On The Radio
There’s something different about hearing a song you love on the radio. It just sounds better.
I know that sounds absolutely crazy. And, in a way, it is. I mean, a song is a song. It should sound the same no matter how you hear it. Or maybe over radio it should actually sound worse given the relatively low fidelity of radio.
And yet, it sounds better. You simply cannot convince me otherwise. This has been on my mind this week following the launch of Apple Music.
A few days in, Beats 1 continues to be a revelation. I find myself “tuning in” just to hear what’s on at any given moment. Sometimes I stay, sometimes I churn. But I keep coming back. It’s interesting.
But Beats 1, at least when I’ve tuned in, has been mainly about playing songs I haven’t heard before. Which is great — it has been years since I’ve had a solid, reliable new music discovery platform. Pandora, of course, is the closest, but it still wasn’t quite what traditional radio was to me as a teenager. It’s a little too clever. Too tailored. Beats 1 is closer.
I digress. New music discovery is great and welcomed. But more poignant is when Beats 1, and Apple Music in general, taps into the other side of radio: playing songs I love.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve listened to traditional radio for an extended period of time. It was undoubtedly before I sold my car.
Sidenote: does anyone actually listen to traditional radio when not in the car anymore? Hard to imagine when you would aside from perhaps tuning in to a baseball game.
I digress, again. The thing I miss most about radio is actually not new music discovery, but hearing those songs I know and love. Again, there’s something both powerful and magical about this level of serendipity. The song you love sounds even better when you weren’t expecting to hear it.
In the age of hunting and pecking and searching for music amidst endless catalogs and repositories and libraries, there’s something great in this process being taken out of your hands; in not choosing what to listen to, but having the music find you. And in it being a song you want to hear, even though you maybe didn’t know you did at that moment.
This is what I hope Apple Music revitalizes. It’s the reason I would always put my iPods on shuffle mode. But there was never quite the randomness, even in ten thousand songs, that I was looking for. But with actually every single song in my pocket, maybe.
