Brooklyn is the epicenter of punk, post-punk and indie culture, It's home to Alternative staples like The Strokes, Vampire Weekend, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and many more who sadly don't even have a station in New York that plays them any more.
David is full buisness-minded in these discussions, as I know from experience.
I find that we have a vast agreement in musical taste; and I feel that on FM radio in these current times, there is no place for fans of anything that isn't rhythmic, country (outside of NYC), Pop/Top-40/Hot AC/CHR, and Sports Talk (which I despise the most of all, grown men droning on about a game they don't play, but think they are all-knowing). David and others will go straight to the numbers. I subjectively disagree, viewing it as alienating people who don't agree to the preferred stereotype. But, my subjectivity doesn't hold much merrit to the data they present. One person's anecdotal observation will not drive the direction of an entire industry. Yet, I will still denounce it through my subjective perspective (knowing that I speak for one person out of millions of Americans).
With that, I need to play "devil's advocate." As WNYL and the "Alt 92.3" brand, many of the Alternative bands/artists that you mentioned got airplay (prior to the station's last stand, reverting to Alt-Rock). How did WNYL perform? Was it successful with those acts as the core artists? Did it need to tweak the playlist, and place less emphasis on them? Let's Go back to the CBGB days, and New York home grown bands like The Ramones. Did they have much success on American FM radio? They sold out arenas...internationally. Domestically, they were a club band (one of which is still my personal all-time favorites).
Where I agree with you is that culturally, the deck is stacked against many genres of music. My top music choices are (in order) Rock, Blues, Rap, Alternative, Jazz (not smooth jazz). I've complained for years about my theory (and it's just that, a theory), that the music industry pushes cookie cutter music, which is what radio picks up. Since it's what plays and what is pushed, it forms the cultural preferences of the current consumer generation, creating a loop that is self-fulfilling. In my 20s, from my little microcosm, I waged a one-man war on CHR and people who listened to stations that I still jokingly refer to as "Crap 108 (Boston)" and SiriusXM (expletive) 1. My gripe was the early 2000s hard-line stance against vulgarity and violence in Rock and Rap, while the same soccer moms shook in danced in their cars to pop songs that were sexual in nature. I viewed it as not "being for the children," but rather being a collective voice against types of music that they didn't like.
And to be honest, there isn't much of a strong counter-culture as there was from the 60s until the the 90s. Post-9/11 America sheded a great amount of the counter-culture. The soccer moms didn't win any true war, but musical tastes of the greater population did shift towards the fore mentioned types of music. We can point fingers all day as to why, but it is what happened (much to my disdain). The mainstream adopted some parts of the old 90s counter-culture and moved forward. That was the more rhythmic sound, and this notion that men want to hear other men talk about a third set of men playing a game that nobody in the first two sets of men played, over rock, alt-rock, Alternative, etc. As this became the norm, a unidentified amount of the population subscribed to it. I don't have exact numbers, but people like David will and do reference them when explaining why radio is in its current direction.
So the answer truly is that when something offers a product that one doesn't want, go somewhere else where one can find what they prefer. I don't like tacos, so I don't go to Taco Bell. But, open a fast food place that focuses on Cuban or Dominican food, and I'd need a wheel barrel to get in and out of there. The same held true. I used every app around to find songs I'd like, then would look up the band on YouTube, then would buy the songs on iTunes, then save them to my phone. I did that for years, until I got unlimited data and decided to subscribe to satellite radio.
The problem that I'm reading with your post, is the same problem that I had for a long time. We're arguing (as in debating) two contrasting things between us and them. We're speaking of art, while they are speaking of buisness. Buisness is objective and data driven (mostly quantitative), where art is subjective. They are creating something that works for as many people as possible to drive in the biggest buisness as possible. We are speaking of personal taste, which in our case doesn't appeal to the mass audience. That's simply what's happening here.
