The Good ... ahem ... Bad Old Days: Radio Stations

Having lived through the transition to the digital age, every once in awhile, I am struck by how much different ... and most times better ... aspects of everyday life are now than they were just a mere twenty plus years ago.

I will attempt to convey my feelings on those from time to time. Today's realization was about radio stations. Nowadays, if you hear a song you like, many of you can simply check the handy-dandy digital display of the device streaming your radio station to see the name of the song and the band performing it. Very nice when you hear a new song you like and you'd like to hear again. Me likey ... very much.

When I was a kid (and no, I'm not about to regale you with tales of walking to and from school uphill in both directions that would lead you to believe that, by the time I graduated school, I surely must have lived in some sort of angelic villa located in the heavens because nobody could consistently walk uphill that much and still be earthbound), radio was so much different. For starters, my first car only had an AM radio (it's okay ... you may gasp at the horror of it all). That meant news radio and talk radio, maybe a pop station if you were lucky. But where was a hard rock junkie like me to get music from? I couldn't afford a car stereo at first, so I settled for an FM converter. That was a little piece of junk that let me get FM stations and a lot of static through my AM radio. It sucked.

When I hit my early twenties, I was finally able to buy a car stereo (and there was much rejoicing ... trust me). Now I could make cassette tapes (CDs came a short time later, but it was years before I could burn one) to listen to my favorite music in the car because I found, with very few exceptions, that the FM stations played the same songs over and over (read that as the Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones). Hell, they even had Fab Four weekends when they would advertise that that was what they were playing!

My only true happiness was over the weekends when the college radio stations would play real heavy metal and hard rock (and of course, there was the MTV Headbangers Ball on Saturday nights, too).

But I digress, the true revelation this morning was due to the fact that in 'the old days', when you heard a new song on the radio that you liked, you had to sit through blocks of music until the DJ came back on the air to announce the songs that had been played. This invariably meant listening to songs you didn't like - you didn't dare change the station because that surely meant the DJ would cut in with the information.

Nowadays, even if your listening device doesn't display the name of the song, you can note the time and go to the radio station's website to look up the artist and name of the song that they were playing at that time. Do you have any idea how great that is? Do you know how many times I would not have been late for work or class if we'd had that back then?

So, new innovations in radio/web technology? Frozen Beans! (That's cool beans +++)