Streaming apps killed the radio star

Ever since Napster first came out,

I'll try that again:

I haven't listened to the radio much since music streaming services leveled the field.

Before that, like everyone else, I pirated everything. Back then you had iTunes and a massive media library of questionable origins — presumably on an external drive connected via FireWire. Everything from Stevie Nicks to Cradle of Filth was filed away in there. Before that you bought everything on CD. And that's as far back as I'm going.

But discovery was always the radio back then, you know? There weren't algorithms telling us what's Hot and Trending. If you were lucky, you lived somewhere with at least one cool station. At the very least, you had shit on MTV like Headbanger's Ball or whatever else was on in the daytime. Even MySpace was a better way to find good tunes than the front page of Apple Music.

We had a cool station in Columbus for a while called CD 102.5. They played GREAT alternative stuff. I could sit there with a pen and notepad and come up with all sorts of music to download eventually, years later, legally add to my Apple Music library for a reasonable monthly subscription fee.

I have totally been sleeping on radio since CD 102.5 went away. And it's not even just Spotify and Apple Music changing the game. It's algorithms; Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube... it's where the influencers are influencing. And where Content goes viral in ways that weren't even possible until pretty recently.

With radio, you have a person with good taste in music curating good music. If it's a station worth listening to, anyway. That's the spirit of this blog, or at least what I'm going for. Trying to find interesting links and curate them into a daily post for... well, mostly for me.

The other night, I went over to Radio Garden to browse around but I didn't know where to start, so I did some digging online and found my latest hyperfixation: KEXP in Seattle.

And this post isn't an ad for them by any means. I like the music they play, but not everyone has the same taste as me. They play a lot of old alternative stuff, a little punk, electronic, and even some death metal every now and then. It's a little bit of everything I listen to, and a lot of it is bands I've never heard of. Plus, with radio you get DJs adding some banter after every few songs. It feels more alive than being alone with an app for the car ride to wherever you're going.

The biggest thing for me is remembering that there are still some really good radio stations on the airwaves. I like consuming things that are curated by people instead of computers.

I realized pretty quickly that I really have no interest in Radio Garden. One good station is enough for me right now, so I got the standalone app for KEXP and now I can favorite the weird, obscure shit they play when I hear something I really like. For the last few years, I've been listening to the same artists I found on CD 102.5 back in the day, most of the Fat Wreck Chords and Epitaph catalogs, local bands from when I was a teenager, and a few newer artists sprinkled in.

There are so many great things we have access to, and idk if it's just because I'm online too much or if it's the same for everyone, but it's easy to forget about "obsolete" tech. Forgotten mediums like radio or even the small web. All of this shit is so punk. DIY, human-made, community funded. There's a lot more noise these days, but a lot of the old, discarded stuff has never truly went away. You just have to know where to look.