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July 20, 2001

I rarely use my thoughts to rant. But this is a situation that is getting worse and worse. Montreal is a large, diverse metropolitan city without a single decent radio station!

A lot of the problem probably had to do with the general lack of good music in general lately. The music industry has ignored individuality and creativity and churned out mass-manufactured, mass-produced, identical-sounding pop groups designed simply to make a profit. So naturally, lots of the same crap is floating around on the airwaves these days. That's a whole other issue and I've addressed it in the music section of this site and on my Anti-Packaged Music Website.

Despite this, however, decent radio stations do exist in practically every city in North America, except Montreal. At work, I listen to 106.9 the BEAR in Ottawa, and it plays a variety of new and classic rock. Basically, it's what CHOM used to be before it switched formats from rock to adult contemporary/ top 40. Toronto has a couple of stations, as does Vancouver, Calgary, and every American city from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta to Los Angeles. So why is Montreal so deficient?

One possible reason is that we have mostly French stations, so our English stations are limited in number. But of the three main English FM stations here (Mix 96, CHOM, and Q92), they ALL PLAY CRAP! Not only that, but each station has a playlist about the size of the list of names on Pierre Bourque's list of friends. In other words, they play the same ten to twenty songs over and over and over again, until they radio-kill the decent songs and kill their listeners with all the others.

Gone are the days when radio stations dared to be different, DJs dared to promote new or local music even if it wasn't on the playlist, and people actually listened to the radio to hear what was up-and-coming. Now, a radio station calling a song "new" is a joke, as it means the song is probably six months to a year old.

So why do the stations do it? Money, presumably. Top 40 and AC stations have the broadest appeal, resulting in higher rates for advertising. More advertising dollars equals higher profit and happy owners. And disgruntled listeners. Lots of disgruntled listeners.

What can we do about the situation? As individuals, probably not much. As a group, if we all banded together, we could make a difference . . . assuming enough people out there are upset by the situation. The problem is that lousy radio creates lousy taste in music among listeners. People who are exposed to crap get used to crap and even start liking it because it's all they know. There are so many people out there with lousy taste in music that those of us who are annoyed by the deteriorating quality of our radio stations are dwindling in number, to the point where we no longer have much of an impact.

I can only hope the trend reverses before it's too late. In the meantime, I suppose that's the reason I installed a CD player in my car.