When radio first came about, it was so influential that it became a defining factor of American mass culture and completely transformed the media landscape. Families gathered around their radios to listen to the news, sports events, shows and, of course, music. It gave people a common experience, drawing them together even though they sat listening in separate houses and cars across their communities and the country. But with the swift development of television and later the internet, radio’s popularity has dwindled significantly. Why listen to a scheduled radio program when you can watch your favorite shows on demand? Why tune in to your local station for music when you can stream your own?
For my birthday this year, I was gifted a retro-style Bluetooth speaker equipped with AM/FM radio, and it has lit up my life in a way that streaming never could.
I love music. My entire life, I have sung incessantly (much to the annoyance of anyone I’ve ever lived with). I have pored over Genius lyric annotations and made endless playlists on Spotify (seriously, I have over 60 of them). But I am a victim of the 21st century. In this post-Napster, streaming-dominated world, the only thing that ever stood between me and listening to exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, were the ads and mandatory shuffle play of free Spotify. And before I finally got sick of listening to the same three songs over and over on Spotify’s “random” shuffle and bought the premium subscription, YouTube was just a click away, where after five seconds and a tap on the “Skip Ad” button, I could listen to any track I wanted. Never have I had to pay or wait for more than the duration of a catchy jingle or snappy brand catchphrase to hear a piece of music. To my generation and those after, music on demand is a given.
I think many people my age and younger often don’t think about the fact that not too long ago, listening to music was very, very different. If you wanted it for free, you were chained to whatever was playing on the radio at the time. If you wanted control over what you were listening to, you had to buy a CD or a record. Playlists were unheard of — the closest alternative was burning a custom mix. Customization took effort. Today, it’s the default.
This fact of modern life has been somewhat stressful for me. I hate nothing more than being asked to be on aux. Building a queue for a party might just be my worst nightmare; I pawn off the phone to someone else like I’m playing hot potato. I don’t know how to cultivate a collection of songs that are both befitting of the desired vibe and relevant enough that most people will recognize them. I know what I like to listen to to accommodate certain moods, as is evidenced by my multitude of hyper-specific playlists, but how am I supposed to know what others will enjoy? All of a sudden my charming, niche, cooler-than-you music taste goes from being something I love about myself to something that is going to ruin the function because no one knows what the hell I’m playing.
Even when I’m just playing music for myself, every so often I fall into a period of not knowing what I want to hear. My current mood playlist will feel too dry, or I’m just not feeling the soft rock playlist that has way too many songs on it, and I don’t want my hip-hop playlist or the folk one or anything I’ve heard before. Sometimes, I just want something new without being too new, a perfect mix of familiar and unfamiliar, and unfortunately, all Spotify can give me is crappy AI-generated mixes that just regurgitate songs from my library with some other Top 40 pop. But this is where radio shines.
Somewhere out there, a real-life person has been hired specifically for their good music taste. They sit before a desk, gazing upward at a collection of monitors with a heavy pair of headphones over their ears, playing songs curated for this very moment. I turn on my radio, and the music that comes out — the music that a headphone-wearing person at a desk is broadcasting into the world — is perfect, always, because their sequence of songs is both something I would have never chosen for myself and distinctly human. I turn on my radio, and I dance to songs I have never heard before simply because their freshness makes them irresistible. Even if the song is horrendous, I know someone out there in the world has picked it out and put real thought, effort and intention into that choice. And that gives it charm.
The music chosen by a robot has always been stale to me — machine learning algorithms and AI are no match for some 40-year-old dude who loves alt-rock and has been listening to it for his entire life. He knows how to build a journey that spans hours of songs, linking each to the one before with a long invisible string and taking the listeners with him. The lifeless code that is the Spotify DJ does not know how to do this. It cannot see the connections from song to song that we, as people, can all feel. Instead, it collects songs by genre, imitating the artistry of people who have built playlists before it. But the algorithm cannot capture the unpredictability that is that alt-rock dude deciding, for a reason only God and himself may ever know, to interrupt a chain of top-tier tracks with “Island in the Sun” by Weezer. How lucky are we to have free, infinite access to another person’s music curation in real time? It’s not just a playlist; it’s humanity.
Not to mention the feeling I get when they play something I actually know. What can be more musically validating than a song you love being picked by someone else to be played for the masses? And the fact that it happened to be played just as I was tuned in makes a song one hundred times more enjoyable to listen to than playing it myself. And there it is again: The humanity of radio, the feeling that someone else is out there, listening to what I’m listening to at that precise moment. Bringing back radio means bringing back those tiny, spiderweb links to others that build a better-connected world.
So my quaint radio, which I originally only wanted for the aesthetic, has brightened up my world so much more than I would have ever imagined. It’s expanded my sense of community tenfold as I picture myself nodding my head along with thousands of others in the greater Detroit area. That new window into my community is just one turn of a knob away, sitting there waiting on top of my dresser, whether I’m sharing a moment with all the nine-to-fivers sitting in traffic as I get ready for my own workday or if I just need to know that there really is another living soul awake at 4:30 in the morning, and they’re playing Nirvana for me. It makes me feel less alone. It makes me feel more alive. Of course, hearing one more Imagine Dragons song being played on Alt 98.7 Detroit might just make my head explode, but isn’t that part of the appeal? Besides, I can always turn the dial back over to Bluetooth anytime the tracks start to loop or when the announcer decides he’s going to run an hour-long tribute to Eminem. My tediously crafted Spotify playlists aren’t going anywhere. But neither is my new obsession, the thing I never knew I was missing out so hard on, my key to feeling oh-so-nineties: my cute little Victrola radio.
Daily Arts Writer Audrey Hollenbaugh can be reached at aehollen@umich.edu.
