Radio

When I first selected the postmodern miracle that is "Shuffle All" on my first (and last) iPod, I had the same reaction many people had: It's like my own personal radio station! Lewis Black described this feeling as akin to "the man who first created fire," comparing it unfavorably to the complex mechanisms necessary to switch between tracks on a record player. In 2002, the year the iPod and digital music as a whole really took off, SPIN Magazine dubbed the DJ of the Year "you", four years before TIME magazine made that sort of thing cool.

But it is the connection to radio that I find most interesting. Music radio plays an odd part in most people's pop culture repertoire. It continues to be the main source of learning what music is popular (surviving the relatively brief span of time MTV dominated that role) and yet most people seem to encounter it by chance, in the car or at the gym. It is not, like broadcast television remains (even if dwindling in that capacity), something people typically make a conscious decision to do other than to have something in the background. According to a 2009 study by the "Council For Research Excellence" (which, despite its innocuous name, is totally not a CIA front company), broadcast radio accounts for 79% of all audio media we encounter throughout our day (that includes both terrestrial and satellite radio). Here's the breakdown:

Exposure to audio listening falls into four tiers in terms of level of usage among listeners: (1) broadcast & satellite radio (79.1% daily reach; 122 minutes daily use among users), (2) CDs and tapes (37.1% daily reach; 72 minutes); (3) portable audio [ipods/MP3 players] ( 11.6% daily reach; 69minutes), digital audio stored on a computer such as music files downloaded or transferred to and played on a computer (10.4% daily reach; 65 minutes average use), and digital audio streamed on a computer (9.3% daily reach; 67 minutes) and (4) audio on mobile phones (<2% daily reach; 9 minutes).

The number for mobile phones is the only one I find suspicious, as everyone knows any phone that can play music has a max battery life of 8 minutes.

So nearly 10 years after digital media players became commonplace, and several years after USB ports became standard equipment in most vehicles, broadcast radio still dominates the listening spectrum. If you are not astonished by this, consider the lifespan of radio; it is second only to land-line telephones as the oldest standard for telecommunications in history. In fact, the only thing as shocking as radio's place on top of this study is the Silver Medal going to CD's--and even tapes-- which have only been around 30 years compared to the century of radio.

The study notes that only 10% of people listening to the radio were doing nothing else but listening to the radio--most were busy with work or some other activity (44% of radio listening is done while commuting). This is important if discussing the role of radio. I've recently become enamored with the website 8tracks.com, which allows users to upload a playlist and for others, even nonmembers, to listen in.  Of the Top 5 tags for user-created playlists, 3 describe an activity the playlist is made for rather than the music itself: "Sleep", "sex", and "study", in that order. MP3 players, as well, are usually found around the armbands of early morning joggers or in the cup-holders of early-morning commuters.

Broadcast radio is uniquely fit to play the role of background music: it's constant, free, and everywhere. In most radio markets, every station runs 24 hours. And despite the complete and utter scam that is HD radio, radio remains free and radio units themselves remain extremely cheap. Because of these two factors, radio is unavoidable. It's the most cost-effective and reliable method of tuning out the real world.

As it turns out, being the soundtrack to our own mundane thoughts and habits is good business. NPR, whose continued existence in the face of the 24-hour infotainment onslaught is itself astonishing, has shown steady growth over the same decade people turned more and more to cable TV and online sources for news. In a study published just this week by Arbitron, an international media analysis firm, weekly radio listeners increased by 1.4 million over the course of 2011. Again, we're talking about a century-old technology with absolutely no screen whatsoever growing against the same odds and technological waves currently crushing print media. Not bad for a box the size of a textbook shoved into my dashboard.

In an earlier post, I discussed the dying nature of television. While TV is quite passive, it does require the use of the eyes, which can be distracting when looking for something to fade in and out of during work, working out, or driving. Unlike TV, the radio transitions fairly naturally to portability. And as any music nerd can tell you, even a fully-loaded iPod can become fairly predictable. Radio can bring you traffic and weather, brand new music of nearly any genre, the oddball personalities of disc jockeys, and the sense that a million or more people could be listening to the same thing at the same moment you are (I believe sociologists call this term "community"). So while TV and magazines may die out to the Internet's persistent evolution, radio continues to be your oldest co-worker, turning down the chance to quit and still outpacing the new hires.