Listening to the local collage radio during my teens was formative, and the exposure to all kinds of things I would have never had heard otherwise still heavily colors my musical taste to this day.

Most of the time songs were played randomly from a huge list, there were no “hits”, and this was exactly what I wanted.

If there was a song I liked, I had to quick record it to tape, because otherwise I likely wouldn’t hear it again for days or weeks.

There would at times be people DJing for time segments, but it was relaxed and music focused, not person focused. I’ll take some dead air and a soft spoken young adult just giving the name of the next song vs bombastic “personalities” any day.

Another big key to it, was my college radio station didn’t have advertisements. Radio ads are grating and repulsive and I simply cannot tolerate that shit. Same thing with TV ads, which is a big reason I basically stopped watching TV in my late teens as well.

I cherish and miss the radio experience that I personally had, but when I hear what others subject themselves to I simply cannot fathom why.

These days my tastes are mostly adjacent to doom or psych-rock, and my modern day radio replacement is following some curators on YouTube whose hobby/side job is to find new releases in these genres and dig up old gems. Which makes it easy for me to quickly find and add (mostly through Bandcamp) new songs into my own collection every so often, which I then self host and further rate/curate via navidrome.

Basically I’ve always been a very active, rather than passive music enjoyer.

I suppose anything thing to bring up, is if I was listening to people on the radio doing something interesting, then I end up either needing to be randomly cut off from it to do something else, or try to constrain my schedule to their show. Not fun at all.