An institution of culture. something the new money tech elite dont seem to understand. modern society is desperately missing the concept of noblesse oblige
Excellent, agreed. Nothing is sacred except "the grind", it appears, yes. No value exists outside viewcount, or listenercount, or whatever metric the media uses.
Your comment reminds me of something I read yesterday, an allusion that mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota made to what he called "Kultur", in this remarkable interview https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326965.pdf. The context is different, but I think your usage is in line with his in the interview.
You can write as many paragraphs of this stuff as you like but I don't think that's going to get people to retain long-term 7-8 figure liabilities on their books. If there's even a notion of a system of "noblesse oblige", everybody has been defecting from it except for King.
When you say "everbody", you're referring to a modest percentage of people, and even for those people, it's only true some of the time.
The real world is full of people doing stuff that is not explained whatsoever by notions like increasing profits in account-books.
People do economically disastrous things like have dogs, go on holiday, they get their nails done twice a month, waste half their Sunday doing their Gran's hedges, and etc etc. They have babies, and often someone stays at home with the baby, losing boat loads of money in many cases if you calculate what they could earn if they worked full time and put the child into a cheap daycare.
Not to mention all the hours spent in amateur sports clubs, and ukulele groups, and pipe bands, and sometimes, they even run radio stations, and blogs, and maintain software, and make little robots, just for a laugh.
The notion of everyone going around calculating everything to maximise income all the time is a fairytale certain people tell themselves to convince themselves they're the real mavericks, the hard ones who don't flinch from reality. The motivation for the deception is clear, but unfortunately, it's patently false.
There are plenty of cultural institutions in the modern world that are basically run as a charity. I think the elite understand this just fine they just don't view some random rock radio station as a cultural institution.
FM radio is dead and has been for years. I haven't seriously listened to FM radio since I got a portable CD player and that was in the late 90s. I can't imagine anybody trying to get into it now.
Why would I subject myself to obnoxious ads every few minutes and music I don't like when I can just listen to what I want, when I want, ad-free?
AM radio is still going with conspiracy talk and maybe sports radio? I honestly don't know, I've never given AM radio a real listen.
Sometimes I get nostalgic for the radio. I remember calling in to stations and requesting songs, contests, morning zoo hosts, and so on. But it's probably not coming back.
I’m not trying to argue the point, but I listen to FM about every day, or at least every day I’m in the car. It’s much easier for me than getting music from my phone going, even with Bluetooth.
And I have come to the conclusion that I like talk intermixed with music, even if the talk is an ad. It’s weird, I never thought that’d be the case, but I do. In fact, I wish I could easily mix my music library into my podcast library— specifically, interrupt podcasts with music (maybe replace the ads with a single song).
I also like how easy it is to switch channels to something different. I could do that with CarPlay or something too with my own music, but then I probably have to actually think about it (when I should be thinking about driving).
And for people who care about live music events (shows etc) it’s a great way to find out about those things, particularly if your city has a good public radio station and not just iHeartMedia.
I’m not sure I Love radio, but I would probably really miss it if it wasn’t in my car.
Dunno where you are but local radio programming disappeared in most markets years ago. Even in the Bay Area. All of what you've said about radio content was true a decade or more ago, but much less true now.
And for people who care about live music events (shows etc) it’s a
great way to find out about those things
Big stations promote big acts, sure. But that's easy enough to find information on elsewhere (e.g. Youtube). Smaller stations (e.g. KXSF, KPFA, KZSU) out here promote smaller venues but I'm typically out of range and end up listening to their content via the good old internet.
I’m not sure I Love radio, but I would probably really miss it if
it wasn’t in my car.
There was a time I would (late 90s, early 00s) but now? Not so much. The ratio of music to ads has gotten awful. Even stations that have ostensibly gone back to their roots like KITS are a pale imitation of their past glory. Like they'll wear the meat suit of genres that were previously popular but make sure to mix it with plenty of mediocre top 40 and a suffocating amount of ads.
I don’t really listen to radio while traveling so I’ll take your word for it. In Minnesota we gave The Current, part of MPR family of stations which is pretty good from what I hear (about its status nationally, though always some one will say it “used to be better”). And yeah, that’s ONE station.
Probably another part of it for me is that most of drives are probably considered short, the longest trip is usually 20-30 minutes depending on traffic and that’s only a few times a month.
If I was doing hour long commutes, it’d be podcasts all day.
In the MSP area my two main radio stations are both public radio. The state's MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) station and The Current, which is basically what the GP described for the Twin Cities region.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that I'd miss them if they were gone. OK, I really like listening to Terry Gross and Kai Ryssdal but besides that it's just nice background audio.
A real quick check of "top radio station owners" showed that the top ten all picked up more stations going from 2020 to 2021. Yes there are still a ton of small stations doing god knows what (on the order of 10,000 AM+FM commercial), but there's been a ton of consolidation. Your examples of Terry Gross and Kai Ryssdal kinda highlight that. Neither MPR nor WHYY are local for most of their audience (and arguably neither are focused on local content).
Give monthly donations to your local NPR affiliate. Most of them have decently middle-of-the-road biased news, and a few have really good music programming (looking at you, KUTX).
As someone who doesn't listen to the radio in FM or AM, does it really make sense to comment on your thoughts regarding how often and why it's listened to by most people? You're not one of them.
I've owned CDs since the early 90s. I e owned several good MP3 players. I have several USB drives with music on them.
I haven't touched any of those in about a decade, and instead listen to the radio every day.
Some time in the early 2000's I heard a Microsoft ad, on FM radio, for FAT32. I turned off the radio and basically never turned it on again (and made sure my next car had mp3 player support.)
Your comment reminds me of something I read yesterday, an allusion that mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota made to what he called "Kultur", in this remarkable interview https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326965.pdf. The context is different, but I think your usage is in line with his in the interview.