...but I know it sucks. I know this because I enter shopping centres, I ride in friends cars and I work at a place that happens to have it playing. The current landscape of radio stations in Perth sucks gigantic donkey balls, for this many reasons:
1) 90% of music is terrible, that's a given. But there's a top 10% of that ninety, occupied by Pink, Nickelback and Snow Patrol, along with the damnable members of their ilk. You know the music I'm talking about, it's not that it actually physically annoys you, it's just kinda boring, and it sits in the background, boring and annoying you. The reason this shit gets played is because it is "inoffensive" so people are less likely to flip the station. Except it gets played ad nauseum so the odds favour someone landing on the latest boring and inoffensive tune when channel flipping. Ostensibly it's good business sense, but it makes basically every radio station unlistenable. Oldies stations have their roster of boring oldies to cycle through, while stations playing new shit have the top twenty singles to just recycle. Which brings me to my next point:
2) It just promotes whatever is popular at the time. OK, oldies stations don't do this so much, but think about top twenty stations. They play songs that are popular, thus increasing their popularity until they get thrashed to death or quietly fall off everyone's radar forever. It just perpetuates the cycle of shitty, shitty music. The worst bit is, they can, if so inclined, replace one Pink song with another one and most of the knuckledraggers out there won't even notice, thus keeping their fiendish pattern going on into perpetuity. Yes, I really hate Pink, we've covered this.
3) It's run like a business. I know this seems like a stupid quibble, but it does bug me. Radio ads are, by and large, really irritating, but because radio stations need cash flow to keep running, it becomes a case of appealing to the lowest common denominator, because that's where the money is. There's no money in niche marketing, so any station that wishes to stand on its feet financially needs advertising cash, hence the samey crap that gets peddled 24/7. It's all connected, and it's all fucking irritating.
4) DJs are boring. Unless they're irritating. By and large, talk radio falls into the "not even funny" category of comedy, and even very good talk falls flat after a while. This whole "three people hoping they're funny while simultaneously taking calls and occasionally shitting out two or three songs" deal has to change. It has no flow, is impossible to get into and leaves fans of any one of those three things irritated at how little a share their favourite section gets. A show just for music, a show just for talk and a show just for call-ins. It's not hard.
I don't even know why I bitch about this, I only ever listen to the radio under duress, as do many of my fellows. I will say, though, I'd probably listen to a lot more if they addressed these issues, and they'd probably educate the masses a bit more if they did. Educational talk radio? Yeah, it can exist. And it can be interesting too. That is, assuming you didn't have a healthy diet of paint as a child.
No comments:
Post a Comment