My Radio Days
I just read this great piece by Michael Byrne on Motherboard:
The DJ Is Dead; Long Live The DJ: How the Cloud Is Changing Music
I liked this graph:
The other thing I wonder about is community. I think there is a thing to radio that has nothing to do with listening to a song. It has to do with with doing something with other people at the same time. As very, very imperfect as it is, our 92Q here in Baltimore is a thing that brings a great many people together. It’s not exactly a peaceful or equal togetherness, but there is a shared identity there. It is a way that we can feel together with people that we may not know, but have Baltimore in common. The cloud is about individuation, on the other hand. Every listener their own station. Every listener their own city.
I’ve never been much of a radio listener. At least, not since 1994. That was the year that Z100 called to offer me $1000 if I said “Z100-means-today’s-best-music-now-give-me-my-money” when I answered the phone, but I was at volleyball practice, so they left me a message on my answering machine telling me I didn’t win. If only I’d had a cell! Of course, it would’ve had to have been one of those Zack Morris phones:
Funny to think of that kind of promo now. Ah, the world pre-Twitter. At one point I had actually said the phrase on my answering machine. Point is, it was a distressing moment in my life. I’d listened to Z100 year after year. The Z Morning Zoo boomed from my Dream Machine clock radio each dawn, and then I was lulled to sleep by the sex doctor’s words of wisdom each night (only thing I recall from that education had to do with blow jobs and Halls cough drops). And here they called in the middle of the day! Didn’t they know my schedule?
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