Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Streaming Radio Stations

This is one of those areas where there are too many choices, and one has to listen to 100 streaming radio stations before finding one that works, and then a month later it closes down and you have to start over.  I haven't much bothered with streaming radio ever.  The only thing that sort of worked for me was Pandora, which is auto-customized to my taste, but can also get boring, and isn't CD quality.  But I discovered more new-to-me artists on Pandora than any other source.

I moved to streaming libraries, like Tidal and Qobuz, where I can select any recording I know by name, artist, or genre, and simply play that.

But it's a pain too, not having a DJ of some kind to preselect music from the billions of titles available.  The convenience of having someone else pick the music for you is one of the reasons why I have always listened to FM and still do.  Meanwhile, many audiophiles have never even thought of FM as audio, just junk.

The DJ function is also of great social importance, as this is how most people discover music.  While you might wonder why even back when recorded music was socially costly (maybe a few hours of work to buy a 30 min LP) radio stations would play music for free, with some thought you see the promotional aspect is extremely important.  Radio play is exact what made the big hits big hits!  Otherwise, few people would have known.  Radio is advertising for recorded music!

This was, from the beginning, a big avenue for corruption.  Not only would record producers give records to radio stations to play for free, they would even make payments, called payola, for the DJ's to actually play them.  Payola was specifically made illegal, but you can bet the complicated interests involved have never gone away.

So all the online radio AND online libraries promote some music more than others, in various ways, corresponding to back door agreements and ongoing corporate relationships.

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