Falling In Love With College Radio (And Despising Modern Streaming Services)

Inside me, there are two wolves. One has the best taste in music this side of Jupiter. The other knows that there is a world of audio out there that has yet to be explored.

Much like most of my generation, and those before me, I grew up with the radio. Every night as a kid I would fall asleep with the Sony Dream Machine playing the local radio station. I would wake up to it blaring the latest hits or to "Elvis Duran and the Morning Show". My brother and I would let it play until we had to leave for school, and even then it was the radio station we had on in the car. Every morning and afternoon we would listen to the latest hits, and whenever we were in the car, we'd end up just listening to music while playing on our Game Boys or DS's.

I guess radio really died for me when I got my first real smartphone. A "Droid Razr M" made by Motorola. It's sitting on my desk as I type this. I was so excited to have a phone that I could access the internet on. I remember being scared to browse the internet while on mobile data because going over the data plan led to a huge amount of fees.

I would regularly watch YouTube videos on my phone, and around that time, the podcast "Welcome to Night Vale" had come out and I was dipping my toes into the format. I downloaded an app called "Podcast Addict" and began exploring different podcasts. I then started exploring music by some artists I really liked and started putting that music on my phone. I was never really interested in music until I started loading up my phone with all kinds of songs.

Eventually, when I started to attend college, I began using my phone more and more for media consumption. My streaming service of choice was "Google Play Music" which was the precursor to "YouTube Music". I had gotten it because the family plan was super cheap and I was able to give my cousins and other family members access to ad-free YouTube as well.

I really loved Google Play Music. I was able to explore a ton of music that I wasn't able to before. It led me down so many different rabbit holes and I was introduced to artists that I still listen to today. I loved the service so much and was sad to see it go. I switched over to Spotify a few years later, and Spotify's algorithms for discovering new music were some of the best out there. I was listening to so many artists I had never even thought of listening to before. Discoverability drew me in and I was hooked.

However, with the way the internet is going, I'm beginning to dislike a lot of those algorithms that I once loved. I find the service invaluable, but you can't go anywhere on the web without feeling the influence of TikTok. It might be the worst thing to happen to humanity in the last few years. Everything needs to look like TikTok. Apps and websites that have no reason to have videos have them for some insane reason.

I think the whole "Internet Fatigue" has been getting to me. One of my friends has been telling me a lot about how he's been listening to his local college radio a lot over the years and I finally decided that it was time to take the dive. There's a wonderful site called "Radio Garden" that allows you to select radio stations from anywhere around the world and tune into a live feed.

I used this site to explore a bunch of amazing stations around where I live and I found a local college radio station. That would be "WHPC", Nassau Community College’s radio station. Apparently, it’s won a ton of awards over the years, so I was excited to give it a listen. The first time I tuned in was around 10:45 on a Saturday morning. The host was playing some hits from the '70s and '80s, I think the last song I heard was “Love Rollercoaster” by the “Ohio Players” before they went on a commercial break. I let the local ads run, there was one about a cookie store that seemed kinda neat so I’ll have to check that out sometime in the future. But then at 11AM, I was hit with Irish folk music. Turns out that from 11AM to 12PM, it’s the “Full Irish” block.

After that was the "Radio Rumble" that host Justin Greenberg was having the time of his life. It was incredible. He hadn’t been on the program for 2 weeks and the line that got me was him hyping up how he hadn’t been here and nothing was gonna stop him from putting on a “pretty average” show. He was so funny. He wanted to play a few tracks by the Beatles, and they have a Friday slot dedicated to the Beatles. Another host there is an expert on the Beatles and apparently knows almost everything there is to know. The other host, Rob Leonard, can supposedly tell you what take was used for the final album which is insane knowledge. So Greenberg wanted to play “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” by the Beatles. Apparently, he started playing the wrong version, stopped the track like 3 seconds in, and then loaded up the actual version of the song from Spotify.

