Homogenized Music 489
Mansing writes "The connections between broadcast radio and music industry are well known. In the old days, payola was the method to increase a song's (or album's) exposure. But now, the same "free market" corporate music that infects the music industry is also infecting the broadcast radio industry as well. What makes the article so informative is not the business angles, but how business has changed what is broadcast. Seeing the parallels between the recording industry's force fed music and Clear Channel's "nothing is left to whim or chance" programming, I now understand how hard it is for any non-corporate sanctioned music to become widely heard."
raido sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
can't someone show a business model to some exec. that shows that
good music=listeners=money?
instead of
crap music we're supposed to play=industry is happy=money
where's the listener come in?
oh yeah, as a stat on some marketroids excell spreadsheet showing that if you play enough Britney Spears, people's standards drop low enough to where they can sell their product.
if you can't tell, i hate almost all broadcast radio. it's been crap for years now and getting worse. i feel like an old man before my time.
Force-fed music (Score:1, Insightful)
If you don't like the music industry, stop listening , stop whining, and make your own music. It what I do.
The problem is not a failure of the market (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of complaining, choose one of the alternatives: listen to satellite radio, internet radio, listen to CD's (the real ones, not those phony pseudo-CD's), etc. If CCU truly isn't performing a service that people want, advertisers will stop buying airtime and it will go bankrupt. I'm guessing that isn't about to happen anytime soon.
Anybody ever think about.. (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, some of you might find the college radio station better to listen to becuase you get to hear different stuff, things that you don't get to hear on mainstream radio. Now, did you ever seem to think that the reason that it's not on mainstream radio is because mainstream people think that the music sucks?
Commercial radio is there to make money, so they need to play what MOST people want to hear, not what you want to here. I like techno, most places don't play techno, why? becuase mainstream people don't like techno, in fact some people hate it (my brother included).
To say that college radio or internet radio is better then commercial radio is silly. Just becuase you don't like it doesn't rule out the fact that somebody must like it, because it's still around, and it's doing well. I've also found that there's some people (an ex-coworker comes to mind) that listens to non-mainstream stuff just becuase it's non-mainstream. I found it to be shit and could see why it wasn't played on the radio. This just goes to show, different people have different tastes, and just because you don't like Britney doesn't rule out the fact that a lot of people do.
Re:In past ages the philosphers... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's obvious there's a growing backlash against this kind of radio. People don't want to hear 15 minutes of commercials out of 30 minutes of air time. People grow tired with oft-repeated tunes. That doesn't necessarily mean we need to have a political solution. It means those people who feel they are disenfranchised need to start their own radio stations, non-commercial [fcc.gov] or commercial [fcc.gov].
Re: Marx (Score:5, Insightful)
While Communism, that's the Monopoly of the state, with no chance for competition, after all the State KNOWS what you need and want. Even if it's true for the majority, the Tyranny of the Majority is not something to be desired either.
So Monopoly, from Communism or Capitalism is bad. But at least with Capitalism, we have a chance against it.
Bill
This is a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:raido sucks and advertisers are stoooopid (Score:2, Insightful)
The 18 to 54 crowd has bills, prespent income (credit card debt), college tuition, and they're minds are already made up, don't care what they hear.
So, I make my money by targetting nonprofit appeals to the geezer crowd. The best bucks per appeal doesn't happen until you start mailing to the 60+ widows. And AARP perennially does real well, too. And you know their crowd.
So, again, why don't advertisers like the 60+ crowd, helluva lot of money to be made there.
Article Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
To save folks the time, here's a quick summary of the article: middle-aged manager of a group of radio stations tells us all how hard it is to make ends meet in today's radio marketplace.
Hint: Skip to the last 2-3 paragraphs and find the real point of the article. You'll be glad you did.
Overgeneralization (Score:2, Insightful)
Nonsense. You might mean "only college stations play the kind of music I like," which certainly doesn't mean that other stations suck. Or you might mean that many commercial stations have short, safe playlists. But then there are stations that don't fit that mold.
