I am becoming more & more obsessed with radio. It started with NTS and lately has drove me into local Brooklyn stations and hunting down indie music that has been played on either on Bandcamp.

I’m very frustrated with the world of streaming platforms and the online slop that pushes 2% of artists 100% of the time. It upsets me that even “new” artists end up sounding the same, capped by tech companies chasing what they know will sell.

I put together a few thoughts about why radio stations, like Radio Free Brooklyn or NTS, have my support:

Actual human curation, not engagement optimization. Streaming narrows your taste over time!! Radio expands it. Every show is someone else’s music collection, not just a feedback loop of yours. EX: NTS has shows with Detroit rap from the 90s, baroque classical music from women composers, Ethiopian jazz, and so on… Algorithms are unable to appreciate taste and new sounds when they’re literally built to keep you near what you already like.

Archives and protects art scenes. NTS, Rinse, Refuge Worldwide, Resonance FM — these all document underground music in real time. Without them, entire genres go unrecorded. Even online pirate radio built jungle, grime, hyper-pop, UK garage. Spotify built none of those and can’t…

Place and community. Local radio is of somewhere!!

No AI slop. Radio doesn’t fill its schedule with fake AI artists or AI-generated mood vibe music. Every hour is a real person who chose every track. Deezer reported in early 2025: about 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks are uploaded per day that is 18% of daily uploads… Not to mention less than 20% of all recorded music ever made is on streaming platforms. We are losing so much access to music and discovery especially historical genres of music!

Free and open. Ugh this, there is no subscription, no bullshit ads, no data harvest. & it streams 24/7!

Resilience against enshittification. Spotify is a great target example for this. Spotify has hiked prices, drops grass-root playlist features, and is now flooding it’s algorithim with AI. It is an extractive model.

Music as culture, not for content. Radio treats songs as art worth talking about, with actual context and history. Streaming strips all that out and treats music as a means to an end. Art can’t flourish under these conditions.

Trains your attention. A 2-hour curated show is active listening that you can’t skip, or at least it’s hard to. Streaming playlists are designed to be ignorable, or skippable, causing you to use more time on their platform. The constant option to skip turns every track into a decision, this is a tiny friction that compounds into never sitting with anything unfamiliar. One makes you a listener, the other makes you a consumer.