doowopvault said:
For your edification...the podcast is used as an archive....
That's a specific about your personal show. My comment was addressed to you contention that radio listeners were defecting to podcasts (and other alternatives) and I gave you the facts, right from The Infinite Dial 2013, released Monday of this very week. Podcasts are down in usage, and have been for several years. FACT.
i'm on a COMMERCIAL station, again, all generalities and NO facts.
So, at the end of the argument, you are not defending doo wop, but your own show?
Plus will soon be on another COMMERCIAL station.
There are 11,125 commercial stations in the USA. They come in different sizes, flavors and qualities. Being on the radio, per se, is not impressive. Getting listeners is.
I can't imagin a person going into an art gallery and telling the gallery owner "why don't you get rid of all this OLD art and display some new art lol.
Let's switch the analogy. I like to see a different section of the Smithsonian each time I go to Washington. But after I leave, I never have any desire to buy an airplane made of wood and cloth or a buggy or a pot-belly heater. All those are part of America's history, and seeing the "real thing" up close is marvelous. It's history...
...Just like doo wop. I'm occasionally interested in hearing a song of that genre, particularly if a later artist mentions being influenced by a particular representative of the style. To me, and, indeed to most, doo wop has the same appeal as the Charleston... a relic of history, a curiosity, even an anomaly which occurred during a finite period of time.
Music is art, but you and the station owners of your ilk wouldn't know anything about that, or about the stations...COMMERCIAL...that are playing this genre, but you wouldn't know because, as I said, you are not lovers of music, it's all an investment.
Music may be art, but in many cases, it is consumable art. Perhaps not the same kind of consumable as Kleenex, but much of history's music is, as I said, viewed only as a reflection of a period of time and is no longer "popular" in the broad sense of being sought out and enjoyed, today, by significant segments of the population.
In any case, radio stations are a combination of a little bit of art and a lot of business. That's because the success of the art part depends on overall commercial success. That's why there are no "all doo wop all the time" stations and why intelligently run stations like CBS-FM have eliminated doo wop specialty shows and pretty much purged 50's music... and most 60's tunes... from the playlist.
Reminds me of the Bar/Restaurants I was DJing for, always packed and making a profit. When the owner handed it over to his son, down the tubes it went. Why? like you..the music was called "old". So he cut the staff, cut back on fresh food and ordered cheap frozen food, jacked up the cost of drinks and played 90's on up and Hip Hop. Guess what? he closed AND left his dad in debt and closed. That is what people like you are doing to the radio business.
That's about as poor an analogy as I've ever come across. What you give as an example is the same as installing a non-type accepted transmitter, running it at half power, using a dial-up phone line to connect to it and playing 96 kbs audio to its input. In other words, destroying the quality.
Nobody is saying that there are not magnificent doo wop recordings. Ones with enormous artistic and expressive quality.
What is being said is that the people to whom doo wop has a strong appeal are for the most part over 70 or dead. There's no market for the quality material of that era of music, no way to make money save for an occasional specialty show, and no interest on the part of most people.
Don't take the discussion so personally. Look objectively, and don't blame the radio industry for not programming music that has no viable commercial audience.