Let me see if I could figure out the problem. Radio listenership is down. Record sales are down. Music networks have been consistently cutting back playing music videos in favor of reality shows, because reality shows get higher ratings than music videos. The only connection is the music that has been promoted heavily by the record company. Let’s be honest, most of the heavily hyped music just plain sucks! People are no longer buying the hype anymore.

Ray-dee-o????

The major commercial radio stations have become so awful they aren’t worth listening to anymore. Their marketing research is leading them down a black hole of suck, they can’t just use common sense and play a variety of half-decent music. They think we want Pussycat Dolls 20 times a day.

well stop playing absolute garbage on the radio….car sales are down too, why, it’s just more crap. So much quality is being lost….no, NOT represented properly becasue of the ‘mainstream’ obsession with profit. There’s good stuff there, but you have to look for it independentely now more than ever

Honestly I think the radio has had this coming to it. All they play is garbage mainstream hip hop, lame rock, pop, and too much R&B. I mean seriously whenever Mariah Carey, Usher, Beyonce, or Britney have a song what happens? The radio only plays garbage, and now people are starting to lose interest. Why don’t they play alternative anymore? Remember the good old days when artists like Nirvana, U2, Pearl Jam, REM, Soundgarden, Metallica were on the charts (Granted they never hit #1) but none the less they got great radio time. Now you only get this garbage on the radio, seriously how is that loser Britney Spears song Womanizer deserve to be #1 on the Top 100? Good riddance, I think radio is actually making listeners dumber.

Honestly I think the radio has had this coming to it. All they play is garbage mainstream hip hop, lame rock, pop, and too much R&B. I mean seriously whenever Mariah Carey, Usher, Beyonce, or Britney have a song what happens? They all go #1. The radio only plays garbage, and now people are starting to lose interest. Why don’t they play alternative anymore? Remember the good old days when artists like Nirvana, U2, Pearl Jam, REM, Soundgarden, Metallica were on the charts (Granted they never hit #1) but none the less they got great radio time. Now you only get this garbage on the radio, seriously how is that loser Britney Spears song Womanizer deserve to be #1 on the Top 100? Good riddance, I think radio is actually making listeners dumber.

In the age where I can download music instantly, listen to free samples, go to an artist’s MySpace page, and talk about music on message boards, chat rooms, etc., why would I want to be force-fed “Womanizer” in my free time?

One correction to what Mark wrote when he said Metallica, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, etc. never hit #1 – they did, but it wasn’t on the singles charts. They are primarily album artists whose work will always produce quality singles regardless of format. I do agree with everything he wrote though.

Oh, yeah. I want to browse the radio stations when womanizer is on one station and rush limbags on the next. Just like Detroit-radio has paid no attention to its audience. Go fish.

If it wasn’t for Zep, Floyd, Aerosmith, and the daily airing of “Born to Be Wild,” the rock stations in my neck of the woods would have nothing to play.

Come to think of it, not a bad idea…..

I have not listened to (music) radio since 04 when I got my ipod. Why would I want to listen to bloated payola stuffed “artists” nestled under a suffocating amount of commercials?

I am ready for radio, major labels and mainstream artists to go the way of the VCR. Go home. (and take yer crap with you!)

Radio, when good ,is unbeatable. Sadly its not often good.

Speaking as somebody in the Radio industry… I agree entirely.

I’ve been a jock for a few years now at a formatted radio station, and I find the whole industry needs a serious makeover. Stuff like payola and satellite radio are done… Why do you need payola when record charts choose what we play for us? Why buy radio when you can get it for free?

Radio used to matter… it used to be a source for people to hear emerging artists and great music… It used to make or break careers… Now, it’s all about the bottom line and the hits.

Yes, myspace is great for hearing cool bands, but how do you find that band in the first place? Radio needs to become the middleman… Get more involved in the process of discovering new artists… And failing that, delve deeper into the artists who are already mainstream… Make these guys be more than one hit wonders!

If we can start doing that, and start caring about the listeners and music instead of the bottom line… We’ll be able to at least do something better than what we’ve been doing for the past decade.

i just have to say that rock radio stations are in trouble if they have to resort to playing apocalyptica and the offspring 20 times a day.
don’t get me wrong, these are amazing bands, but seriously how many times can a person handle hearing “you’re gonna go far kid”?

maybe now clear channel will finally realize that their listeners don’t like hearing “carry on my wayward son” every ten minutes on every single classic rock station of theirs.

Dead men hear no music.

“A”

I haven’t listen to a big popular music station such as K-Rock in over a decade. They don’t play interesting young bands.

As a former broadcaster, it’s painful to watch radio’s demise by clueless bean-counters who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. It’s even worse watching former colleagues, very talented and professional individuals being cast out heartlessly and replaced by cheaper and (deliberately) less educated people fresh out of “broadcasting schools” who are taught to just shut up and read the liner cards, regardless of listener impact. And yet even worse, the fact that radio has cut air staff jobs to the bone, replacing them with pre-recorded “voicetracked” shows or even no DJ at all, letting the computer run the station. I can understand this maybe for a low-power station on a shoe string budget, but certainly NOT for a multi million dollar radio conglomerate. And yet when all of this fails, it’s never the corporate management that takes any blame. It’s always the air staff. Or the iPod. Or Sirius XM. Or LPFMs. Or webcasting. Or even the “changing music tastes”. Let me emphasize: Commercial radio comes in six basic music formats, active/AOR rock, modern/alternative rock, country, adult contemporary, Top 40/CHR or classic rock/oldies. These formats, with only small variations have remain unchanged since the ’70s. Anything that doesn’t fit the label doesn’t get played. Or the economy (never mind they were doing this during the Clinton boom of the ’90s.) It’s an industry of empty dreams of a high tech future with a 100 year old medium and unrealistic expectations of huge profits and ratings with “cookie cutter” formats, such as JACK-FM, KISS and MOViN who’s sound, music and image, right down to the jingles are exactly the same from coast to coast. Just the FM frequencies are changed for their respective locales. There are very few, if any truly innovative commercial radio stations on the air in America anymore. Yet this industry plods along thinking in this mind set, the one that is destroying radio, that it will all redeem itself somehow yet. Will the last station on the air please turn out the lights?

Radio could be, at least, partioally revived if DJ’s would be allowed to play what they want to hear and what the local audience wants to here. The good old days of searching the dial for new, or old, inovative stuff is gone but it would be nice to see a regionalization brought back to it. Homogenized radio is dull, boring and has nothing to offer anyone except the lamest of the lame.

radio stations determine what they are going to play by looking at charts…not sales charts…but number of plays charts….clear channel owns so many stations….that their playlists effect the charts so dramatically….that they end up…essentially….programmin g the entire industry!!

solution – program directors…stop being lazy….close your edition of R and R….and be creative with your playlist….throw some curve balls….even if they miss….they establish that anything is possible….and next time…they won’t miss….get it?

oh yeah…listeners?…stop accepting 24 hours of nickleback….blow up your stations phones….demand variety….you can’t just sit back and let them rule undeterred…be a roadblock to the homogenization of radio

or just listen to college radio…

u suck

I refuse to drink the Cool Aide and listen to four hundred car commercials a day in between three songs recorded nearly twenty years ago. It’s called artificial extinction. Radio look out for the tar pit.