This is just like the overgeneralization that commercial music sucks, when you'll find instead that all of the music played on college stations is, in fact, commercial. The myth among anti-media geeks is that CDs from Britney Spears and Mariah Carey are put out by Evil Money Grubbing Corporations, while music from Chemical Brothers and Radiohead is put out by Independent Freedom Loving Hippies. When, in fact, there's no difference.
Audiogalaxy for yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's some bands worth checking out: (reply and post your own)
Neutral Milk Hotel
The Microphones
The Shins
The Dismemberment Plan
Need New Body
The Mountain Goats
Boards of Canada
... and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Sparklehorse
Belle & Sebastian
Brighteyes
Matmos
The Hot Snakes
The White Stripes (yeah, they've got a video, but they rock harder than anything since Zepplin)
music has always been comercial and pandering to trends, but in the past five years or so it has gotten *much* worse. There has not been a single innovative band to make it to the popular stage, music hasn't seen anything like this since the dark ages of the late 50s/early 60s. Think about it, what was the last novelty hit? What was the last song that got popular just because some DJ thought it was amusing? It's been quite a while. The early 90s saw innovative acts like Nirvana, Beck, and Liz Phair getting tons of airplay, and now we just have 1001 Pearl Jam/Creed rip-off acts. I won't comment on the R&B teen pop, that's obviously commercial fluff, and it wouldn't bother me if there were good things elsewhere. When we had the New Kids on the Block, we also had U2 and REM. Rap is, thankfully, still going strong, it probably has a good 10 or 15 years of life left in it.
Rock and Roll is approaching death. It will soon be as dead as Jazz. It will still be made. There will still be people doing amazing and creative things with it. But it's period of cultural relevancy is nearing the end.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Strokes/White Stripes garage/blues punk thing will take off. That would be cool.
Re:raido sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Even that statement isn't true anymore. College radio is no longer a free-spirited playground of diverse music that it once was. Now, college radio is a proving grounds.
Indies, promoters, radio execs, they all visit college radio stations. They pay the stations/DJs and/or the schools money to get certain songs on the air. They test the market amongst college students, trying to find the next big hit for commercial radio. Very few college radio stations don't have at least some form of commercial influence.
You can read more on the subject at Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/03/14/payol
Re:Force-fed music (Score:2, Insightful)
I am really sick of this particular sentiment on slashdot. Anytime someone complains about the sorry state of a given industry, there are always people who pipe in, "Hey, you don't like it, change it!"
Well, guess what, not everyone has the wherewithal to be experts at EVERYTHING! I'm a fairly intelligent guy, with a few areas of expertise, but I have no musical talent whatsoever. Sure I COULD make my own music, but even I wouldn't want to listen to it.
This is why they will die. (Score:4, Insightful)
As it is today, radio and record sales are the two main ways for an artist to become popular, sell out their shows, and make money. However, there is a high barrier to entry; the recording and broadcast industries want to profit, and so they only support music that will make them money--regardless of quality.
But the Internet allows all artists to be heard, by all people, with no strings attached but the size of your pipeline. Since artists never get paid for record sales to begin with, it hardly matters whether their music gets copied online--so long as it's good, they'll still sell out their concerts.
Ten to twenty years from now, the recording industry will be a crumbling colossus. People will get sick of being force-fed their music, of having to pick between identical blonde models with equally bad style, of seeing the same old stuff on the charts every week. By then, the Internet will have become powerful enough that any artist who wants to be heard, will be.
People Still Have The Power (Score:2, Insightful)
Everyone noted there are alternatives. I've even had a hard time finding mainstream music on the internet. It's all like indie and experimental. Then of course there is mp3 sharing as well.
