zmix wrote on Mon, 08 November 2004 10:56 |
As a child, I recall, the major "rock" station had jazz after midnight, blues in the morning, rock in the afternoon, gospel on Sunday. Now it is a clearchannel affiliate....
-CZ
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I'm old enough to remember those days and miss them. But what doesn't make sense in this dialog is; If the name of the game, regardless of ownership, is ratings, and those days of diversified programming are really what the public wants, what's stopping Clear Channel or anyone from doing that? I don't think Clear Channel has any other agenda but to make money. If Croation Polka Music is what the public wants, then they'll play that. I'm afraid for a myriad of reasons, the radio-listening public, like network TV, is getting what they want. I don't like it, but there you have it.
A great article appeard this fall regarding NPR and their demise of music on their radio stations. Years ago you could get plenty of interesting classical, folk, and other cultural music on NPR for most of the day. Nowadays music limited to a few hours, and usually limited to light classical. (something boutique stores can play, never anything seriously challenging to listen to) The rest of the day is NPR's version of talk radio. It's not Limbaugh or ever Franken, but packaged discussion oriented programming. Some of it's good, but that's not the point. NPR learned that they could get better sponsorship by playing less music, so they did.
The real evil in the record business that I never hear anyone talk about is MTV. There you have a total monopoly of videos and if you can't get on, large scale success is near to, or totally impossible. It seems to me most of this attack on radio is politcal in nature, when the real demon is MTV. But because there's no political gain, MTV gets a pass. IMHO doing this tends to undermine the sincerety of your argument.