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Originally Posted by summer
ANTICIPATION, man. Does anyone else think we could use this concept again, at least in some capacity? I would love it if bands were to like.. just release songs two or three at a time. No leaks to speak of, just music on the spot. Hype, real hype. Think of it, music listeners must have at one time had to waited for their music with bated breath. It may seem archaic now, but I think there is still a place for this sort of thing.
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There is still a place for this.....It's called go out and find your own rabbit hole to jump into which will plunge you headlong into the 7" underground. A band like the Mayyors doesn't even have a website or MySpace page. The only way to hear them is through really lossy Youtube vids or buy a 7" when it comes out. Nobody will know what the next one will sound like. They live in my city here, and I'm probably their #1 fan, and I don't even know what it's gonna sound like.
And you don't think there were leaks in the pre-internet days when radio was actually relevant? That kinda thing did indeed happen, as radio stations got advance copies of forthcoming releases to play. Hell...even your beloved Depeche Mode got leaked this very way. Also, consider how the lead-off single for each album was released several weeks (if not months) prior to the album coming out.
You say no leaks builds anticipation? Think about it....Leaks are what builds anticipation. But it's leaks that are more like a calculated controlled slippage that do the trick. I do agree that when a band's entire album is downloadable on someone's blog, it can be pretty detrimental.
But just know that the radio--in general--has always sucked since the 70s when FM radio became much more popular and marginalized AM except for news, talk, and sportscasts. It has primarily only aided and abetted hero worship through repetition of artists chosen to succeed by the hegemonic alliance of music business heavyweights. Your local "modern rock"-formatted radio station really just behaved like a mirror to the world of "pop/rock/top 40" and "adult contemporary" and "country/western" and "R&B/top 40" and "classic rock" stations.....it was just as repetitive and stepped just as safely to serve its niche in the marketplace. It deserves no credit for being "cool". And much of "college radio" was even somewhat mirroring that corporate game, too.....program directors and music directors were often limiting DJ choice by enforcing a form of "rotation" which favored labels and promoters who they wanted to earn internships with the following summer.
It was different in many ways in the 60's when pop/rock/r&b was still wide open enough that new musical concepts and technology applications could be adopted quickly by fans all over the USA. People became radio DJs because they were actually obsessive fans of new music....not because they could talk succinctly about weather and commute conditions and deliver promotional script so perfectly. And society by and large looked at live music as a favored pastime.......not like today when everybody had 500 TV channels, such as those that show every game of each and every sports league. People are pretty content now living their lives watching other people living their lives on TV. And how many young people are playing video games on any given night of the week, compared to the number of young people in clubs or houses watching bands play? Well, in the 60's, there was live music which a large percentage of the population enjoyed it regularly. Things would wane in the 70s due to a generally more jaded music consumer marketplace, which lowered expectations...and then there was thing called disco which caused many music venue owners to close their doors to bands once they realized that they could still charge a cover, but they'd only hafta pay one dude to DJ, and no ladies would get trampled by stampeding fans, and microphones and stage props wouldn't get broken, etc., etc.
The other thing about AM was that in the 50s and 60s, there were stations in places like Kansas City and Cleveland and Detroit which could often be heard on both coasts of the USA, and that put these regions on a more equal footing with L.A. and New York. It was possible then for a young garage band like Kenny & the Kasuals to make a record locally in Oklahoma and drive it up to Kansas City to that extra-regional radio station, and if the DJ really liked it, it could become a hit there, and be heard all across America. And this was a true story that actually happened....Kenny & the Kasuals had their 15 minutes of fame and dented the top 40 charts with that record, and they were able to tour and make a few national TV appearances.
Once FM took over, though, you hafta understand what's different about FM......even the most powerful FM station in your region cannot be heard more than about 50-70 miles away in any direction. So, in order for record labels to achieve hit records, they'd hafta coordinate their promotional effort so that the record would be placed in rotation on certain formatted radio stations in each and every geographic media marketplace. In California, maybe you'd also conspire with something like Bill Graham Presents, who had his hand in the cookie jar to collect concert proceeds, and Graham had a lot of influence on several radio stations throughout Northern California. Record labels created new divisions that dealt specifically with radio promotion.
This more organized effort to control what gets played on the radio meant that those old-time DJs who LOVED music and therefore only played music that they loved would hafta be replaced by "yes men" DJs who just read brief script and threw off concise banal banter to seem remote human-like. Eventually, several radio stations became totally automated. This set into motion a set of circumstances which--after corporate broadcast lobbies massaged the laws to allow them to own so many radio stations (and TV stations) in each and every market throughout the land--led to shit like Clear Channel controlling playlists in every city across many demographically-pointed formats from board rooms in San Antonio, Texas.
It got so bad that millions of people actually think "Jack FM" is something really cool.
This story also explains a little bit about why bands like The Stooges and the MC5 never made it outside of Michigan until the legend of their influence had accumulated thanks mainly to historians.
Stations like WFMU and the handful of stations like mine that admire WFMU are extremely rare. And they've always been pretty rare since the 70s. Radio is pretty useless, by and large. We mainly only matter as much as we do because of the streams that we put out there for people who are actually musically curious and go hunting on the internet. That's pretty much the purpose of my own program. People with less time and access than me to new music and rare music might just sorta tap into my streams like an oil rig sucking out petroleum...and that way, bands I like can find a new fan here and there.
If you're in the UK, you might ask, "What about us?" Well, your mainland is about the size of one of our medium-sized states, so at its best, your music journos had the ability to focus on any kinda music from any city or town with the same care as a zine covering a local scene here. And you had this dude named John Peel. So your so-called mainstream channels of music information never completely sucked until rather recently.