If you’re like me, you still listen to a fair amount of radio. For me these days, it’s mostly news via Public Radio, but I still attempt to discover new music by listening to the radio. With radio stations so tightly formatted to a certain genre, it’s quite a chore. Also radio ownership is highly concentrated these days, which leads to musical conformity and homogenized playlists. A quick check on Wikipedia showed that just three companies own more that 1600 stations across the US. Check it out here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Radio_stations_in_the_United_States_by_owner
This is why the FCC is supposed to limit things like concentrated ownership of radio, TV and newspapers within a given media market. Yeah, right.
But, all is not lost. Between independently owned and college stations, you can still find new music created by new bands, old favorites, and artists that fell off the charts years ago but still ply their trade with integrity. So I’m going to try an experiment here: If you know of a good radio station that plays a wide variety of new and old rock, blues, R&B….and they stream over the internet, send me an email with the link and I’ll post it here. Just send it to sales@upfrontguitars.com and I will put the link on this blog page. Half the fun of music is hearing new music. So let’s start a movement for good radio and spread the word. Here is my first submission:
WXRV “The River” in Haverill, MA: www.wxrv.com