has it lost it mojo - pirate radio

[ANDY BOY]

15 - 20 years ago pirate radio was very active! with djs wanting to be apart of stations now it seems like no djs are intrested in radio again they would rather do a pod cast or a mix cd..... where did it go all wrong? has it lost its charm and magic!!!

[DJ Mikey]

Yeah its lost some magic although I know some stations that do have a full line up from 7am - midnight / 2am in morning 7 days of the week. The new generation has a lot to do with it, I mean these days what young djs do you ever hear on radio ? Like you go back 15 years ago and there was so many teenagers and dj's in their early 20s on radio, anything before that generation just hasn't seemed interested in pirate radio as such

[drumandbasshead010]

Yeah its lost some magic although I know some stations that do have a full line up from 7am - midnight / 2am in morning 7 days of the week. The new generation has a lot to do with it, I mean these days what young djs do you ever hear on radio ? Like you go back 15 years ago and there was so many teenagers and dj's in their early 20s on radio, anything before that generation just hasn't seemed interested in pirate radio as such

as one of those rare teenagers who is interested in and listens to pirate radio I think what went wrong (well if you want to put it like that, it's debatable whether you could call it an advantage or disadvantage to radio) was the internet. You can stream all across the world online for next to nothing. I'm surprised that this has changed everything because you're still getting more listenership on fm than on the internet? I mean look at some of the station stream figures via shoutcast and you'd be so surprised at the small amounts of people listening online and then considering the amount that apparently listen to that particular station on fm. There are still more, which as I have mentioned in another post, goes back to the fact that there are so many online streams, mixclouds, soundclouds, youtube channels and spottify playlists that you just get lost in the throng

[nrglcb2016]

agree there are so many ways of getting your dj name out in the loop nowdays you dont have 2 rely on radio. 2 b frank most of the music scene needs a kick , a new style may bring a whole range of new djs out of the woodwork

[drumandbasshead010]

agree there are so many ways of getting your dj name out in the loop nowdays you dont have 2 rely on radio. 2 b frank most of the music scene needs a kick , a new style may bring a whole range of new djs out of the woodwork

look at it this way though: it would be very hard to bring out something original with all the music nowadays. I mean it seems most young people are happy to listen to new top 40 and chart music in which case each song sounds the same as the next one, here in Ireland anyway (myself excluded,) but while this is the case licensed stations will still stay popular, with their repetitive, commercial music policies. Ireland needs the pirates it has for the underground styles and that but yeah a new style would be really hard to come up with. Sorry went a bit off topic there.

[bristolpirates]

A new style might do it, but for it to revive pirates on FM it would have to have a scene around it that deliberately ignored the internet. No mp3s or files, no YouTube, no Soundcloud, no Mixcloud, only vinyl, FM radio and clubs.

[thewisepranker]

I think the Internet is to blame in some respects, but not due to the availability of streaming services such as YouTube or Soundcloud or Mixcloud etc. - more Spotify and Beatport ruining it. There are plenty of people happy to listen to the Radio 1 playlist in a different order on Spotify, and pay a lot of money for the pleasure of doing so. Those people are lost causes, and were long before Spotify existed. You know, the kind that would tolerate Heart "because there isn't anything else". I'm starting to think it's more of a cultural shift, what with the line between dance (or even "underground") and pop music being so blurred, I don't think most young people are even aware of the underground music scene, or pirate radio itself - if they are aware, they have no idea what it means. When I tell people that I play on a pirate station the general response that I get is something along the lines of:
"Go on, let's hear your radio voice"
"Did you do media studies at college/uni?"
"Don't the adverts annoy you?"
"What's a pirate station? Do you do it from a boat?"

I still see people driving around wearing those awful white Apple headphones, so the driving around whilst streaming doesn't really appear to have taken off. I tried it in my old car a while ago when I had a Bluetooth head unit (remember that - you could replace the radio in your car!) and it's a nightmare to change tracks or pretty much do anything as the first thing you've got to type in your four digit code without crashing. It wasn't a problem when my phone had a keypad!

