Wednesday February 15, 2006

The Future of Rock and Roll?

There’s been a fair amount of chatter about a new study from the Columbia University Music Lab that finds that “social influence affects decision-making in a market” when people choose what music they listen to. Who finds this surprising? More importantly, what sort of radically atomistic view of personal taste do you have to start with to find it surprising? Oh, probably something like the precious hipster delusion that musical choices are somehow the purest and least commodified expressions of our innermost selves. Of course taste is social, and thank goodness.

WOXY in Oxford, Ohio—the radio station that helped raise me when I was growing up in northern Kentucky—is trying out an interesting model for keeping its online operations going. (The station stopped broadcasting in 2004.) It’s signing up paying members in the hopes of becoming listener supported.

97X, which went so-called alternative in 1983—long before Clear Channel and company began marketing the format ten years later—had as much to do with my becoming a writer (and eventually moving to New York) as anything. (The photo of a vintage 97X sticker above comes from a cracked skateboard deck I still own.) Listening from a stalled, post-war suburbia where Zeppelin and Rush ruled, the station cracked my head open to new music and to new possibilities in books, magazines, movies, politics, and life. Was my “life saved by rock ‘n’ roll,” like Lou Reed says? Maybe. But only because taste is social. I was just lucky to fall in with a good crowd.

Posted by jim at 04:22 PM ||