of an AM or FM station broadcasting over the air on some frequency in a general metropolitan area. I remember listening to the radio stations my parents liked to listen to in the car as a kid. But by the time I was old enough to drive myself, I had already owned an mp3 player for a while, and if I wanted to listen to music in (my parents') car I could plug it into a cassette deck adapter - it's not like any local radio station near me was gonna play the Final Fantasy VII OST or a mix that went from Eve 6 to Jethro Tull to Blind Guardian to an bluegrass version of the Bubble Bobble theme I found on OCRemix. Plus, no commercials.
And if I wasn't actively driving a car at the moment, I probably had something I could be doing with a computer, perhaps involving a YouTube video, or just listening to my own extremely idiosyncratic music choices, that was more interesting than a local radio station, even if I technically owned some kind of device that could receive an FM signal.
Soon enough I had a smartphone and then a smartphone with a mobile internet connection whose cap was generous enough that I didn't need to think hard about how I was using it. And it turns out that having the entire internet available to me on a handheld device subsumes everything I might get out of listening to a radio station - including the modality of listening to audio while I'm doing something else, which might well come from an internet radio station anywhere in the world.
It occurs to me when I listen to a podcast while I'm working out at the gym or driving a car today (via my phone) that the actual auditory experience of this isn't drastically different than how people were consuming talk radio shows decades ago (down the fact that many of them have ads). The techniques for speaking in an engaging way to an audience, or having an engaging conversation between multiple people, are still valid; many podcasts I listen to address listener messages on the program, just like a weekly radio show might do - some even try to replicate the experience of a listener calling in live on a phone.
The business models that work today are of course drastically different than the ones that worked on radio decades ago, and the fact that audience isn't at all limited by physical location means that the sorts of audio content that gets streamed over the internet today are systematically different from what would've been the case on a radio show. I think this is mostly for the better though - more variety, more democratic access to the medium, and no FCC to regulate what you can and cannot legally say on regulated radio spectrum.
As far as I'm concerned, everything that's good about the content of AM/FM radio has been replicated on the general internet, and I have no particular reason to care if the radio signal carrying it to my ears comes from a licensed FM station or the 5G connection from my phone to a cell phone tower.
"Video killed the radio star."
I was always a fan of talk radio. In the late 80s and early 90s there were so many diverse and interesting talk radio shows. And many times they were local and accessible, I was able to get on the air several times. But then Rush Limbaugh exploded and eventually angry right wing politics took over everything except sports and NPR.
>I signed off the air for the last time in 1994 [...] radio has changed drastically, and it just wouldn’t be any fun for me today.
I don't agree with this premise. FM Radio is definitely more corporate today, but I grew up in the 90s and my memories of FM radio are not fond.
For my whole life it has always been materially the same, shitty, experience: occasional good songs interleaved with mediocre ones and a hefty dose of annoying unskippable ads.
The difference is that when I was a kid we didn't have streaming or even mp3 players so we just had to put up with the ads. Today I can just play songs locally off my phone via Bluetooth. No ads, no DJs, just the music I enjoy.
Most stations sucked, but there were some more fun counter culture stations.
I remember KGLE (KEGL?) Out of DFW pulling shit on their radio shows like saying the city banned smoking in cars and people flooded city government phone lines with complaints and rants, which had a lulz component that we wouldnt see again till the 4chan days.
KEGL, The Eagle ROCKS! Back on the air again after a failed attempt to make it yet another sports talk station.
They also had an ad-free (or at least low as, I don't think I've heard any) version of The Edge on their HD2 stream.
Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)
Nowadays I have a USB drive, though I understand that's rare. Can hardly find a (car) radio that supports modern sizes these days, probably by design.
>Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)
Yes, that's an accurate description of the hassle of trying to avoid unskippable ads.
I skipped ’em. Hassle is kinda strong and doesn’t bother me that much, don’t expect more for free.
I'll never forget Dennis Erectus on KOME 98.5 (the wet spot on your dial) in 80's Silicon Valley.
“Don’t Touch That Dial! It Has KOME On It!!”
A whole bunch of local stations got bought up by a web sales optimisation company. They do a really good job tbh. They leave the radio station in tact but just advertise their ability to make websites + google seo + advertise via radio and billboard in one package. If it keeps the station going its a nothingburger.
Theres also a local christian radio station I am only aware of because the guy fixing my fence was blasting it on his stereo. They were taking donations the entire time. I am sincerely not interested but they seem to deliver what their listeners want too.
Meh, haven't missed radio in ages. If I have no control over the content, then the medium isn't for me.
What's up with US radio names sounding like amazon chinese electronic devices autogenerated brands with just a string of random letters?
Weren't they allowed to have "normal" names like anywhere else in the world?
This is a tradition over a century old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_sign
Branding was usually based on FCC callsigns. But not always... many people in the US grew up with some Z100 or morning crew brands too.
Other countries have similarly arbitrary brands based on either band spectrum or regulatory regimes - eg Channel 4 / Radio 4