The trouble with radio February 8, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Essay,Music,Rants,Society , trackbackI’ve avoided music radio for a long time. From when I was young I knew how important music was to me but I found it nearly impossible to find stuff that I liked and listening to the radio never helped. I did for quite a while, as you do when you don’t own any music or have any other channels to hear it. It left me entirely disatisfied and I stewed in some kind of musical no mans land for a long time.
Recently however, I’ve found myself listening to rather a lot of radio (for me, anyway), not through choice but because it’s on where I work. Now, it’s not local or national radio like you’d typically listen to, but actually it’s very similar in style, it just has adverts for products from the store rather than from other companies.
Listening to it more and more has really brought me to realise just why DJs let down their audience time and time again. Indeed, it’s such a deep betrayal that no one even knows it’s happening. Every day I find myself hearing the same songs. The same bland, un-musical pieces of factory made pop music.
I’m not about to suggest that DJs not play chart music, as much as I would like that. No, instead all I ask is that DJs do what I percieve their job to be. Not everyone has time to seek out music, to dig and listen and cast away and listen and love and seek and find and pour themselves into. It’s their job to not just play what people already know they like, but to play them stuff that they may find they like. To open new doors, to new and interesting places. To introduce people to worlds they never thought existed.
Music has incredible power. You ask almost anyone and they’re likely to say they like music. As a species, we are built to enjoy music. But some of us more than like music. Taking my average tracks per day (from my pretty damn accurate last.fm profile) and the median (since the mean would take a ridiculous amount of time to find) length of songs in my music library we can calculate that on average I spend 4.725 hours a day listening to music. Ish. Of course, that’s not exclusive (and doesn’t include when I’m at work, or when someone else is playing the music). Doesn’t sound like the hugest portion, but bare in mind that’s over 4 years that average, and includes times when I’ve been working or at school full time. It’s been slowly rising over the past year as well.
Now I’m sure there are plenty of people more obsessed with music than I am but I’m pretty deep in at this point. Most of me is focused around it. And it’s damn important to me. Because of the effect it’s had on me, I want to share that effect. I want others to feel it and to know it. That’s why it annoys me so much that DJs are always playing the same songs, they never give your average every day music liker to become a full blown music lover because they limit them to the top 40, or even smaller groups of songs.
I think that’s fundamentally wrong, and something of a moral injustice. There’s a further element that I’ve become more and more receptive to further reaches of music and I want to have another source to say “Hey, listen to this, see what you think”. I want to be able to trust that DJs are playing music because they think it’s interesting and good, not because it’s what’s been handed to them by their major record label funded bosses, not because it’s what we’re being told to like.
I do have a big problem with pop music, I hate about 99% of it. Mainly because it’s pretty much all the same. Doesn’t matter what genre it claims to be. If you think of all music as coming from a centre and spreading out in different directions all around as different genres then what’s played on the radio accounts for the tiniest spec in the middle. Yes, some of those bits are on the bit that starts to be come Electronic, or Blues, or Rock or Punk but ultimately it’s so close to the middle that it shares almost nothing in common with the further reaches of the genre.
And that’s my problem. A lack of variety. Currently all we get is a tiny spec of all the music out there and that’s not fair on anyone. Not fair on the listeners who never have the chance to discover music that could change the way they see the world. Not fair on the artists that work so hard to produce original and interesting and likable music that goes entirely ignored by the mainstream population. And more importantly, not fair on me for having to listen to all the shit they do play.
Tagged as: Essay, Music, Music Industry, Pop, Radio, Rants, Society, Work
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