[drumandbasshead010]

the spottify thing is a good point and also the fact about unawareness. Most of the people who listen to pirate radio now listened to it years back when acid house was turning into hardcore and hardcore was turning into jungle etc. As for a new style of music avoiding mp3s youtube etc, I think that would be technically impossible. even if the djs wouldn't put it on soundcloud or whatever the heads would. even the styles that were developed by pirate radio are on mixcloud and soundcloud now. For young people dance and pop yes are all in the one sort of category. I guess if the licensed stations played more underground those who get drawn to it will lock into pirate radio to hear more of it, in other words if underground was played in outlets young people would normally listen to (i.e. radio 1), they would be drawn to it. I mean how hard would it be to get a licensed station to play underground music?

[thewisepranker]

I don't think that the legals playing underground music would work. Even if they did decide to do it, imagine they did it at a non-graveyard hour, the younger generations (my generation included) wouldn't even know that the pirates existed. A few might really enjoy it and then go on a journey of discovery and find mention of perhaps this very forum... The culture these days is to subscribe to and pay for everything, and that's how it is.

An alarming number of younger (and some that wouldn't be considered quite so young any more) people don't have any idea what I'm talking about when I mention the station and a number between 87 and 108. They either ask what "channel" it is, how to find it based on the pretty comprehensive information that I've given them, or look at me blankly as what I've just said doesn't correlate with anything else that they understand. I have even had to have an argument with someone about how 100.00 was the same as 100 as I "didn't pronounce the .00 like I should". I think they remain unconvinced to this day.
The irony is, if you tell them the URL, they can deal with that with immediate effect, however they won't listen to it as it's an inconvenience that it uses their monthly data allocation, requires a Bluetooth head unit or one with an auxiliary input in the car (which the manufacturers like to charge around £500-1k for) and drains their phone battery. So, you provide a nice FM signal for them and they have no idea what it is.

I've said it before - in the society we live in, it is considered comical to not be able to multiply two numbers together.

[drumandbasshead010]

Yeah young people still listen to radio, but it's a sort of 'just when you're in the car' thing. I mean for them who take interest you have to convert 'rds' into 'the writing on the display'. But yeah the majority of younger people don't have a clue what pirate radio is. It seems apple with their new music system have decided to make yet another programme that will make them richer, and change the world for the worst.

[bristolpirates]

Radio specifically is affected by the internet. Radio was free music. Now, the internet is free music with the added bonus of you (not the DJ / station) choose what the music is in more detail.

I agree that it does look like a cultural shift is in play though, and it's more to do with the music industry and how they are making their version of everything to rival the real deal.

When you've got something that sounds like DnB, something that sounds like House, something that sounds like Indie, something that isn't really Hip Hop but has rapping in it, all in the charts - who needs the underground?

Funny how it was different in the 80s. When I heard Hip Hop and House starting to creep into the charts back then it made me dig deeper and find radio shows which played more stuff which I knew must exist but wasn't hearing, and that then lead to pirate radio. But I guess I was an exception even then, because there were maybe five of us in the whole year at school that didn't just put up with the charts.

Somehow, I just think it's more obvious now how most people don't dig for tunes, than it was when I was growing up.

[Albert H]

There is another approach:

Stations playing material that isn't otherwise available will be able to get an audience. Sadly, that audience is unlikely to be young. One genre that isn't covered at all in London is real Rock - not the pop crap that's played on Absolute, but the stuff that's been mainstream since the 1960s. There is a gigantic, high quality back catalogue which hasn't ever really been covered by any kind of radio - pirate or legal.

Back in the 70s and 80s, there were some rock pirates - RFL, RFM, Alice's Restaurant, Zodiac, LMR, Thameside (though that was a bit poppy), Bedside, Duck, Phoenix, Raiders, Electric, London Rock, HMR, and many more. The audience for these stations was huge - bigger than the soul boys ever got - and in those days, the band was emptier, the noise floor was lower, and you could cover most of London with as little as 50 Watts from a good site!

