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.
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
I'd Like to Make a Request
I am not going to discuss the Grooveshark music service in detail - you can go to the service's Wikipedia entry or to the Grooveshark.com site itself if that's what you want - but will merely say a few things about my experience with the service in this post.
I did a fair amount of music listening at MP3.com during its heyday. MP3.com's music offerings were mostly chaff and not so much wheat, but that never bothered me: swimming through the chaff was all part of the listening experience, as I saw it. The MP3.com site is still extant, although it is only a faint shadow of what it used to be. It hosts 250 songs that can be streamed or downloaded; there are no selections from big-name artists as there once was. Parts of the site are dysfunctional or haven't been updated for a couple of years.
I had a small collection of MP3.com favorites that I listened to time and again. I was able to download some but not all of these songs - I still have those .mp3s, BTW. One favorite that I wasn't able to download was This Holiday Life's "Come and Remain", which I like for its U2-ish anthemic feel. Fast-forward to the present: after I sorted out my Internet situation here in California, I did a Google search for "Come and Remain" on the chance that I might find a site at which I could play it. Gratifyingly, my search turned up a Grooveshark.com page that hooked me up with the listen I was looking for.
Grooveshark is a service that allows its users to freely stream songs but not download them, and that's just fine with me: believe me when I say that I don't want a bunch of files cluttering up my hard disk. A wide variety of music is available at Grooveshark.com. If you're up for a Muzio Clementi sonatina, a Luciano Pavarotti aria, or a Hossam Ramzy belly dance (you'll have to supply the dancer ;-)), Grooveshark's got you covered.
Ah, but what about the depth of the Grooveshark library? I can report that it's pretty impressive, at least as far as popular music is concerned. Let's put the Grooveshark "Search for songs, artists, genres" widget to work:
• "Killing Me Softly (with His Song)" was made famous by Roberta Flack but was originally recorded by Lori Lieberman. Never heard Lieberman's version? Grooveshark's got it.
• In the late 1970s, "Responsibility" and "I'll Be Waiting" from Robert Johnson's Close Personal Friend got a lot of airplay on KMET, which I briefly discussed in the previous entry. Johnson is a relatively obscure artist and Close Personal Friend is his only record, and I wasn't expecting to find Close Personal Friend's tracks at Grooveshark.com, but they're there. Wow.
• When Huey Lewis and the News released "Heart and Soul", I thought, "I've heard this song before." "Heart and Soul" had in fact been recorded twice previously, and the first of these versions, by Exile (the "Kiss You All Over" guys), did indeed get a bit of airplay. Exile's "Heart and Soul" is longer and more interesting than Lewis's version; you unfortunately won't hear the former on the radio today but you can listen to it at Grooveshark.com. (The second "Heart and Soul" was by The Bus Boys: I couldn't find this version at Grooveshark but I did find it here.)
Imagine being able to call up a radio station and request a song and get it played immediately, without having to worry about the 'tastes' of the station's DJs, management, and advertisers - Grooveshark is somewhat like that.
I say "somewhat" because there are some conspicuous gaps in the Grooveshark library - run a Grooveshark search for the Beatles and see what happens - prompting the questions:
(1) Where does Grooveshark's music come from?
(2) Is the Grooveshark service legal in the first place?
To my understanding, users provide the great majority of Grooveshark's content although, per the Copyright subsection of Wikipedia's Grooveshark entry, Grooveshark employees seem to be responsible for some of it.
I can't answer the second question with certainty, but I suspect the answer is "no".
• Wikipedia notes that Grooveshark has been sued by all of the major music companies - this does seem like the sort of thing that would put the music industry in high dudgeon, doesn't it?
• Some Grooveshark song listings are in disguised form: for example, one "21st Century Schizoid Man" listing is for a song from Kkiinngg-Ccrriimmssoonn's Ttthhee-Ccoouurrtt-ooff-tthhee-Ccrriimmssoonn-Kkiinngg album - listen to it here (Robert Fripp has locked horns with Grooveshark over its hosting of his music). Would this be the case if the Grooveshark service were completely lawful? I don't think so.
