Radio's New Wave

4

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF MUSIC LISTENING

Between Freeform DJs and Recommendation Algorithms

Elena Razlogova

 

 

 

In 2010, in response to a New Yorker article on Pandora Radio, an online music recommendation service, a Vermont reader objected: “All this new technology has yet to improve on the old radio model: putting yourself in the hands of independent, passionate, and deeply knowledgeable disk jockeys—the likes of which can be found at New Jersey’s incomparable WFMU, for example—and following them blissfully into the world of unknown and unexpected sound.”¹ This argument comes up repeatedly in online debates—in comments to a New York Times blog post on Pandora a reader put forward freeform radio pioneers from the late 1960s, KMPX and KSAN ...