As long as I'm sounding off about the current state of popular music radio, let me sneak in one more post on something else that gets my goat about it.
When I lived in New Orleans I sometimes listened to WTIX's repeat broadcasts of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem on Sunday morning. If you have the patience to sit through an AT40 program from yesteryear - and I can see how you might not have that patience - you will hear 'diamonds in the rough' thereon, e.g., Aretha Franklin covering "Bridge over Troubled Water", early Kool & the Gang, that sort of thing. However, I'm not going to talk about AT40's music today as Kasem's presentation is the part of the show that really interests me.
For each song that he plays, Kasem articulately states the song title and the name of the artist both before and after the song (if the song appears on an album he normally doesn't give the album name, but then again, his program's focus is hit singles); if the song is a cover, he'll tell you that, and who did the song originally; moreover, he often says where an artist hails from. I sincerely think that all of this is a wonderfully pro-artist thing to do and that all DJs everywhere should follow Kasem's example.
Regrettably, the management/DJs at most commercial music radio stations are pretty slack about relaying song/artist information to listeners. Maybe these people think, "Listeners who care about that stuff can go to the station's Web site or call us up." Maybe they assume that the listenership 'knows it all already'*, so to speak. Maybe they just don't care.
*This assumption is not wholly unreasonable for a classic rock station that plays a small set of songs over and over again. Everyone knows that "Another Brick in the Wall" is by Pink Floyd and appears on The Wall, right? To be sure, a majority of listeners will know this, but some listeners won't, and the station should be willing to cater to the latter group.
A true story:
For the longest time I did not know who Jewel was. I had heard her hits on the radio a zillion times but NOT ONCE did I ever hear a DJ say, "We were just listening to Jewel, doing Song X from her most recent record." This drove me absolutely nuts. If I recall correctly, I finally solved this mystery by latching onto a lyrical snippet from one of those hits and then running a Google search on that snippet - this is what I'm reduced to when I want to find out who does a song these days - pathetic, huh? (Don't ask me to watch a video channel to learn artist names: I detest music videos.)
At non-commercial music radio stations the information situation is also often problematic. College radio DJs are notorious for playing 30- to 60-minute music sets without interruptions of any kind: before the start of a set they'll tell you the first song they're going to play; after a set ends they'll usually give you a list (not necessarily a complete or correct list) of what they just played. What if you really like the fourth song of a 10-song set and can't hang around until the end of the set and are unable or not inclined to check in with the radio station to get the skinny on that song? You're out of luck. Deeply uncool.
Not-so-popular music radio
Classical music radio hosts typically do a good job of keeping their listeners informed. The presentation of jazz music radio is a mixed bag - it ranges from conscientious DJs who announce song/artist information every couple of songs to DJs who adhere to the 'let's play a whole bunch of songs in a row' model - but is generally better than that of popular music radio.
My criticisms of music radio's content and presentation will of course be irrelevant for those to whom radio is little more than a form of 'aural wallpaper', which seems to be the case for a lot of listeners out there. However, if you are interested in broadening your musical horizons - as worthwhile a pursuit in life as any, IMO - then at some point you will need to move your quest to the Web, if you haven't done so already. My reproach of WKBU two entries ago notwithstanding, Web sites of traditional music stations are a good place to start. WWNO.org offers two (NPR-free) audio streams that WWNO-FM does not. WNOE.com is a step up presentation-wise from WNOE-FM. Get going.
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