I can see why record companies and artists would be upset with Grooveshark, but there's very much a limit to which I can sympathize with these parties given the awful state of today's radio listening experience. Moreover, I own hundreds of records and have been to my fair share of music shows, so it's not as though I don't have any 'skin in the game', so to speak. Grooveshark's detractors can throw stones at me if they want but as long as Grooveshark is around I'm going to avail myself of it.
Leading by example
Let me conclude this entry by noting that you can listen to "stations" at the Grooveshark Genres pane. I listened to the "Classic Rock" station for a while today: in addition to hits from Rush, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Steve Miller Band, I heard off-the-beaten-path songs by Styx ("Edge of the Century"), Thin Lizzy ("Brought Down"), Mountain ("Roll Over Beethoven"), the Grateful Dead ("Little Nemo in Nightland"), and Fleetwood Mac ("Morning Rain") - there was even a song by The Tragically Hip ("Pretend"). Can you now see the difference between programming that is run by music fans vs. programming that is meant to maximize advertising revenue?
I did a fair amount of music listening at MP3.com during its heyday. MP3.com's music offerings were mostly chaff and not so much wheat, but that never bothered me: swimming through the chaff was all part of the listening experience, as I saw it. The MP3.com site is still extant, although it is only a faint shadow of what it used to be. It hosts 250 songs that can be streamed or downloaded; there are no selections from big-name artists as there once was. Parts of the site are dysfunctional or haven't been updated for a couple of years.
I had a small collection of MP3.com favorites that I listened to time and again. I was able to download some but not all of these songs - I still have those .mp3s, BTW. One favorite that I wasn't able to download was This Holiday Life's "Come and Remain", which I like for its U2-ish anthemic feel. Fast-forward to the present: after I sorted out my Internet situation here in California, I did a Google search for "Come and Remain" on the chance that I might find a site at which I could play it. Gratifyingly, my search turned up a Grooveshark.com page that hooked me up with the listen I was looking for.
Grooveshark is a service that allows its users to freely stream songs but not download them, and that's just fine with me: believe me when I say that I don't want a bunch of files cluttering up my hard disk. A wide variety of music is available at Grooveshark.com. If you're up for a Muzio Clementi sonatina, a Luciano Pavarotti aria, or a Hossam Ramzy belly dance (you'll have to supply the dancer ;-)), Grooveshark's got you covered.
Ah, but what about the depth of the Grooveshark library? I can report that it's pretty impressive, at least as far as popular music is concerned. Let's put the Grooveshark "Search for songs, artists, genres" widget to work:
• "Killing Me Softly (with His Song)" was made famous by Roberta Flack but was originally recorded by Lori Lieberman. Never heard Lieberman's version? Grooveshark's got it.
• In the late 1970s, "Responsibility" and "I'll Be Waiting" from Robert Johnson's Close Personal Friend got a lot of airplay on KMET, which I briefly discussed in the previous entry. Johnson is a relatively obscure artist and Close Personal Friend is his only record, and I wasn't expecting to find Close Personal Friend's tracks at Grooveshark.com, but they're there. Wow.
• When Huey Lewis and the News released "Heart and Soul", I thought, "I've heard this song before." "Heart and Soul" had in fact been recorded twice previously, and the first of these versions, by Exile (the "Kiss You All Over" guys), did indeed get a bit of airplay. Exile's "Heart and Soul" is longer and more interesting than Lewis's version; you unfortunately won't hear the former on the radio today but you can listen to it at Grooveshark.com. (The second "Heart and Soul" was by The Bus Boys: I couldn't find this version at Grooveshark but I did find it here.)
Imagine being able to call up a radio station and request a song and get it played immediately, without having to worry about the 'tastes' of the station's DJs, management, and advertisers - Grooveshark is somewhat like that.
I say "somewhat" because there are some conspicuous gaps in the Grooveshark library - run a Grooveshark search for the Beatles and see what happens - prompting the questions:
(1) Where does Grooveshark's music come from?
