Radio has no interest in music. It is in the advertising business. The record industry has no interest in music. It is in the business of selling pieces of plastic. It is a gigantic machine, almost entirely owned now by international conglomerates, whose only purpose is to accrue profits. It is indifferent to what is on its plastic discs, except insofar as it induces the undiscriminating to buy them. It virtually ignores the discriminating audience because the undiscriminating are so much more numerous.—Gene Lees, The Modern Rhyming Dictionary.
Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time,
“regardless whether we want to hear it,” it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don’t know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can’t tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.‗Milan Kundera, Ignorance
Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.—Herbie Hancock