Hello Heathens,

Edit: I’ve made slight edits to this to improve the clarity. Maybe I’ll write another part to this, but it seems that the future is shit and we have only ourselves to blame for it as we put convenience above everything else.

I’ve complained about Spotify on here before, and really I should stick to my guns and totally get off that platform. At this point it doesn’t really matter what streaming service you are on since most of them are fairly shitty to bands. Apple Music might be the least bad streaming platform, or Tidal. I like being able to link playlists for people to enjoy, and Spotify is the largest platform so it makes sense that I would use it for you all to enjoy the show playlists. That being said, Spotify’s new feature is being pushed on me yet again.

A few months ago Spotify unveiled their AI DJ, Xavier. While it’s a cool idea in a vacuum. It’s trying to replicate something that makes radio special from streaming, and totally misses the point of what makes radio special. I’ve been around the radio industry as a volunteer at KSUA and Overkill for almost 15 years. One of the biggest things that makes radio special compared to podcasting, or AI Dj’s that talks like a real person, is that radio is a temporal listening experience. When a radio broadcast happens, it’s something that is happening in real time and can’t be replicated, or captured. Radio is closer to a concert than it is to DJ X. When you hear the local radio DJ trying out a joke and it bombs, or making a prescient point about some local event, DJ X can’t replicate that. That event passes you by like tears in rain.

The other part that makes radio special and keeps people listening to radio is that local radio has news and ads that are relevant to you as you live in that area. I can’t tell you how many times my friends who only get news via youtube or podcasts try to tell me about some event happening thousands of miles away. I don’t care what the schools in X city are teaching kids since I don’t fucking live there. I want to know what is happening in my community and is going to impact my daily life. DJ X doesn’t capture this, and advertisers on spotify are still focused on massive global brands instead of smaller local companies. I’m actually shocked that Spotify hasn’t started to run ads for local businesses for users depending on their region.

Something that DJ X does replicate and is partially the fault of the insane monopolization of local radio is the playlists. iHeartRadio has deals to play music from certain labels (a licensing agreement) and there is also a demand for certain artists. This can result in say, a classic rock station in Alaska playing virtually the same music as a classic rock station in Florida. Sure, there are some bands that will forever be popular, but those popular bands have tracks that see very little radio play that are great. There are also bands from that era that are still relatively underplayed, and as we’ve seen recently there are some influential bands that were forgotten about from the classic rock era (Death comes to mind). Since iHeartRadio owns the lion’s share of the market, and since they can dictate what their stations play, it leads to situations where local radio is fairly indistinguishable from “radio” on streaming services.

Independent stations have a lot more say over what gets played and it’s why people like Jake The Ripper can have a show with a different theme each week, or I can focus on just new releases. This means that some of the shows that get played on the radio have a playlist where a human makes a decision about what to include or not, and how to order that playlist. Sometimes the order or playlist has little thought, but at the same time since a human made it there was some sort of subconscious emotional resonance that went into selecting that track or ordering that playlist that can’t be replicated by code.

With all this talk about “AI taking over Hollywood writing/acting gigs” or “AI replacing customer service” no one is talking about how creepy it is to have DJ X pretending to be your friend who knows what you want to listen to based on your current’s vibes. No one is talking about how the local radio star is most at risk of being tuned into some sort of soulless AI. It’s a sad state of affairs where radio, one of the most popular media platforms on the planet, is seen as the stepping stone for these technologies to take over. If the radio industry does start to replace on air talent with AI, you can bet your ass it will replace other entertainment talent outside of radio.

Keep Heavy The Sabbath Day

09.30.23