(2) Is the Grooveshark service legal in the first place?
To my understanding, users provide the great majority of Grooveshark's content although, per the Copyright subsection of Wikipedia's Grooveshark entry, Grooveshark employees seem to be responsible for some of it.
I can't answer the second question with certainty, but I suspect the answer is "no".
• Wikipedia notes that Grooveshark has been sued by all of the major music companies - this does seem like the sort of thing that would put the music industry in high dudgeon, doesn't it?
• Some Grooveshark song listings are in disguised form: for example, one "21st Century Schizoid Man" listing is for a song from Kkiinngg-Ccrriimmssoonn's Ttthhee-Ccoouurrtt-ooff-tthhee-Ccrriimmssoonn-Kkiinngg album - listen to it here (Robert Fripp has locked horns with Grooveshark over its hosting of his music). Would this be the case if the Grooveshark service were completely lawful? I don't think so.
I can see why record companies and artists would be upset with Grooveshark, but there's very much a limit to which I can sympathize with these parties given the awful state of today's radio listening experience. Moreover, I own hundreds of records and have been to my fair share of music shows, so it's not as though I don't have any 'skin in the game', so to speak. Grooveshark's detractors can throw stones at me if they want but as long as Grooveshark is around I'm going to avail myself of it.
Leading by example
Let me conclude this entry by noting that you can listen to "stations" at the Grooveshark Genres pane. I listened to the "Classic Rock" station for a while today: in addition to hits from Rush, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Steve Miller Band, I heard off-the-beaten-path songs by Styx ("Edge of the Century"), Thin Lizzy ("Brought Down"), Mountain ("Roll Over Beethoven"), the Grateful Dead ("Little Nemo in Nightland"), and Fleetwood Mac ("Morning Rain") - there was even a song by The Tragically Hip ("Pretend"). Can you now see the difference between programming that is run by music fans vs. programming that is meant to maximize advertising revenue?
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Checking In with the Narrowcast Media
For today's post, your humble narrator heroically listens to some "classic rock" - so that you don't have to.
I have a couple of questions for those who listen to FM rock radio:
(1) When's the last time you heard Procol Harum's "Whiskey Train", Joe Cocker's "High Time We Went", Roxy Music's "Out of the Blue", or Jackson Browne's "The Fuse" on the radio?
(2) Are you familiar with these songs?
I spent my high school years listening to the long-gone KMET, which was based in Los Angeles but whose strong signal easily reached my home in North San Diego County. KMET aired a reasonably satisfying mix of 'hits' and deep cuts from the world of rock music, broadly defined. KMET wasn't that adventurous - I can't recall it ever playing "21st Century Schizoid Man" or "God Save the Queen" - but it was nonetheless a good place to begin one's musical education.
Fast-forward to the present: What is FM rock radio like today?
To research this question, I listened to WKBU, "New Orleans' Only Classic Rock!", on the Web for about an hour and 15 minutes last Friday afternoon. During this time I was treated to 15 songs, about 20 commercials, various forms of station identification, two traffic reports, and a very small amount of chitchat from Kat, the station host.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Do Me Like That" was playing when I tuned in. Here are the other artists/songs I heard, in chronological order:
The Police: "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
Lenny Kravitz: "American Woman" (the Guess Who classic)
Scorpions: "Rock You Like a Hurricane"
Fleetwood Mac: "The Chain"
Led Zeppelin: "Black Dog"
Don Henley: "All She Wants to Do Is Dance"
Pink Floyd: "Another Brick in the Wall"
Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Simple Man"
Def Leppard: "Bringin' on the Heartbreak"
Journey: "Faithfully"
Metallica: "Enter Sandman"
Van Halen: "Unchained"
Stone Temple Pilots: "Plush" (unplugged version)
Free: "All Right Now"
Pretty standard fare, eh? Not a deep cut in sight. The closest we get to a 'surprise' is the Stone Temple Pilots selection: STP came out of the 1990s alt-rock era and IMO does not really count as "classic rock", at least when compared with Free and Led Zeppelin. (Don't get me wrong: I am definitely not faulting WKBU/Kat for playing STP.) You might also find the Journey selection a bit surprising in that "Faithfully" is now a staple of "soft rock" radio - I know for a fact that WLMG plays it.
