« Theory Makes Me Feel All Naughty... | Main | Jamie Kane, Always In Our Thoughts »

November 4, 2005

Jack, The Death of Music Radio, and What's On Your iPod?

Jack, or Robot Radio

I live in Burlington, Vermont. That means that I get network television from Burlington and from New York (the nearest WB station is from New York), and cable from Montreal (some stations in English, some in Quebecois).

TV is easy to send to far-away places, especially when you pay through the nose for digital cable, as I do.

Radio, on the other hand, is not so easy to get across the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, or the White Mountains. Which means that if we don't want to listen to music from Quebec, we're pretty much stuck with the local stations. Of which there just aren't that many.

Now, living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania wasn't great, either. Even though Pittsburgh has as many residents as the entire state of Vermont, the radio choices weren't anything to write home about. There's a Clear Channel "alternative" station that does exactly the same things as every other Clear Channel "alternative" station, and an Infinity-owned "Star" station that plays "Pittsburgh's Best Variety." I honestly can't tell the difference between the Infinity-owned "Star" stations and the Infinity-owned "Mix" stations -- both play "Hot AC" (adult contemporary), and both are listenable in an elevator-ish sort of way.

When the Very Significant Other and I were here in May house-hunting, we noticed that Vermont had a new radio station, one that played songs we hadn't heard on the radio in years. That station is MP103.3. As you might guess from the name, it's a play on the popular music compression format, MP3. As you might further guess from the pun, from the design of the station web site, or from the station identification spots, the station bills itself as an iPod hooked up to a giant antenna.

This means no DJs, no "morning personalities" (and if there is any phrase or concept more odious in mass media, I do not know what it is), no blather. It's just songs, commercials, and station ID.

This format is now known in radio circles as "Jack." You can read up on the history of Jack radio here and here. It really is quite something.

Now, I like the Jack format. I hate radio DJs, especially the ones who talk and talk and talk. When I turn on the radio I want music. I don't listen to NPR (although I like it well enough), and I don't listen to talk radio. I only listen to the radio when I'm in the car, and I really only use the car for running errands, so the extended ranting and/or interviewing of talk radio is impossible to follow. Three-and-a-half-minute processed music bits are more suited to the kind of radio listening I do.

Jack is great for this. I generally like the "trainwreck" format, and am entertained by hearing songs that no self-respecting corporate radio station would play. I mean, what's the market demand for Sting's "All This Time"? It can't be great, but I like the song.

On the other hand, there is something sad and lonely about the lack of a human voice on the other end of the radio wave. When the human race is extinct and only the cockroaches and diet cola bottles remain, Jack Radio will still be playing "whatever, whenever." After you finish singing along with Foreigner's "Urgent," you realize that there's something profoundly disturbing about enjoying something that is, essentially Robot Radio.

The Death of Music Radio

A few days ago the VSO sent me an article from Yahoo News that started me thinking about all of this. Howard Stern is leaving Infinity Broadcasting as of December 16th. The stations (typically classic rock or "alternative") that play/played the Stern show are now being converted into either Jack or talk radio formats, with talk radio seemingly the preferred option:

Infinity has changed the format of some of the 27 stations that carry [Stern]. Of the 12 rock stations that featured Stern in the morning, three are flipping to talk or the Jack format, which uses no DJs and a random, classic-rock-oriented playlist. Such flips in Sacramento, Calif., and Philadelphia mean one less new-rock station. But in New York, come January 3, Arbitron's top-rated market will not have a station playing current rock hits.

[....]
"What Infinity is signaling is that a combination of celebrity talk and comedy appeals to its target market more than music in general and rock in particular," says Barry Sosnick, consultant and president of Earful.info. "When you have Infinity, a major player in broadcasting, indicating that music isn't a powerful draw for listeners, (that is) the most frightening implication."

Eww. Seriously. Imagine spinning through the radio dial and getting nothing but "talk radio" and "comedic" on-air personalities. The thought gives me the heebie-jeebies.

And yet, that seems to be the direction broadcast radio is moving.

What's On Your iPod?

Complicating all of this is the Devil's Little White Box: the iPods. My office on campus is on the fourth floor of a building that overlooks the campus green. This means that I see a constant stream of students and faculty scurrying about when I glance out my window. The majority of these people (students and faculty alike) are more likely than not sporting headphones as they scurry.

