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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

I miss radio streams though. there's value to the idea that thousands of others are listening to the same thing in realtime. Damn those personalized streams, i dont want to listen to music alone

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I love tuning in to whatever local station I can find while road tripping through some obscure part of the country. With radio I feel connected. Isn't that supposed to be a big part of what music is about? I'll go to any live show at a bar, it doesn't even have to be that good or my kind of music for me to appreciate it.

As someone who lives in an obscure part of the country, almost all of our radio stations come out of the same building which has maybe one actual on-air personality for the ~7 stations broadcasting. What makes our stations "local" is the extensive advertising.

Yeah it's funny, after what feels like at least a solid decade of on-demand audio I'm finding myself seeking out more live audio wherever I can find it. Miss the feeling of at least passively participating in something. I think the isolation of the pandemic kicked some of that into gear.

I guess I can understand the desire to be a part of something, but I can't see that feeling ever driving me back into the clutches of the commercial FM/satellite radio. I think I'd rather track down some popular pirate streamer or better yet just start going to concerts.

I'd rather have been at Glastonbury listening to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POTjcZGLKuY for the whole immersive crowd vibe, but watching it on TV wasnt bad.

I prefer Norman's sampling and MC'ing to David Guetta's.

Armin still does live streams all these years later! https://www.youtube.com/@arminvanbuuren/streams

And the BBC Essential mix https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006wkfp is now streamed online around the world every Friday night and thats been going since 30 October 1993 via the radio!!!

Funny, I've been listening to Essential Mixes since the late 90's and I don't think I've ever listened to them 'live'.

I don't miss the ads. Every time I listen to the radio it seems like there's 10 minutes of ads for 5 minutes of music. I know that's not actually the case but it doesn't usually take me long to find something else that doesn't have so many ads.

I think the main advantage of radio for music is human curation. Spotify is still far from being able to give me a high quality playlist of music I'm likely to enjoy but would be unlikely to find on my own. However, podcasts and DJ mixes mostly fill this role for me. Internet radio still exists (KEXP is great) but I don't find myself using it much anymore.

For the live element, it seems like Twitch streaming still has a lot of potential if they can figure out the copyright issues.

For conversations and news, I think a well edited long-form podcast is superior to radio in every way.

But, how do you know that anyone else was ever listening to the same thing in realtime? Maybe you were the only one every time. Unlikely, but possible. I honestly don't see the difference. If it makes you feel better, try pretending in your mind that thousands of other people are listening to your personalized streams in realtime. Functionally it is the same thing.

You re probably not old enough to remember radio

Which phrased that way sounds as if radio would be dead.

LOL. I was born in the early 70s. I still don’t see a difference between radio and Spotify, other than Spotify is much better since there are no ads, no people talking over the beginning of songs, I can listen to whatever I want, etc. Anytime I’m in the car listening to the radio (my cars are so old that I can’t use Bluetooth to listen to Spotify from my phone) I’m reminded how bad it is. Flipping through stations to find something I want to listen to sucks.

I like the Apple Music radio stations for this reason. Not the personalized stations, they have 3 live stations: Hits (generic pop), 1 (modern pop), and Country (obviously country).

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