Kids, I want you to take off your jetpacks, and step out of your flying cars for a minute. Come sit down over here, and let Old Man Wheaton tell you a tale of a time when television didn’t have a pause button, renting videos meant actually going to a store - during hours that they set - and listening to the radio meant hearing the same 27 songs every two and-a-half hours, with ten to eighteen minutes of commercials every 60 minutes.
Now, I realize that some of you think I’m just making this up to scare you, but it’s true. We didn’t have any control over how we got our entertainment back then. We couldn’t skip songs we didn’t like, and we couldn’t tell the radio how frequently it should play certain songs. It was a different time, when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them and the King of England would just show up at your house and expect you to make him a cup of tea.
Those of you who have grown up in a world where you have unprecedented control over your media (DRM, which is beyond the scope of this story, notwithstanding) may have a hard time believing that we who came before you would actually wait for a song we hated to go away, or sit through loud and obnoxious commercials and DJs because we knew a song we loved was coming up. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true; that’s just how the world worked back then, and we accepted it without question.
Oh, how the times have changed!
The change came to me in 2002, when I got my very first XM Satellite Radio. No longer was I limited to a handful of radio stations that all played the same basic playlist! When I drove out of major media markets, I was able to listen to more than just country and right wing talk radio! There were comedy stations! Old Time Radio stations! Eclectic stations that reached deep into the catalogs of everything from classic rock to jam bands to truly alternative music from the 80s. It was absolutely glorious, and I couldn’t believe that we ever listened to radio any other way. We all thought that it was too good to be true.
Last year, when XM merged with Sirius, we found out that it was too good to be true. Most of the stations I loved on XM, if they stayed on the air after the merger at all, became as repetitive and pedestrian as the ones that drove me away from FM radio so many years ago. It seemed like the programming departments (with a few notable exceptions - the decades remain great, and XMU and XM Chill seem to have been left alone) made the inexplicably stupid decision to simply recreate the unsatisfying FM radio experience that drove so many of us to become XM and Sirius subscribers in the first place. The talk stations are all the same, the DJs are interesting and many of them provide great nostalgic value, but radio is ultimately about listening to music, and what’s the point of paying for satellite, if it doesn’t offer anything substantially different from what we already get with our basic radios?
I recently wrote that years of listening to Pandora and using social news sites like Reddit had conditioned me to expect a greater amount of control over the information and entertainment that I consume. Being able to train a service to give me more of what I want and less of what I don’t isn’t a luxury; it’s a requirement.
One afternoon last December, after hearing “Eyes Without A Face” for the third time in five hours on a station that used to play great New Wave music, I looked at my radio and I said, “I wish I could train you like Pandora, so you’d stop playing this crap I can’t stand and play more of the music I like. What happened to you, man? You used to be cool!”
My iPod, sitting unused on the passenger seat, said, “hey, I’m right here, you know. I have all your favorite music, all ready to go.”
“That’s not the point, iPod,” I said. “I want radio. I grew up with radio. I’ve listened to radio my whole life. Radio is important to me, and you, iPod, are no radio!”
“I also don’t play a lot of music you don’t like, tough guy,” my iPod said, nonplussed.
“Touché,” I said. “Now, let’s stop talking before the people around me think I’m nuts.”
“They already think you’re nuts. You have a bumper sticker on your car that says ‘There’s no place like 127.0.0.1’. You frighten and confuse them. They’ve probably called the police already. Hey, speaking of The Police...”
That’s when I put my iPod into the glove box, kids.
As fate would have it, there was a Woot Off that day, and one of the items offered was the Slacker portable media player. I’d heard of it before, but I hadn’t paid especially close attention to it; after all, I had XM and my iPod. Why did I need something else? What did the Slacker portable media player offer that I didn’t have already? Well, after a bit of research I determined that, distilled to its most fundamental essence, the Slacker is like Pandora-on-the-go. It combines a web-based music player with a portable music player where all your ratings and custom stations are synchronized. I decided to take a chance, and bought one for myself.
