Wednesday, September 29, 2004:
I live in the United States, which tends to be less densely populated and less cosmopolitan than Europe. I'm in Gainesville, Florida, home to about 50,000 constant residents and 50,000 students. The students come and go; the number increases by a thousand or two a year.
All of the radio stations here bore and/or annoy me. Except for NPR they're all format radio stations, and the "college radio" station sounds a lot like the corporate stations. The format stations play the same tracks over and over. Want to hear Kansas sing "Dust in the Wind"? Great. You're at the right place.... NPR spends a lot of time talking politics, which is all well and good if talking politics is what you're after, and not at all well and good if you're more interested in music.
Here, you can turn off the radio and come back to it a few years later; it's like a soap opera: give it a few hours and you've caught up with all that the author thinks you need to know. It isn't meeting my needs. I frequent mp3blogs and buy CDs by the armful. Occasionally I listen to shoutcast, but I tend to hop stations once or twice an hour and then turn it off.
So I guess I'm writing this for people in the same situation as me: people who love music and hate their local stations. I don't want pasta for lunch every day, and I don't care if it's tomato linguini one day and fettuccine alfredo the next.
These posts don't substitute for a radio station--there's a lot less music, for one--but it's a start. And I'll be stoked if I ever point you towards a band you haven't heard before and fall in love with. If you find that band, please do the right thing and buy the music.
what what?
Phillipe from the Beathunters posted a comment about how Cesaria Evora is popular in Europe, which is true enough, but led to the question of who I think my audience is.I live in the United States, which tends to be less densely populated and less cosmopolitan than Europe. I'm in Gainesville, Florida, home to about 50,000 constant residents and 50,000 students. The students come and go; the number increases by a thousand or two a year.
All of the radio stations here bore and/or annoy me. Except for NPR they're all format radio stations, and the "college radio" station sounds a lot like the corporate stations. The format stations play the same tracks over and over. Want to hear Kansas sing "Dust in the Wind"? Great. You're at the right place.... NPR spends a lot of time talking politics, which is all well and good if talking politics is what you're after, and not at all well and good if you're more interested in music.
Here, you can turn off the radio and come back to it a few years later; it's like a soap opera: give it a few hours and you've caught up with all that the author thinks you need to know. It isn't meeting my needs. I frequent mp3blogs and buy CDs by the armful. Occasionally I listen to shoutcast, but I tend to hop stations once or twice an hour and then turn it off.
So I guess I'm writing this for people in the same situation as me: people who love music and hate their local stations. I don't want pasta for lunch every day, and I don't care if it's tomato linguini one day and fettuccine alfredo the next.
These posts don't substitute for a radio station--there's a lot less music, for one--but it's a start. And I'll be stoked if I ever point you towards a band you haven't heard before and fall in love with. If you find that band, please do the right thing and buy the music.
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