Radio: the word inspires... not much really, not any more, and yet it has been the soundtrack to many of our lives, up until now, not bad for a medium whose electromagnetic waves were not even theorized until 1873 by James Clerk Maxwell, and whose frequencies were first proven to exist by Heinrich Hertz in 1886, with practical applications first experimented in 1896 by Guglielmo Marconi, and commercial broadcasting begun in the US in the 1920's. That's quite the international success story: kudos (and don't call it 'wireless' any more)...
Fast-forward to the present, and Internet has been a game-changer many times already, and even a deal-killer sometimes, notable for a medium that has itself been in existence little more than twenty years in its World Wide Web form, and not even half that in 'smart-phone' formats. They say novelty sells. I get it, but that doesn't mean that I always like it. Does watching TV on a (tiny screen) smart-phone or tablet make it better than 'traditional' broadcast (or cable or satellite) big-screen models that are far more democratic, if not necessarily so at-hand in-the-pocket cooler-than-sh*t de rigueur and a la mode automatic? I doubt it...
A couple of points should probably be made: 1) radio and its music has always been free in the US, so any notion that Internet has ushered in a new unwarranted age of hacker-inspired freebies (and that Jay Z needs your subscription) is arguably misplaced; 2) the current era of dollar-a-pop singles-only sales is a reversion to an earlier pre-70's paradigm in which 'hits' inspired sales and probably signals a decline in 'album-oriented rock' and rock-and-roll in general more than anything else; and (drum-roll here, please)....
3) there has always been an alternative to the status quo of commercial radio and store-bought jury-rigged corporate music sales, a valid concern and one which Jay-Z fails to address at all and that has a name: public radio. Unfortunately for Jay-Z, they won't be playing much of his music, or Beyond-say's or Con-yay's, either, since there are so many better options, too numerous to mention. Who needs a new service to play the same crap-ass celebrities that bombard us with their formulaic dreck constantly anyway? Not me.
For the record, and as claimer/disclaimer, while in LA on-and-off the last five years I subscribed at various times to KCRW, KPFK and KCSN, and now that I am in Tucson, AZ, I listen to the broadcast version of the excellent and hugely diverse KXCI,while still listening online to such trend-setters as KCRW and KEXP-Seattle. In fact I think I'll join KXCI right now and possibly even consider underwriting a show with my bizniz Hypertravel Hostel if budgets allow at some point in the future.
To be honest the existence of KXCI was a factor in relocating here to open my hostel. I'm not sure I could live in a city without a healthy public radio station. I suggest you support yours (and good luck, Jay-Z, you and all your smoke-machine over-stuffed...whatever)... que viva la radio publica!
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