A couple weeks back I flipped on the radio and someone else was the DJ. I assumed Mike was sick but the next night was the same and the next and the next. After a couple weeks of his absence without explanation I wandered over to the station's website and to its forums where I learned that Mike had been fired.
The station's only real explanation is that it was moving in another direction at night. Some digging indicates that the station was informed that a lot of supermarkets were interested in playing WQBK over their speakers at night. Apparently this didn’t click with the idea of a guy who would put a deserving listener in their place. Like that he was out.
Now, I don’t expect you to start some campaign to restore Mike’s job. I don’t even know if any readers are in the same area and thus have reason to care. I mention this, first to say thanks to a guy who has added plenty of humor to my evenings. Secondly, I want to point out an ugly direction in the music industry in general. Let’s call it the Clear Channel effect. When the rules were relaxed on how many radio stations one company could own in a single market, Clear Channel started sucking them up like an overactive vacuum cleaner. That eliminated a lot of competition between stations because the same company owned them all and carefully targeted them at different demographics. In becoming such a giant, Clear Channel has sucked all the individuality out of their stations. They run tiny playlists and can barely be distinguished from one another.
That has dramatically cut the variety of music you can hear on the radio, a fact that has led to the supremacy of corporate soulless mass produced garbage masquerading as music. Most people don’t know any better as they don’t get a real chance to experience something different unless they really hunt for it. Irritated at WQBK for axing the main reason I bothered to turn on my radio anymore, I tried a different station, one that turned out to be owned by Clear Channel. Without a real personality on WQBK at night, I was hard pressed to tell the difference between the stations. Basically, WQBK sold out its regular listeners for a chance to gain a new set of listeners. But the transient nature of who is listening at supermarkets or elevators (yes elevators) makes them a vague group lacking substance. Most of them will hear a tiny piece of the station’s material and then leave, probably without any idea what they just listened to, assuming they cared enough to pay attention.
Mike will be missed. He was a DJ I could trust. If a song sucked, he wouldn’t pretend to love it just because the station was playing it regularly. If he did love it, you really knew it. That honesty made him a very rare quantity in radio. We need more of it, not less. Instead we have a music industry that poses stunts like the Super Bowl half time show and then pretends it was an accident. That’s just pitiful. It’s one thing to pull a stunt to get attention. But have the guts to see it through and admit it. Don’t pretend it was an accident.
The music industry wants to blame their diminishing returns on people illegally sharing music on the internet. They need to take a hard look at their whole system and see what has driven consumers away. Insulting our intelligence and reducing our choices is an approach that will never result in more sales.
These days my radio remains silent. I’ve bought exactly one CD in the last three years. I have over three hundred CDs. It is unlike me not to add to my collection constantly. A lack of quality and an overwhelming wave of indifference from the folks controlling the music has turned me off. Despite all that, a guy like Mike the Enforcer had me listening to the radio faithfully for the last couple of years. I speak of him as if he’s dead, which he is most definitely not. What’s dead for me is a form of entertainment I once loved dearly. I’ve traded emails with Mike and can say that he’s alive and kicking and will be back on the radio eventually. In the meantime, I’ll close with a paraphrase of his words.
It’s time to strap on your hockey helmets, empty out your drool cups and tell the short bus driver we want our damn music back.
Later ya bastards.
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