WKBU's "Listen Live" widget features a Song History page that maintains a running log of the songs that are aired. For whatever reason, "American Woman" and "Plush" were not entered into the log - make of that what you will.
History-wise, the oldest of these songs is "All Right Now", which dates to 1970, whereas the newest is the "American Woman" remake, which dates to 1999, which by my arithmetic was 15 years ago. Most of the above artists have released one or more studio albums during the 1999-2014 period: Lynyrd Skynyrd has made five such records, for example. Have you ever heard any of this new music on the radio? I haven't. Maybe WKBU should call itself an oldies station, à la WTIX.
With no deep cuts and no recent material, WKBU offers a listening experience decidedly inferior to that provided by KMET back in the day. How can this be?
In her station bio, Kat says that her musical favorites include David Bowie, U2, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, and Frank Zappa. Left to her own devices, could Kat put together an interesting set list of songs from these artists on the spur of the moment? Has she ever played "Dinah-Moe Humm" during her program? Intriguingly, Kat also says that she's a fan of Patsy Cline and Frank Sinatra. What response would Kat get if she played "Strangers in the Night"? (C'mon, Kat, let's do this...)
Of course, it is extremely unlikely that Kat is left to her own devices: almost certainly someone higher up is telling her what to play. Let's assume for the moment that Kat is indeed a bona fide music fan and is not just a 'personality'; for all I know, she may own hundreds or even thousands of records and have a comprehensive knowledge of popular music. Whether or not this is true, however, it is clear that the shot-callers at WKBU and other stations of its ilk are NOT music fans, and THAT, my friends, is the real problem that plagues WKBU and FM rock radio more generally.
Actually, I can't say with absolute certainty that KMET's management/DJs were music fans either, but they were at least willing to take some musical chances, and a willingness to take risks goes a long way in determining the quality of a commercial music radio station.
Ah, but what about WKBU's advertisers? Does WKBU's management worry that those advertisers would bolt if Kat and her fellow hosts 'went rogue', so to speak? Is sheer cowardice to blame here? My listen featured ads by Terminex, New Orleans Audi, the Silver Slipper Casino, and Progressive Insurance (at this point in my life I think I would rather hear "Flo" sing than hear "Another Brick in the Wall", but that's another post for another time): Would these businesses really be scared away if Kat were to play Bruce Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)", or the title track of Heart's Little Queen, or something from U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (a 2004 release that song-for-song is much better than The Joshua Tree)? I highly doubt it, although their representatives are welcome to contact and correct me if I'm wrong about that.
FM rock radio does not have to be as bad as it is - diversifying its output would attract new listeners and maybe even more advertising revenue, who knows? But it is really bad, and that's why people like me are driven to streaming services like Grooveshark, which I'll discuss in the next post.
I have a couple of questions for those who listen to FM rock radio:
(1) When's the last time you heard Procol Harum's "Whiskey Train", Joe Cocker's "High Time We Went", Roxy Music's "Out of the Blue", or Jackson Browne's "The Fuse" on the radio?
(2) Are you familiar with these songs?
I spent my high school years listening to the long-gone KMET, which was based in Los Angeles but whose strong signal easily reached my home in North San Diego County. KMET aired a reasonably satisfying mix of 'hits' and deep cuts from the world of rock music, broadly defined. KMET wasn't that adventurous - I can't recall it ever playing "21st Century Schizoid Man" or "God Save the Queen" - but it was nonetheless a good place to begin one's musical education.
Fast-forward to the present: What is FM rock radio like today?
