2. music
  3. 1054693560

Todays Raido Stations suck

Is it just me, or does todays Radio suck?
When I was a teenager FM was cool, it had laid back D,jays and they played cool new music. That's were I first heard Alex Harvey, Hawkwind,Atomic Rooster,Zappa,The amboy dukes,
Robin Trower,Roxy music,BOC,Captain Beyond,Audience,
Bowie,Steely Dan,etc.

The AM of that day used to be Hit Radio, and played the top hits of the day.

FM today has become Hit radio, with a lot of cookie cutter stations all playing the same old hits, with a few of those old fm classic hits as well.

Does it only bug me, that they only play the one hit off the LP over and over again. When in fact the lp had even better tunes on it, but they never play them.

Recently with the advent of eBay, I have been able to collect a lot of rare and Great music that I never new existed before.

When my friends here the new tunes I have They get the same Idea that I always get, to start a new radio station that plays this unknown treasure. As well as the songs like "Candys gone bad" off of the Golden Earring lp with Radar love on it, you know the one.

You know what I'm talking about, am I alone here.


I must state that I live in a smaller town now, but we can still pick up the Jacksonville Florida stations.
Does this kind of practice go on all over the country?

The new music of today no longer interests me with Rap and the Rock of today all sounds the same, with only minor exceptions like Radiohead.

WHAT do you think, is their some stations that I could pickup on the internet that would satisfy my craving?

would you like to be able to get in you car and tune the radio to a station like the one I described?

128x128rockinroni
philjolet's avatar
philjolet
2,306 posts
 
try: www.widr.org you should be able to listen online. They play a wide mix of music which can be very bad to very very good. As I write this they are playing something french with piano and harmonica and bass and a lazy trombone just stepped in, part of their usual eclectic mix which keeps me listening with great pleasure.

Nothing like a college readio station that is always trying to find new music, it is almost the only thing I listen to.

good luck

Phil
spindrifter
105 posts
 
Corporate radio of today is absolutely terrible. Besides satelite radio(which I'm not really familiar with) one must stick with public radio and college stations. College radio is now and always has been the only real breath of fresh air on the airwaves.These stations have always been my main source for mew music and artists that would never, never be heard on big radio. Cheers, Lee
timo's avatar
timo
610 posts
 
Yes, they do suck. There is very limited dynamic range on most stations these days. Most pop recordings in the first place are poorly recorded with limited dynamic range. Everything just sounds LOUD.
agonanon
70 posts
 
Rockinroni, yes, they s---. But I wonder if it's radio itself or the listener. I find, with age, one simply becomes more discriminating. So when one looks, a lot more appears to blow now than ever before. Perhaps the personal age of innocence has an expiry date. Of course once one knows where one's preferences lie, one looks less elsewhere, and when one does, then with... benign ambivalence(?).

Slightly off-topic, but sometime ago I looked for some web radio stations to see what the hype was about. For classical I found a few were sometimes ok (kuni, wpr, wgbh, kccu, kosu, ksui,cbc r2, bbc r3). Most, I notice are college efforts. In the brief aside, I used this list, perhaps a usable site for finding interesting (web) radio for rock too. As bandwidth increases, one may hope that good stns in all areas will emerge with decent quality. For now, w/o question (since I don't have a tuner anyways), it's still LPs and CDs for me.
wdhsvbgod
22 posts
 
I agree with most of you in this thread on most of the points raised. I grew up near Detroit in the 70's and early 80's. At its peak, Detroit had 4 AOR stations (FM, of course) and the pickin's were good for someone with that taste (for AOR, that is). By the time all that "new romantic" crap of the early 80's started, I had abandoned radio entirely.

It wasn't until university that I rediscovered it on campus. As many of you have pointed out, college/university radio has always been a great source of "new music". Unfortunately, at that time, the university radio station had about a 5 watt transmitter and could only be heard on campus (heaven forbid you go across the street---you'll lose the signal for sure!)

but I digress...

Radio became so non-user friendly that I never even owned a tuner until just a few months ago. I am using it to educate myself in a new-found love of jazz. There is a pretty decent (member supported) jazz station in Toronto (near home) that I have been listening to a lot lately. I don't have a large (or small, for that matter) collection of jazz, especially old stuff, so this station is a boon to my burgeoning appetite for jazz.

Maybe the reason that this station seems so good to me is that it is member-supported, like PBS. Or maybe it's that I can hear BBC world service news every now and again.
More to discover