LA Alternative Station Indie 103.1 Off The Air Today 0
Yet another harbinger of the impending arockalypse
Well, apparently there isn’t an audience for independent or alternative music in Los Angeles, the birthplace and breeding ground of a significant portion of the nation’s entertainment products. I don’t know how Nielsen monitors ratings on the radio but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t enough people in the hipster capital of the world to keep one goddamn alternative station running. Sadly, my own disbelief doesn’t change the fact that we are now officially back in the Stone Age where pay-for-play buttrock and disingenuous, pussy-begging R&B are the only alternatives.
The official word from the station’s programmers is this:
This is an important message for the Indie 103.1 Radio Audience -
Indie 103.1 will cease broadcasting over this frequency effective immediately. Because of changes in the radio industry and the way radio audiences are measured, stations in this market are being forced to play too much Britney, Puffy and alternative music that is neither new nor cutting edge. Due to these challenges, Indie 103.1 was recently faced with only one option — to play the corporate radio game.
We have decided not to play that game any longer. Rather than changing the sound, spirit, and soul of what has made Indie 103.1 great Indie 103.1 will bid farewell to the terrestrial airwaves and take an alternative course.
This could only be done on the Internet, a place where rules do not apply and where new music thrives; be it grunge, punk, or alternative - simply put, only the best music.
For those of you with a computer at home or at work, log on to www.indie1031.com and listen to the new Indie 103.1 - which is really the old Indie 103.1, not the version of Indie 103.1 we are removing from the broadcast airwaves.
We thank our listeners and advertisers for their support of the greatest radio station ever conceived, and look forward to continuing to deliver the famed Indie 103.1 music and spirit over the Internet to passionate music listeners around the world.
So as a small consolation, Indie 103.1 will still exist on the Internet, where likely no one will listen to it. Whoop-de-doo. There will be no more Steve Jones, no Henry Rollins, no punk rock blocks, no unheard music from overseas, no great local bands and no genuinely new music on our radios from now on. The music industry will likely suffer as a result, as interest in many of the more independent offerings will dwindle without the much-needed exposure, causing record sales to plummet further. You can only sell so many f**king copies of Death Magnetic.
Eat all the dicks, KROQ.
I’m not really sure what the overall significance of this is, culturally speaking. Are the critics so far removed from the public that what they (the critics) consider good just sounds like egghead shit to the common listener? Have people just completely abandoned the radio altogether? Is The Offspring or T.I. played 10 times in an hour really more satisfying in some way than hearing a really good new band once an hour? Do people prefer familiarity to originality, and if so, is that really all that unusual?
I’d like to think that people generally want to be challenged and excited by new experiences, but I’m continually proved wrong every time another “Scary/Epic/Superhero/Date Movie” sequel makes 500 million at the box office, every time a new season of American Idol gets even better ratings than the last, and every time U2 breaks sales records with a new album that, while heavily marketed, is only mediocre. Do the commercials exist to support the product or does the product exist merely to support the commercials?
Unfortunately, the demise of Indie 103.1 provides a simple and irrefutable answer to that question. See you in hell, Indy.
