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Sunday, September 11, 2005
Serious Radio 
| | The kid and I are listening to Norm N. Nite on Sirius Gold (Channel 5, for Fifties, I think), broadcasting from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. |
| | The kid wanted to know who Norm N. Nite was, which brought us to ASV's excellent Obiturary for a Radio Station. Norm was a fixture on WCBS-FM in New York, which gave way to "Jack" on 101.1fm a couple months back. CBS-FM is gone, but "Mister Music," Norm Himself, has become our Sunday afternoon companion here in Santa Barara, out by the pool. |
| | When I hear the old doo-wop song "In the Still of the Night," I am in my parents backyard, about eight years old, wearing a yellow tank top and tan cotton shorts. It's early evening and my parents have company over. They are scattered around the yard, sipping exotic drinks with fancy stirrers and smoking long cigarettes. I can smell the sweetness of the drinks, the smoke from someone's cigar, the chlorine in the pool. There are fireflies flitting around the yard, and I'm running after them with another girl, the daughter of one of my parent's guests. She smells of coconut suntan lotion and the beach. The radio, a little am/fm portable with a bent antenna is tuned to WCBS. The DJ announces the next song. "And now, here's The Five Satins with In The Still of The Night." |
| | shoo do- shooby doo shoo do- shooby doo |
| | The girl and I stop chasing fireflies. We stare at the grownups. They are all singing along, the women and the men with their funny drinks and half-drunk voices and some men are singing louder than the others and some of the women are giggling. |
| | The bad part is Sirius Gold when Norm isn't on. Over the last several hours, Norm played a pile of great songs that are mostly off the tight playlist Sirius Gold plays on its Fifties channel. I'm sure the list is just as short on its Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Smooth Jazz and Margaritaville channels, to name the ones we've grown tired of hearing except when they turn off the robot and let somebody like Norm do Real Radio. (By the way, I'd point to Sirius' channels if the website weren't such a crowded, aversive mess.) |
| | I was talking recently with somebody who spent a month or so driving around the country, happy to have XM Radio, and its ultra-wide dial of channels and formats. But after a while, they told me, they got tired of it. While the overall musical selection beat the crap out of the rounds-to-nothing that's left on the FM and AM dials, the satellite service still leveraged the narrow playlists that radio consultants have preached to their clients for the last forty years or more. These travellers also got tired of narrow formats that each comprised a pidgeonhole. Going from one to the next was like going from one restaurant that served nothing but hamburger to another that served nothing but yogurt. Worse, they felt pidgeonholed with each channel they listened to. |
| | (You can almost hear the consultants thinking Hmm. There's a demo/psychographic here that likes salted nuts. Let's give them nothing but salted nuts.) |
| | I remember when KRTH/101.1 (K-Earth 101) beat all comers in L.A. with a playlist of about 200 songs. (As did 'CBS-FM.) They change the list a bit every few weeks, but the effect is kind of monocultural. It's like growing nothing but soybeans on the same land for years. That's what happened to radio on AM, then FM. Now it's happening again, on more channels, on satellite. |
| | (Sirius is playing In the Still of the Night. Coincidence?) |
| | Every couple months there's another story about what Lee Abrams is doing with XM. (Like this one from Wired magazine last October.) It ends this way: |
| | XM is not really reinventing radio. Abrams is simply doing what he's done since the 1970s, figuring out what people want and delivering it to them. Maybe it's true that new, popular music once brought people together. But to some extent it did so by excluding choice; radio is the last medium to succeed by limiting its audience's options. Today, with choice expanded by cable, Internet, and satellite, everyone can be their own psychographic. It's a little anarchic, but hey, anarchy is good for rock and roll. |
| | This weekend, when lots of people were here, do you think we listened to reinvented radio? Or radio at all, satellite or otherwise? |
| | Nope, we listened to people's iPods. We talked about music, genres, collections, sources on the Net. Discoveries. Artists old and new. Friends we didn't know were connoisseurs, much less experts. And podcasts. Most people still aren't hip to podcasts yet, but it's starting to happen. |
Clues vs. Train
| | Well thought and written. Read the whole thing. Then the next thing, when Dave posts it. |
Then
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