But if you want the songs on the radio to change - go do something about it. Support your favorite bands - go to their shows and give their cds to people. If you want new music go to clubs and find it. Look at Linkin Park, I heard of this band forever ago before they had a record out. People had seen them and everyone in Orange County was talking about them. And I was also pretty suprised to hear the Strokes on the radio, they're a pretty indie sounding band. But there was techno before its short radio boom and it lives on after in smaller circles. Someone talked about punk, which also had a radio hayday (circa early epitaph) but in general has been able to survive as its own thing. And a lot of punk bands and a ton of punk fans don't want them to be on the radio. The radio is dependant upon what vocal people and their money like. Whether the radio station is owned by mom and pop or a corporation, if they want to survive, that's what they'll play. Point being, from the audience standpoint, it doesn't matter who owns it. and eventually Vegas Radio will get played when the corporation realizes they've saturated the market with too many of the same sounding stations. And they'll realize it eventually.
Re:Overgeneralization (Score:2, Insightful)
The myth among anti-media geeks is that CDs from Britney Spears and Mariah Carey are put out by Evil Money Grubbing Corporations, while music from Chemical Brothers and Radiohead is put out by Independent Freedom Loving Hippies.
Why would freedom loving hippies put out commercial music like the chemmical brothers or radiohead??
This in fact goes right against your argument - what YOU think of as underground music is actually REALLY mainstream...
mark
Nature of the mass market (Score:1, Insightful)
Given a choice between music that a thousand people really like, or music that a hundred thousand people tolerate, a mass-market broadcaster is better off picking the mass-tolerable music. Everybody has their own set of music they would rather listen to, but given the nature of the medium we all end up listening to the same crap. And when we hear it over and over, after a while we get used to it.
Replace FM radio with wireless networking, customized feeds, and collaborative filtering, and the no-better-than-tolerable mass-market bands will find their true destiny, making commercial jingles while the rest of us listen to good music.
Re:In past ages the philosphers... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure you knew this, but it's hugely surprising how many people have clearly never read an economics book in their life, but consider themselves experts because they read a website. It's sad.
Re:Hark! Yon Radioplay Doth Sucketh Verily! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Radio GaGa (Score:2, Insightful)
Voluntary? (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine for a moment that you're the owner of a local station (or small chain), and someone like Clear Channel decides they want your radio station. You're making enough to meet payroll, sponsor some community events, but you don't have deep cash reserves. Then CC comes in and tells you to sell for a lowball price.
You refuse - and they tell all of your advertisers that there's a new sheriff in town. If they sign exclusive agreements with CC stations, they get an ad rate substantially lower than what you can offer. It's far below cost to CC also, but they can pull in money from other stations nationwide.
But if they don't agree to that exclusive agreement, they're blacklisted by CC stations. Accounts are closed (even if that involves penalties), and even after they're removed from the blacklist (when CC is the only game in town) they'll never get prefered customer rates.
How long do you think you'll hold onto customers? A few may say with you, but anyone running ads on multiple stations will be forced to dump you. And all CC needs to do to target your advertisers is hire an intern to listen to your station and jot down what ads they hear.
This isn't an abusive monopoly since CC doesn't yet have a monopoly in that market, but it's as unfair as an unlimited stakes poker game where one player has $100 and another has $1000, and you can't not play.
Re:In past ages the philosphers... (Score:2, Insightful)
Payola isn't the problem. (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, perhaps it's all just due to corporate conservatism and a 'stick-with-what-has-worked' do-nothing take-no-risks attitude. Look at network television and reality series #4232, or the computer games industry and RTS FPS game #2189, or the movie industry and stupid action flick #12092. Occam's razor, people. It's not payola.
Re: Audiogalaxy for yourself (Score:2, Insightful)
<sarcasm>Which is *really* surprising, because the rule is if a group has a video, they suck.</sarcasm>
The fact that you're apologizing for a group having a video is a pretty clear indication that you might not like mainstream music precisely because it is mainstream. Yes, quite a lot of mainstream music sucks. But quite a lot of indie music sucks, too. There's also good music both on and off major labels. We should judge music by what it sounds like, not where it comes from.
