Yesterday I was listening to the new TV On The Radio album, Dear Science, with a couple friends. One of them used to be a big music fan, but basically stopped following music in the early 1990s, circa Beck and Pearl Jam. Every time I play him a song by a band I like (Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse), he comes up with a terse response like "fun." If I press him, he can always come up with a reason why the artists of yesteryear are better. He hasn't bought a CD in ages, has never downloaded a song, and doesn't go to concerts unless it's an act he's known and loved for years. He assumes there's no good new music. I know dozens of people like him.
Then the song "Shout Me Out" came on. As the track kept increasing in intensity, closing with a bonafide kick-ass guitar solo, he couldn't believe it--new music that didn't suck! As he put it "this is the freshest song I've heard in years." Then, the million-dollar question: "Why don't they play this on the radio?"
I had no good answer. Commercial radio seems geared toward two audiences: kids with disposable income who might be willing to buy an album if the single's pounded into their head, and aging rockers who haven't been interested in music since they were in their 20s. In other words, the stations that play new music either play insipid teen music (metal or pop or R&B, all with dumb lyrics), or have a narrow demographically tested playlist that allows new songs only if they sound like they come from the early 1990s (adult contemporary). Or they don't play new music at all (classic rock, Jack FM). Once in a while a truly universal new song breaks through--"Hey Ya" by Outkast, "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. But apart from college radio, nobody's playing cutting-edge rock and roll with potentially broad appeal.
The death of relevant radio bears as much responsibility for the decline of the music industry as file-sharing and free downloads.
A related thought: if a band never gets radio play, who decides what its "hits" are? Last week I saw My Morning Jacket, and last night I saw Sigur Ros. Both are big in the indie rock world--their shows were sold out with more than 1,000 fans--but almost no mainstream penetration. (Although Coldplay's Chris Martin recently admitted that Sigur Ros is better than his band.)
At both shows, when certain songs began, the audience gave a loud cheer--the kind that used to be reserved for when an artist launched into a radio hit. So how did these songs become fan hits? Does MMJ always close with "One Big Holiday" to the same huge applause? Do fans cheer every time Sigur Ros launches into "Staraflur"? Is it possible that some songs are just objectively better than others, or does the response vary widely from city to city, country to country?
A follow-up to my previous post on Qbox: they fixed whatever was preventing the player from playing songs embedded in MySpace pages, and I can now happily recommend it anybody who frequently listens to music on MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube.
As the Qplayer plays this Sigur Ros video from YouTube, I can conduct a search for a friend's band, and add songs from their MySpace to my playlist. The only drawback: search results appear in a separate window.
(Credit: Screenshot)A quick recap: the Qbox Web site lets you conduct searches for artists across MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube simultaneously. When results appear, you click a small play button on the Web page and the Qplayer launches and begins playing the song or video. You can conduct other searches and add them to your currently playing list, mixing audio and video in whatever order you like. The service is interesting because--like many younger music listeners--it makes no distinction between multiplatinum artists and your best friend's garage band. As long as they're on MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube, they're easily available from Qbox.
Qbox has the concept right, but the overall experience is a little more awkward than it could be--you can conduct searches from the player, but the results appear in a separate Web browser window. Then, when you select an option like "play" or "add to player" from the Web page in the browser, it adds the song back to the Qplayer playlist. I'm not sure why this back-and-forth has to exist, given that Qplayer is basically a modified Web browser--why not just display the search results window in a separate tab within the player? It also has an annoying habit of asking you if you're sure you want to close the player every time you try to shut it down--unnecessary dialog boxes are a pet peeve of mine. But I trust this is just a first iteration, and I'll be keeping track as they improve the service and the software.
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