black stations, white stations
My brother and sister live in Asia and Europe, so I started making them mixed CDs with current Canadian music, so that they would have some idea of what was going on at home.
For up-to-date music that my siblings wouldn’t have heard before, I found myself flipping between two stations, in order to get both the Avril Lavigne and the Kardinal Offishall sides of things. (I didn’t want anything from community radio stations, I did used to volunteer at CHRY; I wanted my siblings to be up-to-date, not 20 years ahead of their time!)
However recently I stumbled across the Martha and the Muffins website, and saw the words for Black Stations White Stations, and… realized that’s pretty much what we still have in Toronto, 20 years later.
In comparison, Kiss 98.5 in Buffalo will play white and black pop artists pretty much back to back. In Ireland, Shannonside FM plays music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and present day, the music generations side-by-side just as multiple generations are at a holiday family gathering. Driving around counties Roscommon and Galway, both me, my sister, and our parents were happy enough with the music mix; there was a little something for everyone, and I got to hear my parents’ music, without them having to make a mixed CD, as John Mayer recently asked his dad to do in his Esquire column.
Presumably Kiss 98.5 and Shannonside make money; hopefully in Toronto someday we will see commercial radio stations that don’t have such narrow slices of music on offer as they do now.
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so true so true. for a kid in his twenties who loves listening to oldies music, i end up having to tune into AM stations which i hate. theres no bloody FM station in this town which plays good oldies music. sometimes when im near oakville or further west of there, i end up tuning into buffalo’s 104.1 which plays decent oldies. other than that, its useless. my only other FM fix is q107 which im getting rather sick of. john derringer is annoying and ignorant. they repeat the same music on a daily basis. its the same deal, rush, stones, guess who and thats about it. oh yeah, dont forget the fifteen times in a day that they play sweet home alabama.