Yostivanich

Last week­end I went on a trip with my cur­rent girl­friend, we went and drove about 6 hours to her younger brother’s high school grad­u­a­tion. Her car doesn’t have a CD player or an input line for an mp3 player, so we were forced to resort to the radio for when we wanted to lis­ten to some music. It was one of the most painful expe­ri­ences in my life, for sev­eral reasons.

1. No per­son­al­iza­tion of the media
2. Ads were hor­ri­bly un-targeted

It was jar­ring 20 min­utes or so as I got used to lis­ten­ing to the radio again after hav­ing not lis­tened for at least 2ish years. First off that I had to spend 5 min­utes or so find­ing a radio sta­tion that played music that I liked which was a wasted effort in and of itself. I tried find­ing a radio sta­tion that played some­thing that I could enjoy, darn near impos­si­ble. I found one sta­tion that played some­thing that they called rock music, but heck I would have never called it that. Sev­eral other sta­tions with Top 40 hits and pop music, some coun­try and tons of Chris­t­ian music (inside of Texas you can always find coun­try and Chris­t­ian music sta­tions). It was point­less noth­ing came any­where close to play­ing some­thing that I could enjoy.

There was a sta­tion or two that I could lis­ten too every once in awhile when some­thing came on, but most of the time I ignored the radio. It might as well have not been in the car. I’ve been spoiled rot­ten, hav­ing my per­son­al­ized music selec­tions full time on either a portable media device or on my com­puter. Going and lis­ten­ing to the radio with songs selected with no input from me, feels weird.

The other major prob­lem was that the ads were just seem­ingly fired off in the hopes that they would con­nect with me, which I can assure you they did not. In a world of hyper tar­get­ing, un-targeted ads are a painful expe­ri­ence. I lit­er­ally had to change to the radio sta­tion dur­ing ads, they were just awful and mind­less. I don’t mind ads, but I came to real­ize dri­ving down  US-82, that I couldn’t deal with ads that didn’t tar­get me precisely.

When Face­book serves me ads for Gay sites, it intrudes on my expe­ri­ence with Face­book. The ad doesn’t con­nect with me as a per­son or con­sumer and it is an intru­sion into my life. When Face­book on the other hand gives me ads for TTU Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion or PHP pro­gram­ming solu­tions, I find them wel­come. The ads are say­ing hey we have a ser­vice that you are within a very good prob­a­bil­ity inter­ested in. Radio ads are mean­ing­less, just some non­sense I have to waste my time lis­ten­ing to.

This leads me to believe that radio is not going to sur­vive for very much longer. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t have a use­ful place, radio pro­vides an easy way for artists to pro­mote their music. As I said ear­lier:

Would you buy a prod­uct with­out test­ing it first, or ver­i­fy­ing that you are receiv­ing some­thing that you want?

Radio is very use­full in this pro­mo­tion and sam­pling of music. How­ever I see radio dis­ap­pear­ing with the sam­pling being taken over by Last.fm or Pan­dora. Pro­mo­tion will be done through the iTunes, Ama­zon or other respec­tive music store.

I for one won’t miss radio and the next trip I take I’ll buy a cas­sette adapter before leaving.