Students walk into my classes with headphones on and iPod playing, and the second class ends, the headphones go back on and the iPod once again injects soothing Phish tunes into their auditory cortex.

Which is not to say that I have a problem with the Pod. I was pleased as punch to get one as a gift and I use it. My violent motion sickness prevents me from reading on the bus on the way to or from campus. So, I listen to my iPod during my morning and evening commutes.

In the past, I listened primarily to music. Now, and I really do blame my colleague Paul Martin for this, I listen to podcasts. For those of you who don't know what a podcast is, it's basically an a-synchronous radio show. People record themselves talking, sometimes mix in music, and then post the results online to be downloaded and listened to via such devices as iPods. The shows are "broadcast" via the Internet, and frequently listened to on iPods, hence the name podcast.

Now, I'm a regular listener to TWiT (This Week in Tech), NToddcast, DiggNation, and Spaceship Radio. My taste, as you can tell, generally lean toward the techy and the science fictional. (Big surprise. You already knew that I'm a major geek.) My normal routine is to download the podcasts to my iPod and listen to one on the way to school, and to another on the way home. TWiT is longer than most, and I'll split their episodes up over 2 or 3 trips.

Like the strategy of listening to books on tape during long car trips (which really does work if you have the right audiobooks -- listening to Stephen King during daytime trips isn't so fun), listening to a single 30-minute podcast really makes commuting feel quicker and less tedious than it might otherwise, even when listening to music. Rather than hearing 10 or so songs, I listen to one podcast, and then I'm at work. I listen to another and I'm home.

Obviously, though, what I'm talking about here is practically the same thing as listening to talk radio. The podcasts I like are almost indistinguishable from tech-themed talk radio. (Spaceship Radio is the notable exception, as it replays science fiction radio dramas from the 1950s.)

So, even though I crave hearing music on my radio, and I deplore talk radio, and even though I'm troubled by the lack of "human" connection implicit in the iPod-with-an-antenna Jack radio format, I spend very little time listening to any form of live radio. Instead, I seem to be moving (very comfortably, I might add) quickly toward getting all of my audio entertainment a-synchronously and in talk format.

One final word -- there really is a difference between reading a blog and listening to that same blogger podcast. There's something about the power and reach of the human voice that transcends the power of the written word. NTodd is a great example of this. I've read Dohiyi Mir for months and months now, but I just started listening to the NToddcast and Friday Coffeeblogging podcasts. I like the blogs, but I love the podcasts.

I'm reminded of the impetus for Jesuit literacy scholar Walter Ong's work, The Presence of the Word. Ong, a Jesuit, is worried that modern culture's loss of the sound of words, obscured by the technologies of writing, necessarily distances humanity from God. And yet, at root, Ong is talking about the desire for the sound of the word. He writes in his preface to the book:

Today we have often to labor to regain the awareness that the word is still always at root the spoken word. Today there has grown out of and around the spoken word a vast network of artificially contrived media -- writing, print, electronic devices such as sound tapes or computers in which informational content is implicitly or explicitly tied in with verbal explanation far beyond the experience of early man -- and other complex contrivances. These media are a great but distracting boon. They overwhelm us and give our concept of the word special contours which can interfere with our understanding of what the word in truth is, and thus can distort the relevance of the word to ourselves. (Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word, ix-x)

What this all means, I honestly don't know. But it feels to me like we are all on the cusp of some significant shifts in mass media and communication. It could also lead to a more widespread acceptance of multimodal forms of composition -- the (rhetorical) work that goes into preparing and enacting a podcast needs to be evaluated in relation to the (rhetorical) work that goes into preparing and enacting a more traditional essay, and both need to be evaluated in relation to their respective (rhetorical) effectiveness.

Interestingly, I encouraged all of my undergraduates to incorporate podcasts in their blogging (they are all required to blog), and not a one has yet done so. Their written posts are often excellent and are quite entertaining, but as I did not demand that my students podcast (unlike Paul Martin, with his English 005 class), they did not.

What think all of you of this?

Posted by reparent at November 4, 2005 2:49 PM

Comments

Posted by: coeurlion at November 4, 2005 6:06 PM