When radio was first introduced to the community by KDKA it was used for news and relaying information. People tuned in to listen to news broadcasts and updates on world affairs like war. Eventually music became the big sensation of the radio. Different radio stations played different kinds of music. The first song ever played over radio broadcast was "O holy night" by Reginald Fessenden.
The FCC began opening up applications to radio stations and allowed broadcasting over low frequencies (for a while all stations were on the same frequency). Eventually by the 1930s over 12 million homes had radios. More and more stations were being developed under the big broadcasting names of NBC and CBS. And as time when on and radio grew popular, after WWII, more stations were playing a variety of classical and popular music, sporting events, weather reports, news casts, and political commentaries. AM and FM radio frequencies were used to transmit audio waves and AM was most commonly used for broadcasting because it carried a much stronger signal.
*This was also a time when more people wanted to become singers and song writers because radio and television were ways to put out music across the world.
Now:
Today many things are different in the radio world. With the introduction of internet people are able to find radio stations online and listen to a larger variety of music, at will, rather than being limited to a home or car radio. Radio is still used a lot today (mostly FM broadcasting), but now there are different kinds of radio programs.
Some of these programs include iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify and Amazon which allow consumers to be in control of the music and programming they listen to. iHeartRadio allows people to listen to any radio station they want right from their smartphone or other media device. Pandora and Spotify are programs that allow users to select almost any genre of music to listen to. Users can also bookmark, like and skip music which creates a memory system the program uses to select future songs to be played based off of what the user likes. Amazon and Spotify also allow people to build their own playlists from millions of songs for a small subscription fee of about $8 a month.*Over the past century radio has went from broadcast to narrowcast. The consumers now have more control over the different kinds of music they want to listen to.
**I use the free Pandora app as this plays many great songs from my favorite genres of music. I also buy my music from Amazon if there is a specific song I like.
Later:
Radio today is going in a good direction as far as usability and innovation. As for the future it is possible that radio may become more social network and app based. This could be by sharing music and commenting on others music. One app that allows users to do these kinds of things is SoundCloud. SoundCloud allows people to listen to, as well as create and share their own music.
Radio may essentially put the consumer in full control of music.Some apps allow people to change their voice with auto tuning and combined with apps like SoundCloud makes it easy for anyone to become a DJ. This brings a form of democracy to broadcasting and allows almost anyone to be a musician.
**I think this could essentially be a good future for radio. This allows more musical artists to get discovered and broadens the horizon for music. This could also lead to more genres. If we take a look at some of the genres in the past few years we can see that more and more types of music are taking heat like Dubstep, Trance, Dancestep and New Pop.
--------
*Thesis
**My thoughts
No comments:
Post a Comment