Radio, oh no
2004 05 17
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I love radio. It's nice to have that music, that company, in the middle of the night - or any hour of the day. But being a stay-at-home-student and infrequent author, means that I fall into a rare radio-listening category - those of us that listen beyond the 15-minute quota.
See, most people who listen to the radio listen in increments of approximately 15 minutes to half an hour. Advertisers know this, radio programmers know it, and both plan on it. They bank, or plan, around the fact that most people hear them only a short bit of time out of any given day - usually that time is the drive to and from work. Either they structure their programming to work within this 15-minute framework, with news, weather, and traffic reports during the morning and evening rushhours, or they're structuring it in a feature sense, where they're hoping to get you on the rare times you will be sitting at home doing nothing - like late evenings or the weekend.
This presents a problem. This presents a problem for me, as a radio listener. I fall outside their 15-minute span, so I become intimately acquainted with any radio station's high repeat rate - and with some stations it's very bloody high. This means that a song that would be special to hear once in a rare while, a song that would catch the attention of the average radio listener and perhaps hold them on a radio station beyond the 15-minute span, somehow loses its specialness and becomes noise. It is no longer a wow to hear The Kings' This Beat Goes On / Switch Into Glide or Don McClean's American Pie, because you've already heard them every single damned day that week, and if you keep listening, you'll hear them every damned day for the coming week.
Some stations have "no repeat workday", but that only means they don't repeat a song from between 9 AM to 5 PM - it doesn't mean they, a, won't repeat a song they played during those hours after those hours are up, or b, that they won't repeat songs they played during the Monday workday, during the Tuesday workday. A "no repeat work week" would be beautiful, but that's never going to happen.
The repeat rate is irritating, but it's structured to bring in the most listeners as possible, to make the most money from their advertisers. And, because radio stations are becoming more homogeneous as the years roll by, particularly in major city centres where they are competing for the same shares of the same market, it means that changing stations isn't much of an option. I have classic rock, rock, alternative rock, country, easy listening, jazz of the sort that would give you the shits (i.e. not real jazz, but easy listening dentist office muzak jazz), college radio, and variants in-between. There have been times I've been listening to one station and could have sworn I'd been listening to another - that's how homogeneous the sound gets. The bad jazz is right out, the country is out, the alternative station is out because I'm a bit too oldskool to want to hear Blink 182 all the time. I need my Ramones, daddy-o, my Stranglers, China Crisis. I need The Buzzcocks, Cramps, Fleshtones, Wall of Voodoo, ABC, Adam Ant, Charlatans, Chumbawamba (No, not "Tubthumping" - they've been around a hell of a lot longer than that), PWEI, and ... need I go on? I need glam rock. I need garage rock from the '60s (Oh, thank you Little Steven for the brief reprieve you provide me every Sunday evening!), I need a fix of '80s electro-pop, goth, post-punk, romantic, new wave, rockabilly, punkabilly, and anything that will remind me that there's some charm left in the music industry. These are things I will not get on 99% of the radio stations provided for airplay. This is why people turn to Internet radio. This is why we download MP3s. This is why, when you hit a certain age, you start going backwards musically - not because what's available is bad, but because how you find out about what's good becomes more and more bloody difficult.
So, there's the problem. Radio stations don't care about me, about the rare demographic I'm in, and I'm not going to suggest they should. I'm a listening aberration. I am no one's target market. I am no one's skew.
It still presents a frustrating problem when you're also stuck with a busted TV, not enough money to go out and buy the CDs you want (which I prefer doing to MP3s), and trying to avoid inundating your computer with the sort of spyware garbage you might be prone to from being forced to install things from whatever online radio source you're attempting to access. I'm looking at you Real Media (you and your friends, and they know who they are). I'm looking at you and telling you right out that I am sick to death of all that shit you try to helpfully install on my machine. I don't need it. I don't want it. It fucks with my system in ways I don't like.
So, I buy CDs with what scant money I have. I wait for the day I can purchase a new television. I overload my system with MP3s. I try to forget that the Joe Walsh song they just played on the classic rock station is the same Joe Walsh song they played yesterday, and the day before, and the week before.
Addendum: And what hope have I that radio will at all improve, when announcers will refer to Hootie and the Blowfish as "punk rock".