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RADIO_HATE

                                                  October 1, 2012

Overheard on caltrain:

  I don't like radio, I only listen to
  it if I've rented a car.

  I mean actual radio, no internet radio
  or whatever.

  It's all ten minutes of commercials and
  then *This Song*--

  I only listen to what pitchfork tells me
  to listen to.


Commercial radio has poisoned the minds of a
generation against the very idea of broadcast
radio.  They'll never discover the gems that
mostly lurk down in the muck at the bottom of
the FM dial.

  I had a conversation with a young guy I know
  from Cellspace-- a local, "underground" arts
  place-- and I realized he had no idea what
  college radio was, let alone what it was about.

  Even after trying to describe it to him--
  he didn't know about the tradition of trying
  to discover the new and shelter the obscure--
  he was of the opinion that the internet had
  taken over that role.


   I made the point that while the net
   is good for many things, it doesn't
   really play an identical role:

   There's an elaborate social
   system, both formal and                                             
   informal at KZSU, where a lot      In the KZSU system: new releases are     
   of different kinds of people       pre-screened by the Music Dept,          
   have gathered together and         kicked to DJs who listen and write       
   agreed to work together, and       reviews of them (these are stuck on      
   it's all because they're           the front on stickers, and entered       
   rallying around this one           in a public database,                    
   resource that's perceived as       zookeeper.stanford.edu) the Music        
   valuable: a transmitter            Dept looks at the reviews and picks      
   frequency.                         what to feature in the A-file-- DJs      
                                      are required to choose a certain         
                                      amount of music from the A-file          
                                      (roughly, 1/3 of the show).              
                                                                               


             Amateur "podcasters" tend to                                     
             quit just when they start to       And they lack groups
             figure out what they're doing.     of experienced peers
                                                nudging them to take
                                                it a little farther.


                   Pitchfork may have it's
                   virtues, but it's only
                   one system... every non-
                   commercial radio station
                   is an opportunity for
                   working out another system.



             Are recommendation databases perfect
             substitues for editors, DJs, curators... ?






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