Thomas Park- Benchmark: Hub

How To Save Radio (and Music)
By Thomas Park

It’s hard to watch the things we value disappear. | am having to watch two of them fade rapidly
from this world. One is radio, and the other is music as we know it.

Radio has been many things to many people. It has presented a kind of culture where families
would sit around and listen. It has carried hit songs to millions of people, who discussed them
and waited for them to be played again. It has carried news of all kinds, the voices of djs,
interviews, and so on.

Every year there are fewer broadcast radio stations in every city. Those we have left are often
poorly-funded, or draw from a rather limited playlist of songs that have a target audience, but for
many quickly grow stale.

Music as a whole is suffering. Indie music is rarely purchased, if listened to. The larger industry
seems to consist of a few major acts, most who tour, who command nearly all of the revenue.
Streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, which seem to fulfill both radio and music
needs, don’t help enough. There is not enough variety in the playlists, which are quite limited,
and artists get hardly any income from streams and downloads.

Many musicians will tell you, we are in the midst of a number of dying scenes. Even though tens
of thousands of independent artists have access to better music-making tools, and hundreds of
thousands of cc-licensed songs are created annually, these songs are underheard and
underappreciated.

Sad, indeed, for those who love radio and music.
So... what to do?

One tool would involve coded playlist generation and harvesting from cc-licensed music sites
such as the Internet Archive.

A second saving technology involves live generative music creation. It occured to me that a
series of embedded players on a webpage could be sent sounds from a soundbank, which
could be combined randomly. Over time, more and more sounds could be used, in different
combinations. The user would hear the sounds combining in real time, from the webpage, and
would never hear the same sequence twice,

Gone would be the predictable, static playlist. A generative station, instead, is always making
new versions, creating new moments. A station such as “The Heliades” (

httos://www.thomasparksolutions9.com/ ), has enough variety to occupy listeners for hours on
end, and on a regular basis.

Where redundant playlists and boring shows draw fewer and fewer listeners, where a sense of
the unique and special is fading, where artists ask for money and don’t receive enough, where
djs labor for hours on end to make shows that only last an hour-- this is radio as we see it now,
radio as we have come to experience it.

Let’s work together, you and I, to open the door to new possibilities, through using my code or
similar programs.

Are you interested? If so, there are two main ways you can help.

1. Please consider donating to my Patreon campaign (
httos://www.patreon.com/user?u=46289996 ). | need money to invest in ad campaigns
for my experimental radio formats and related generative projects.

2. Please consider listening to one or many of my free generative radio streams. If you like
them, bookmark them, and tell some friends.

| would add a third possibility, for the truly adventurous. Do you code in Python, or want to
learn? Why not use any of my public domain codes for generative radio stations, hosted at my
Git Hub page: https://github.com/Mystified131

| hope you will!
Thank you for your time.

--Thomas Park, 3/31/2019