Good radio died in the mid 80s.

Most people today can hardly remember when radio was curated live. Perhaps if you were near a small station you might have had the experience. Most major markets were completely corporate by the early 90s.

I know, my first career pick was radio, and by the time I was in college at a college radio station in the late 90s. That career path was dead unless I wanted to be in marketing or sales, which I had no interest in.

Little factoid about my username, it was my pirate station call letters from when I was running my own small station with a hand built FM transmitter in the 90s.

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graymalkin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It died mid 80s for me too. That was when the monoculture, where everyone was listening to the same thing, just disappeared. I was just a kid so I never knew what happened. All I knew was that when I was itty bitty, I could turn the dial and find mostly the same stuff everywhere. Mid 80s onwards and it was all fractured. That fracturing continued to the point where it’s like there’s a genre and a band for every taste…which is cool, but now we don’t have a broadly shared cultural experience anymore. Ditto for television. Basically, the scarcity is gone. On the one hand, cool, but on the other, society weirdly suffers.

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wffurr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Boston has a whole bunch of live and college ratio stations still.

	▲	don-code 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, sort of. My radio presets back in the 2000s were 101.7 WFNX, 104.1 WBCN, 107.3 WAAF, 100.7 WZLX, and 92.9 WBOS. Of those stations, only WZLX remains. The greats - in my opinion, WBCN and WFNX - are long off the air. They were powerhouses of culture, both local and national. WFNX was the first to play Nirvana's Nevermind; Bono of U2 once said that "...without BCN, we'd all be (expletive)'d, let's face it." Oedipus, a well-known Boston DJ since the 70s (who got started at 88.1 WMBR, MIT's station) and program director at WBCN, said of it: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed radio... Corporations were now allowed to own multiple stations in the same market and across the country. Stations were no longer programmed locally." Meanwhile, WAAF went online-only in 2020. WBOS got delegated to an HD2 subchannel in 2004. Likewise, The Boston Globe picked up many of the radio personalities for the online-only RadioBDC, now Indie617, but that seemed dead by the mid-2010s. I hear the former WFNX DJs Henry Santoro and Julie Kramer may still have some limited presence on 89.7 WGBH. I was recently happy to find Adam 12 (formerly of WFNX (formerly of WBCN)) still DJing on 105.7 WROR. 88.9 WERS (Emerson College's station) is doing a great job of carrying the helm of Boston music culture. Occasionally I'll also tune into 90.3 WZBC (Boston College's station), which is a more "traditional" and less "commercial" college radio station. Just outside Boston are likewise some public and community stations with good programming - 88.3 WRPS (Rockland's public radio station) and 101.3 WFNX (Scituate's community station - love that they picked up the WFNX callsign!) are pretty good, if you're in range.

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mickdeek86 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm reminded of Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog with her late night radio station in a lighthouse, or Lily Tomlin in Prairie Home Companion saying "Now radio's just a bunch of people yelling at each other and computers playing music". Although I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a GenZ girl doing something I had forgotten about: channel surfing.

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kibwen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You don't necessarily need to be near a small station these days, college stations can stream online. I listen to WXPN (UPenn) that way regularly: https://xpn.org/ (player at top of the page).