It's the same phenomenon that makes some long-time fans of a band get pissed off when the band makes it big. I've never understood it. If White Stripes makes it big, next year we'll be reading a post on Slashdot from another user complaining that the radio only plays mainstream crap like White Stripes and never plays any of his favorite bands.
The RIAA, et al., could learn from this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Fifteen years ago, I was buying 5-20 CD's a MONTH. I found much to listen to in terms of 'New Age' (primarily instrumental, related to Jazz) artists like Ray Lynch, Michael Manring, Checkfield, Pat Metheny, etc., to say nothing of rediscovering all of my rock-and-roll faves from earlier years.
Guess what? Almost all of what I bought were copies of what I had already heard on commercial radio. KKSF, in the Bay Area, to be exact, plus a few other stations playing "classic" rock.
Granted, there have been a few of the more recent vocal groups and singers that have caught and held my interest; Don Henley, when he went solo from the Eagles, Bruce Hornsby, Bryan Adams, etc. HOWEVER -- The real reason my CD buying has dropped like a rock (maybe two a year if that) in the past decade or so is because I'm not hearing hardly anything worth listening to, either on or off the radio.
Music, to me, is a form of storytelling. Whether it's fact, fiction, or somewhere in between doesn't matter to me as long as it is sung with a good voice ('from the heart' is a good way to put it), and with DECENT music to back it up.
By 'decent,' I'm referring to the idea that the singer also be the songwriter, if not also playing their own instrument. Jimmy Buffett is a great example. He has a band, yes, but he also plays guitar and Lord only knows what else, and he writes his own material for the most part.
I think what I miss the most about today's (alleged) "pop" music is that much of it is as empty of real meaning, of real 'heart' if you will, as the Mojave Desert is empty of water in midsummer. Real musicians put a lot of their own personality and feeling into their work, and that's what makes it unique.
Anyway, it seems (to my ears) that the only "good" stuff is showing up on the few independent stations left, and on "web radio." This pisses off the big labels, though, because they now seem to think that music should be lip-syncing "pop stars," dressed in glittery costumes with colors that no living creature would be caught dead in, putting on a show that I don't think even a Las Vegas producer would touch with a 3.048 meter pole.
Can't have any real creativity running around now, can they? It shines a bad light on their predigested pap-spewing money-machine, and makes the way they've been trying to trample fair-use rights look even more greedy and stupid than it already is.
Unimaginitive jerks...
Re:the payola hearings of the 60's were a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm only 28, so this is before my time, but it seems like the days of the Golden Age of Radio Music (50's and 60's) focussed as much on the music that the DJ played by choice as they did on the personality of the DJ. Nowadays, DJs are handed lists of scheduled tunes to spit out, leaving them completely removed from the decision-making process.
What's the upshot? You can't listen to what the DJ likes to listen to anymore. There's no musical connection to them for the audience to resonate with. Particular DJs don't have particular styles anymore. There's no recognition of individual DJs and styles, no loyalty, and no sense that (*here's the important bit*) the DJ is sharing music with you that he or she thinks is really worth listening to.
(Whoops -- there's that "sharing music" idea again.)
DJs are therefore distinguished by their chatter between songs. Which is not music. I turn on the radio to listen to music or news, not chatter. Hence, I hate DJs. They're cookie-cutter gibbering monkeys to me, failed stand-up comedians who couldn't muster enough journalistic skills to become bona fide reporters.
I listen to my local university-driven NPR affiliate, and that's all. That station has a vast library of out-of-the-way music from every conceivable genre, and the DJs get to pick and chose what they'd like to play. Sometime I hate what they chose. Other times, I'm pleasantly surprised.
Imay not know their names, but I know their styles. I love that.
GMFTatsujin
Mostly the Current Economy (Score:2, Insightful)
Attempts at innovation in any company are not cheap and often don't improve things in the company (the few times they do are really what make the risk worth it). Nobody wants to take financial risks right now because of the economy and R&D or innovation are big financial risks.
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market (Score:2, Insightful)