The audience for those stations has aged, and are now major consumers of on-line stations. These people still want intelligent programming with knowledgeable presenters who can talk coherent English. They are completely ignored on the FM dial, and the few "rock" stations on DAB are a sick joke. The people who used to run the stations listed above (most of whom I know and am still in touch with) have all ended up in legal radio around the world. The BBC don't serve them, the commercial companies don't serve them, and they have by far the biggest disposable income of all demographics (Kiss can't give away advertising because their demographic have no money to spend!). A station or two - done properly - could make a fortune!

The closed-shop broadcasting cartels in this country are happy to churn out the mindless pap that you hear on Crapital and Heart(less) because they can automate their stations, have the DJs "phone-in" their programmes ("voice-tracking" is now common), and run the whole mess for about £5 a week (plus their insane Licence fees). The audience don't complain, because they never had anything better, and they don't miss what they've never had!

It's not possible to get a licence any more. They've (pretty much) all gone. The restrictions placed on "community" radio are deliberately designed to make it uneconomical. The smaller stations like Time and Jackie begin as independents, but are swallowed up by the cartels when they run out of money (as they always will). The radio programmers looking at their RAJAR ratings (or whatever they're called nowadays) see a decline in audience and blame it on iTunes and Spotify. That's a small part of the story, but if they actually broadcast what people wanted to listen to, their audiences would rise massively.

The FM band in British cities is a mess. The BBC still cling on to their smeared national frequencies, leaving almost nothing for anything else. The BBC national frequencies were allocated in the 1950s, when domestic receivers had difficulty in discriminating stations within 2 MHz of each other.

Domestic radio technology has improved radically in the last 60 years, and there is no saner reason (except politics and stupidity) to spread the national FM stations across 70% of the dial. It would be perfectly possible (and require little re-engineering) to confine ALL the national stations to below (say) 93 MHz. Properly engineered, you could get seven or eight national stations in there.

The next bit of the band - 93 - 98 MHz - could be for "regional" stations, and everything above 98 MHz could be "local". Each city would have space for as many as 40 stations. DAB would not be worthwhile (or necessary), but could be allocated to "community of interest" stations, including all the religious crap that's polluting the airwaves, and the foreign language stations that OFCOM's so keen on.

Sadly, we have broadcasters who are only interested in their advertising revenue - programme-making is just an annoyance - and we have stupid, corrupt politicians who are not at all interested in radio (unless it's improving their public profile by getting on R4's Toady Programme). We have the useless (and corrupt) OFCOM, and we have a bunch of stupid, complacent listeners who don't understand that there could be something better.

British education was completely f**cked by the 1960's Labour introduction of the "Comprehensive" system. It was a Soviet-inspired plot to ensure that we'd have a stupid, compliant populace. If you're prepared to step outside the "norm" (like running a pirate station), the state slaps you down and makes sure that you're put back into your little box (or a jail cell in extreme cases). The last thing that either colour of British government wants are people smart enough to think for themselves!

The sociological changes in this country over the last few years - the arrival of political correctness, virtue signalling, radical Islam and all the rest - have gone a long way to ruining a once great country. We no longer stand up for ourselves (though Brexit might be an indication that things may change), and our media is thoroughly controlled.

Pirate radio shouldn't just be about kids playing their favourite records to other kids. It can be a voice for social change, encouraging toleration of things that should be tolerated, and rejection of behaviours and beliefs that divide us. In other countries, pirate radio has been a motivator for real political change, whereas in this country it's just seen as an interference-causing irrelevance!

[powerfull]

its not dead for us pmsl you lot must be doing something wrong

[drumandbasshead010]

its not dead for us pmsl you lot must be doing something wrong

where u from then?

[OldSkool99]

I personally radio changed the day I saw this post......

https://www.facebook.com/EvoandRST/post ... 1205529102

[FMEnjoyer]

FB and YT. Connect with people you vaguely know on FB and YT for tunes.. why do I need to tune into a pirate anymore. I type in genre xxxxxxx mixes or by DJ name and endless mixes and tunes appear from the entire planet with endless top tunes you never even heard of. There is little innovation in standard dance genres now so nothing new to hear really.

No overmodding hopefully and no gobsh*te shouting out to people you dont; know that is not compelling listening frankly. Ok no connection with the community wither but who is doing that these days anyway bar a few reggae stations ? As far as I am concerned until something new and or better happens in pirate radio it's done.