A Face Made for Radio

A Voice Made for TV

“A face made for radio” is an old-timey joke. I wonder if, “A voice made for TV” might carry the same punch today… probably few would hear it as a putdown. Still, it was a line in Lindsay Zoladz’s review of the new Harry Styles album that made me think of it:

“Styles is such a magnetic onstage performer, provocative interview subject and fearlessly androgynous fashion plate that his records have come to feel like missed opportunities - the least personality-driven expressions of his otherwise compelling celebrity.”

Records may well come last for Styles – as well as for a number of his colleagues at the top of the charts. And who can blame them, when recorded music is valued so little? Streaming doesn’t make anyone their big bucks, perhaps especially those tied to major label contracts that keep the lion’s share of whatever royalties the platforms do pay. So even for those at the top – who aren’t hurting under this system designed for consolidation, let’s not forget - even those at the tippy top of the pyramid are truly more in the business of performance, brand deals, and all the other opportunities that come their way based on visual entertainment, rather than records.

Which is how even a youngish pop star could end up acting like the Stones or some other legacy act who only seem to make new albums as an excuse to promote yet another tour of record-setting gross receipts. They’ll just play the hits in any case.

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Still, what I really wanted to write about this week is my community garden plot.

I promised vegetables when I launched this newsletter, but it was September and already near the end of our pitifully short growing season here in New England. Well, it’s Memorial Day coming up at last – which means it’s finally warm enough at night to put tomatoes in the ground.

In an effort to stretch our Puritan growing season, I’ve been experimenting with self-seeding – letting crops go to flower and scattering the seed before winter. Whatever then comes up in the spring does so quicker and stronger than any seedlings I can buy at the local nurseries.

It also finds its way to precisely where it wants grow. Self-seeding results in a kind of micro-climate map of my already tiny plot – a map so tailored to plants it seems beyond human knowledge. Why, for example, in a rectangle of seemingly undifferentiated earth, does borage choose one particular corner…?

Last year, I seeded borage in a deliberate line across a long edge of this area, and they dutifully grew – not all with the same vigor, but they did reach flower (shocking blue, if you’ve never seen them). I let them go to seed and made sure those scattered across the entire area.

Broadcast is a planting term adopted by analogy for radio in the 1920s – casting information out across the airwaves, like seeds across an area of ground.

Not all land where they take. But some do.

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Let’s turn on the radio while I plant zucchini in that empty area alongside the borage. It’s my favorite local AM station playing “Beautiful Music” for anyone in its short radius who might happen to tune in. I know from a Facebook page that those fans include both nursing home residents and ironic hipsters. Corners of ground in a wide field.

Another tech analogy drawn from planting: seeding music for peer-to-peer file sharing, as Napster pioneered and BitTorrent clients use today. In this case, the sounds don’t have to heard in a given moment to take; they can sit dormant for ages, only to be animated suddenly by a request. If there’s an equivalent in the plant world, it would probably be in a place of extreme weather, like a desert, rather than a Massachusetts vegetable garden. Or maybe those seeds that I’ve read are activated only by a forest fire.

Streaming, too, has a planting metaphor at root: “seed money.” That is very clearly equivalent to deliberately planting in a line, where some might take and some might not. Or maybe none at all will grow and no one will ever be sure exactly why, because they’ve quickly moved on to other seeds on other ground where subsequent success and failure will again remain mysterious. Abject failure is an accepted part of the venture capital/start-up process, as we’ve all been told by dozens of TED talks.

Total failure in broadcast? Not likely – ask any late night DJ. Someone is listening out there. They always are.

Total failure from seeding files? Again, unlikely – sometime, it stands to reason, another listener will be searching for those same obscure recordings you value enough to keep in your collection, and be all the more grateful for finding them.

Total failure in streaming? Evidently it’s quite common. There’s even an app designed to chip away at the millions and millions of completely unstreamed tracks: Forgotify.

While planting my garden and listening to Beautiful Music on the radio, I have heard a lot of songs I never thought I could like. I still don’t like most of them. But one or two have started to grow on me.

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I do suspect we are in an era of voices made for TV. Pop careers seem increasingly created by and for televised singing competitions, late-night talk show performances, and – not unrelated – the enormous video screens that frame festival stages. All of which feed into endless rebroadcast on YouTube and social media.

Not that the primacy of image in pop is anything new. But were the images ever so big and the loudspeakers accompanying them ever so small, as now? The Super Bowl halftime show is staged more elaborately each year – yet its sound remains as tinny as ever. Television isn’t typically listened to on good speakers, and god knows YouTube and social media clips often aren’t heard on anything better than a phone. Even outdoor festival shows with their gigantic sound systems are sorely lacking in clarity and quality of sound – the low end can benefit from the impact of volume, sure. But vocals are necessarily so compressed and boosted to carry in open air, you’ll never hear detail in them the way you would on a properly tuned system in a hall with decent acoustics. Or on a recording played by a hi-fi.

In any case, we are most definitely in a time of decreasing influence for radio, where voices rule. As Variety has pointed out, even though radio still accounts for “39% of audio consumption among those 13 and older, compared to 18% clocked by streaming services,” once you factor out news traffic and weather together (plus sports and all that talk, talk), the figures reverse. Controlling for music listening, traditional radio shrinks to “a 15.9% share.”

If you’re feeling cynical, you might see another sign of commercial radio’s waning importance to music in what looks to be bipartisan support for the American Music Fairness Act, a bill that would for the first time require US broadcasters to pay royalties on master recordings. This bill is about 100 years late for dealing with a new technology. It’s also possibly a decade past real relevance to the industry: 16% of music listening, and falling with a bullet, is what the American Music Fairness Act will address. If it passes.

Nevertheless, even a little more fairness taking root in a corner of our field would be good. And it could start to spread.

Listening to: Afrikan Culture, by Shabaka

Cooking: Drained yogurt with salt and all the first herbs to come up in the garden (dill, chive, mint, coriander…), chopped fine