To research this question, I listened to WKBU, "New Orleans' Only Classic Rock!", on the Web for about an hour and 15 minutes last Friday afternoon. During this time I was treated to 15 songs, about 20 commercials, various forms of station identification, two traffic reports, and a very small amount of chitchat from Kat, the station host.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Do Me Like That" was playing when I tuned in. Here are the other artists/songs I heard, in chronological order:
The Police: "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
Lenny Kravitz: "American Woman" (the Guess Who classic)
Scorpions: "Rock You Like a Hurricane"
Fleetwood Mac: "The Chain"
Led Zeppelin: "Black Dog"
Don Henley: "All She Wants to Do Is Dance"
Pink Floyd: "Another Brick in the Wall"
Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Simple Man"
Def Leppard: "Bringin' on the Heartbreak"
Journey: "Faithfully"
Metallica: "Enter Sandman"
Van Halen: "Unchained"
Stone Temple Pilots: "Plush" (unplugged version)
Free: "All Right Now"
Pretty standard fare, eh? Not a deep cut in sight. The closest we get to a 'surprise' is the Stone Temple Pilots selection: STP came out of the 1990s alt-rock era and IMO does not really count as "classic rock", at least when compared with Free and Led Zeppelin. (Don't get me wrong: I am definitely not faulting WKBU/Kat for playing STP.) You might also find the Journey selection a bit surprising in that "Faithfully" is now a staple of "soft rock" radio - I know for a fact that WLMG plays it.
WKBU's "Listen Live" widget features a Song History page that maintains a running log of the songs that are aired. For whatever reason, "American Woman" and "Plush" were not entered into the log - make of that what you will.
History-wise, the oldest of these songs is "All Right Now", which dates to 1970, whereas the newest is the "American Woman" remake, which dates to 1999, which by my arithmetic was 15 years ago. Most of the above artists have released one or more studio albums during the 1999-2014 period: Lynyrd Skynyrd has made five such records, for example. Have you ever heard any of this new music on the radio? I haven't. Maybe WKBU should call itself an oldies station, à la WTIX.
With no deep cuts and no recent material, WKBU offers a listening experience decidedly inferior to that provided by KMET back in the day. How can this be?
In her station bio, Kat says that her musical favorites include David Bowie, U2, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, and Frank Zappa. Left to her own devices, could Kat put together an interesting set list of songs from these artists on the spur of the moment? Has she ever played "Dinah-Moe Humm" during her program? Intriguingly, Kat also says that she's a fan of Patsy Cline and Frank Sinatra. What response would Kat get if she played "Strangers in the Night"? (C'mon, Kat, let's do this...)
Of course, it is extremely unlikely that Kat is left to her own devices: almost certainly someone higher up is telling her what to play. Let's assume for the moment that Kat is indeed a bona fide music fan and is not just a 'personality'; for all I know, she may own hundreds or even thousands of records and have a comprehensive knowledge of popular music. Whether or not this is true, however, it is clear that the shot-callers at WKBU and other stations of its ilk are NOT music fans, and THAT, my friends, is the real problem that plagues WKBU and FM rock radio more generally.
Actually, I can't say with absolute certainty that KMET's management/DJs were music fans either, but they were at least willing to take some musical chances, and a willingness to take risks goes a long way in determining the quality of a commercial music radio station.
Ah, but what about WKBU's advertisers? Does WKBU's management worry that those advertisers would bolt if Kat and her fellow hosts 'went rogue', so to speak? Is sheer cowardice to blame here? My listen featured ads by Terminex, New Orleans Audi, the Silver Slipper Casino, and Progressive Insurance (at this point in my life I think I would rather hear "Flo" sing than hear "Another Brick in the Wall", but that's another post for another time): Would these businesses really be scared away if Kat were to play Bruce Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)", or the title track of Heart's Little Queen, or something from U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (a 2004 release that song-for-song is much better than The Joshua Tree)? I highly doubt it, although their representatives are welcome to contact and correct me if I'm wrong about that.
FM rock radio does not have to be as bad as it is - diversifying its output would attract new listeners and maybe even more advertising revenue, who knows? But it is really bad, and that's why people like me are driven to streaming services like Grooveshark, which I'll discuss in the next post.
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