Via the excellent @BobDinan, here’s a depressing article – What I’m really thinking: the radio presenter. It takes some feat to contradict yourself so splendidly using only four paragraphs, but somehow this piece manages it.

“Listeners have told me they’re pregnant before they’ve told their boyfriends. They’ve just had nobody else to go to. This job has made me realise there are a lot of lonely people in the world. I know they think I’m their friend.”

Radio as friend. Got you. Makes sense. I mean, I’d quibble with how it’s phrased, and it seems to pity an audience of which the vast majority doesn’t need pitying – but whatever.

“This is the only job I’ve done and I’m amazed we still have an audience. With a smartphone you can listen to whatever song you want, whenever you want. You don’t have to tune in on the off chance I’ll play something you like. Within a generation I think there will be no such thing as a radio presenter. Which is why, when people ask me how to get into radio, I think – don’t.”

…hang on. You started the piece by pointing out how radio can connect with an audience – using the human voice, in a way that an iPod can’t. Have you completely forgotten what you’ve just written?

[Read more →]

Over a year and a half after I read this article on radio, I keep coming back to it:

“Q: Why should I listen to your radio station?

After all, I have an iPod with more than 10,000 tunes that collectively form the soundtrack of my life. I have more music on my computer. I can listen to endless computer-generated combinations – better mix, better variety – that can surprise me and amuse me between now and whenever I lose my interest, my sanity, my life. My iPod can do all that; my computer can do it too.

So why should I listen to your radio station?

After all, I can listen to online stations that programme the music I like (70s retro … electronica … ambient), and many of these play without interruption, without call-letters, without commercials, without an intervening human presence.

So why should I listen to our radio station in this brave new world of choice and lifestyle-customisation and narrowcasting?

And yet listen I do. I need radio.”

Give the whole thing a read. It sums up most of my thoughts about what radio should be doing… and why so many stations leave me cold.