Smoke On The Water

I've done precisely what I said I was going to do tonight, ie nothing. I've had a few beers, got fairly bored surfing the internet, exchanged a few messages with a few people, and so on. Very relaxing, very pleasant.

While I've been doing nothing, I've been listening, as I often do, to the radio station Planet Rock on my digital radio (which, despite what I'm about to say, is a very worthwhile gadget to own.) Planet Rock is a radio station which describes what it plays as the best rock from the 60's, 70's and 80's. Really? What it actually seems to be is all the obvious rock tunes from the 70's and 80's, with the odd obvious track from the later 60's and 90's thrown in as well. Together with patronising station idents which seem to suggest that to listen to the station you have to be considerably older than I actually am.

Don't get me wrong, I really, really like good rock music. I like the standards, those obvious tunes that Planet Rock play. But I like, when I occasionally get to hear it, some of the more obscure stuff too. And what really, really gets me about ALL radio stations these days is the limited play lists. Once I have listened to a radio station for a few days, I can pretty much work out what time of the day it is from what track is being played on the radio.

And this, I think, is one of the problems with the music industry at the moment. It's all too comfortable, cosy and predictable. Why are record companies allowing this to happen? I already own almost all of the tracks I like that PlanetRock play, so I'm not going to go out and buy them again. The same goes for the odd times I listen to other radio stations. Perhaps if the record companies invested a bit of the money they are spending chasing kids through the American courts for downloading MP3s on persuading radio stations to look outside their limited playlists they might actually start selling some records again.