Later in the show, he had a cohost on and they spent a good chunk of time discussing their favorite months of the year and ranking them. Now I'm used to people talking about nonsense for hours on end. I grew up watching Let's Plays on YouTube and streams on Twitch. But hearing this on the radio felt very different. I've always associated modern radio with playing the same pop songs over and over again while pumping your ears with as many ads as possible. But all of a sudden, you have a host who is just having fun. While they enjoy playing all kinds of music, it was so nice to have someone so joyful talking about some silly little things.

I think this was a wonderful introduction to college radio and I made sure to set it to my default station in my car. I've kept listening to the station on and off. Anytime I don't have anything on in the background, I'm sure to let the songs play out on the station.

I had listened to this radio station on and off for the past week or so, and I was thinking more and more about the way I consume music. Then serendipitously an email landed in my inbox.

I'm subscribed to one of my favorite bands Substack Page. You can check out more about my love for PUP here. Guitarist Steve Sladowski ended up writing a book report of sorts about the recently released book by Liz Pelly, Mood Machine. Their Substack is paywalled, and I being a huge fan had to subscribe.

In the post, Sladowski divides the book into 3 distinct takeaways. Those being "Music Streaming is Surveillance", "A.I. Music Creation", and "Royalties Royalties Royalties".

Now I won't go into too much detail, if you want to check out the article, you'll have to subscribe to the Substack. As much as I hate paywalling information, this is one of my favorite bands and it feels wrong to just summarize it here.

I genuinely don't know how to start this off because there's so much to say about this book. The big theme I feel that needs to be addressed is that music is something that needs to be enjoyed.

Now there are two ways to consume music. Those would be active listening and passive listening. Active listening means driving most if not all of your attention towards the piece of music that you're listening to, while passive listening is just having some kind of noise on in the background.

Pelly's book puts Spotify center stage. While other music streaming services are probably in the same boat, Spotify is the name in music streaming.

Spotify wants the listener to engage with music passively. Spotify wants to be the soundtrack to your life. It doesn't matter how you use the service, as long as music is on, Spotify is happy.

The main method Spotify accomplishes this is by heavily pushing playlists. There are hundreds of playlists made by Spotify, and even more made by algorithms. As Sladowski puts it "The main job of playlists, [Pelly] seems to say, is to encourage passive engagement with music while simultaneously keeping users hooked on the platform".

Sladowski goes on to say how he's always found himself engaging more and more with albums rather than playlists and that while reading Mood Machine, he felt a sense of confirmation. I find myself in a similar place. I always felt as if I was in the minority for listening to albums in full. Seldom do I make playlists and engage with them. If I do, it's more of an opportunity to explore and find new artists. If I make a playlist, it's for myself. I'll put on a playlist I made, and if someone is interested, I'll stop playing it and put on that artist's discography and go into it separately.

With Spotify, Pelly goes on to say that Spotify wants to be in control of how you consume music. Pelly interviewed hundreds of people throughout writing this book and many of those people worked for Spotify. At one point in the book, Pelly goes on to say how Spotify employees were celebrating because of how much music people were listening to at night. Many listeners fall asleep while listening to music and with the help of playlists that consist of more laid-back songs.

Spotify doesn't care at all what you're listening to, as long as you're listening.

Spotify is a company that loves to collect data. In the book, Pelly reveals that Spotify collects every bit of data it possibly can when you're interacting with the service. Every single song you listen to, from the millisecond you pause and unpause. Every button press that you make while in the app, all of it is logged, and sent off to Spotify. When Spotify claims to know you better than you do, it's because it's true. That hesitation you make before skipping to the next track? Spotify will remember that.

So what does Spotify do with all of this data? Every song you listen to on the service gets fed into their algorithms. The thing I once praised for allowing me to discover hundreds if not thousands of new artists is something that I've come to despise. Spotify takes all of the information you feed it and throws it toward playlists. There's a playlist called "Daylist" that is unique to your account. It changes every few hours every day and shifts to your tastes depending on the time of day and whatever other information Spotify has. For example, as I'm writing this, my "Daylist" is suggesting "emo phase, midwest emo, angst, math rock, emo pop, and indie punk". It's a good mix of songs and artists I love, but also a ton of bands I only recognize or haven't even heard of.

