There’s a new radio station in town that bills itself as “commercial-free and member-supported.” It appeared suddenly on a channel that used to be a college station. There are no live DJs, all the self-ads are generic corpo-sounding crap, and they play the same top 40s as every other generic corpo station in town.
Now, they’ve started a membership drive in the fake hopes of appearing like a grassroots station. The infuriating part is that we have a legitimate indie station (partially publicly funded) that they’re trying to steal money/contributions from.
It’s obviously a corporate ploy to destroy the current commercial-free station while replacing it with a fake one that will just turn into another soulless corporate station.
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There is a local “rock” station I started listening to when I moved into the area. Their playlist was limited, and I quickly realized they would play the exact same songs at almost the exact same time every day. I think the weekend was the only time I ever heard any recent music.
I drove a lot, so I subscribed to XM. That was super nice, but pretty soon I noticed the same thing. I switched channels a lot, then started listening to a talk channel because I tired of the same songs. (O&A, Ron & Fez, fuck you Anthony you racist piece of shit…)
I dumped XM, started listening to podcasts. And I expanded my music library 10-fold through the wonders of privateering.
Recently I was outside at lunchtime, and someone was sitting in their car listening to that same old local “rock” station. And they are still playing the same garbage songs at pretty much the same exact time every day.
I think it’s the same practice as why sitcoms always used to revert to the status quo of the previous episode as if nothing had happened. Most humans are truly creatures of habit and find comfort in habit and so giving them something habitual is giving them what they want.
In other words a lot of people find comfort in the same song same time every day thing. It’s stupid, but stupid sells.
The Sirius XM people are probably hassling you every day now right? Those bastards are the most annoying of any subscription service I think I’ve ever used.
SiriusXM is now buying up a ton of popular podcasts and locking new episodes behind a completely separate membership from my Spotify subscription, so my feed is filling with a bunch of locked episodes. They’ve found a way to torture everyone not just those people who tried a free trial (or were given one after buying a car).
It’s likely this station is in the non-commercial band if it used to be a college station - anything below 92 mhz. They’re legally not allowed to have actual commercials but they can run PSAs, membership drives, underwriting, etc due to FCC rules.
It’s almost certainly not a ploy: it’s way more likely the college decided the previous format was too expensive. The college probably decided to lease out their frequency to someone else. The lessee still can’t run commercials (or even operate “commercially,” whatever the FCC decides that means), but it’s very easy to pre-program a music format with all the breaks already slotted in which explains the top 40s and the lack of live DJs. The college therefore reduces their operating costs to nearly zero and they make money from the lease at the same time.
This exact situation happened to my college radio station when I was an undergrad and I hated it too.
