Heres a dare: spend an afternoon tuning your radio dial and see how many actual DJs there are and how many truly great songs you hear. Unless youre lucky, youre more likely to hear commercials, talk radio, Top 40 and three classic rock stations playing Slow Ride at the same time. FM radio is pretty well dead, and the internet killed it. Like so many aspects of the evolving industry, this is good and bad. People now have unlimited access to the worlds music, and an up-and-coming band has more avenues for self-promotion than ever before. On the big scale, its fantastic at no other time in history could a do-it-yourself musician show something she made in her bedroom in Stockholm to someone in Albuquerque on the same day she made it. But what radio did was provide a community for music. It kept things organised; your local punk station advertised all the upcoming punk shows and a good DJ introduced new artists you needed to hear. With the internet, theres exponentially more material, and sure there are plenty of fan pages; but a diverse and lively radio scene ensured an ongoing local conversation, a satisfying experience that a lucky Pandora discovery made while doing the dishes just cant compete with.
Kyle Schmidlin is a writer and musician living in Austin, TX. He manages the news blog at thirdrailnews.wordpress.com. Follow him at facebook.com/kyleschmidlin or twitter.com/kyleschmidlin1.