Spotify has a ton of genres they've made up and spun into their own playlists. There are chapters in Pelly's book dedicated to playlists like "Lorem", a playlist I once quite enjoyed, but it has basically no consistent genre within it. With the information that Spotify gathers, it drives that interest of yours into a playlist. Whether it's one automatically made for you, or one that was made by Spotify, it wants you to just put on a playlist and forget about it.

This method of Spotify's operation has a ton of horrible effects.

Because Spotify promotes its own playlists, artists are incentivized to make music to land in that playlist. This doesn't apply so much to the biggest musicians out there but to the smaller ones. The musicians who make music because they need to put food on the table.

In Pelly's book, she makes you want to care about a few genres, specifically Lo-fi, Ambient, and Hyperpop. If you're like me, you've probably spent too much time on the internet. Across your travels on the world wide web, you've probably stumbled across YouTube at some point in your life, and you've probably seen, or at least heard of the live stream "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to". Originally from the "ChilledCow" YouTube channel, now rebranded as "LofiGirl", it's a channel dedicated to Lofi music.

Pelly goes on to explain how artists who make music for LofiGirl, will end up in the official LofiGirl playlists, and from there, they'll be added to some of Spotify's in-house playlists. Because of the way LofiGirl functions, it in a way makes artists irrelevant. The music is just background noise at that point. When you're listening on Spotify, you're not incentivized to learn more about the artist who made the track and explore their music.

This has a few side effects. First of which is artificially inflated numbers. If you click through on any artist on Spotify, you'll be told how many monthly listeners they have. If the artist has only one song in the most popular playlist for their genre, all of those listeners will be from that playlist. Only a small fraction of people will go through and learn more about some of those artists. Spotify also displays the amount of "Plays" a song has, which may seem helpful, but it hurts more than anything. I just clicked around Spotify's official Lofi playlist and found a random artist. I clicked on their most recent album, and the most popular song there has almost 2 million listens, while the other songs have less than 20,000 plays. Would any normal person want to listen to a song that has only 5000 plays, or one with 2 million?

LofiGirl has some other consequences. Every artist that partners with the label gets anonymized in a way. Despite their names being on the live stream, and the uploads, it all gets lumped into the LofiGirl branding. Everything begins to sound the same and it's hard to find a unique voice. Listeners and viewers are made to think that the creator of the song they're listening to is LofiGirl and not the person who actually made it.

Another side effect of landing in a playlist is how an artist makes music. Artists are incentivized to make music that would land them in a playlist because it generates revenue. Artists are sometimes forced to make songs that they don't want to make but have to because it will put food on the table. Imagine wanting to take your sound in a new direction, one that is a bit experimental, but isn't safe. You know your dedicated fans will stick with you, but the broad appeal you once had will leave you in a place that isn't financially safe. This leads to artists taking the safer bet, or even just making one popular song just to get by. If you click through to some of an artist's other music, you might see that their most recent album is completely different and has a lot lower play count than some singles that are made for these playlists.

Spotify is also taking advantage of how these playlists work. They realize that if they use A.I. to make music, they can then put those into their own playlists, and because they made those songs, they don't have to pay out actual artists. This has also led to some funny cases where people will put A.I. songs on the platform, and then use bots to drive up the play count for increased revenue.

There is so much more that I didn't cover. I'm still processing my thoughts on this and I don't think I'll ever stop. I'm filled with dread, disgust, and hopelessness after reading it and it sucks.

There are a few things you can do to help fight back against Spotify. Engaging with artists on other platforms, looking out for your local music scene, and buying music from other services like Bandcamp or the artist's merch store to support them better. Listening to your local college radio station is an excellent step, and I'm glad to have found mine at just the right time.

Liz Pelly's "Mood Machine" is out now, check it out here.

As always, I will leave you with a few words.

Be A Real Person