I was watching an episode of "Bar Rescue" with John Taffer some years back. In this one particular episode his recommendation to the bar owner was to get rid of the blues band, since only 2-3% of the bar going population wants to hear it. Can't remember if that was a general statistic, or just this particular area. This could help explain why there are so few blues radio stations.
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Why no Blues Radio Stations?
- Thread starter 51PRI
- Start date
Again, this thread was meant to be about regular radio stations, not internet radio.
There is a pretty good station in Edwardsville, Illinois that plays a mixture of blues and smooth jazz. I like to listen to it when I'm in that area.
My first memory of hearing and being excited about blues was from the first 3 or 4 Rolling Stones records, when I realized that they didn't write the songs and did a reverse search on the writers. That said, the pinnacle of blues awareness in America was probably during the SRV era, and immediately after. I think that's gone away now, except for the requests for "Pride & Joy."
YouTube has a ton of "whiskey & blues" live stream channels. Maybe radio isn't your best option.
When I “discovered” his music in the 90s I realized that as well.
Which is why it was even more baffling that he got little to no airplay.
By the later 90s he was on local classic rock stations, but when he was contemporary you just didn’t hear him around here. Despite him having chart hits.
Like no joke, that genre just doesn’t have any traction in some areas.
We had a VERY low power blues station in Springfield Missouri for a year or so. It appeared one day out of nowhere and unless you were inside the city limits, you weren't going to get it. It was around for a while and then one day it vanished. There were no commercials, no talking, no news, only the occasional break for the station name to be said "Blues (frequency). All blues, all the time." For the life of me I can't remember what the freqency was for it. I strongly believed then that it was a pirate station broadcasting illegally. Which would fit with how it appeared and its sudden disappearance.
Cave Puppy
"Humph Bo, he's wond!" - John Lennon
Love Joplin. I went through a similar experience with tennis.
As a lifelong Michigan resident, who grew up in Grand Rapids, went to school in Kalamazoo (WMU Grad), and now lives near Michigan's West Coast, I am familiar with a bunch of these stations. I still tune into WGVU 88.5 occasionally on Friday and Saturday nights. It is fun to hear the station plug upcoming shows for our local Blues Band.
For the Intraweb, besides Sirius XM (paid), also check out Pandora, they have some blues stations.
Satellite radio has several. My local NPR station has a blues show once a week that is pretty popular. I'd imagine that there are a couple places that have full time stations, but blues is pretty niche
In the early 00s the FCC opened a new license classification for low-power FM stations with a broadcast radius of a couple miles. So it could have been legal, just not sufficiently self-sustaining.
Maybe many people, after having immersed themselves in blues in the late 60s and early 70s, grew tired of a straight blues diet. I did. I think of the blues like a spice, good very now and then, sometimes, but not all the time.
And, it would be interesting to hear the occasional skiffle music, as a previous poster suggested.
Could we throw in a bagpipes number, just once a week?
And, it would be interesting to hear the occasional skiffle music, as a previous poster suggested.
Could we throw in a bagpipes number, just once a week?
I think most of the musicians I know like something about a broad list of genres. I didn’t realize how fun rag was until I got a little further along as a player.
Alkali Ike
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- Jan 1, 2011
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KRVM-FM has a total of 20 hours of blues programming 7 days a week. I think the show has 6 different hosts so there are diverse takes on what constitutes "blues".
https://krvm.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Program-Guide-2-1-21.pdf
https://krvm.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Program-Guide-2-1-21.pdf
Blues is like any genre - there are tons of simple tunes, and then there is the jazz/blues fusion which can be maddeningly complicated, switching back and forth from major and minor keys, and on-the-fly key changing. While my band bills itself as acoustic blues, we play some gypsy jazz, jazz, classic rock, classic bluegrass, a couple civil war tunes, country, soul, folk and Indie. Some of it is proprietary, but our fans dig our mix - including some great blues.
Yes the world has changed.
And technology has evolved where an individual, rather than a station (driven by marketing $$) that is driving a one-way broadcast where someone else chooses your programming and content for you… can select and choose, as the individual consumer, what you would would like to listen to. Choose your own adventure and listen to whatever YOU would like to listen to. Love this approach and and rarely subjected to FM programming anymore.
I have found some nice modern blues stations on Spotify (based on some artists they I like) and these are in my rotation when I’m in the mood to listen to blues.
And technology has evolved where an individual, rather than a station (driven by marketing $$) that is driving a one-way broadcast where someone else chooses your programming and content for you… can select and choose, as the individual consumer, what you would would like to listen to. Choose your own adventure and listen to whatever YOU would like to listen to. Love this approach and and rarely subjected to FM programming anymore.
I have found some nice modern blues stations on Spotify (based on some artists they I like) and these are in my rotation when I’m in the mood to listen to blues.
TL DR, (even the title of the thread): "Why no blues radio stations", not "where can I find blues on the web, pandora, sirius, or an hour blues radio show"
Alkali Ike
Gold Supporting Member
- Jan 1, 2011
- 2,854
- 15,665
- Disclosures
- I never actually learned to play very well
Radio has essentially become a cesspool of advertising for commercially benign music. Country: not really. Classic rock: heard it a million times. Blues: not big enough market. Classical: same, although tens of people listen to NPR's nation wide broadcasts which can be heard in some extremely rural areas on 3 different NPR stations at the same time, at the public's expense.
