I am Jack’s stunned surprise

I don’t drive so much anymore. I sold my car more than a year ago, and now, when I need to get somewhere mass transit can’t take me, I use a Zipcar. Or I’ll rent a car the traditional way for a weekend away. I don’t miss car ownership one tiny bit... except for the fact that I don’t listen to the radio anymore. That’s something I used to do in the car, and only in the car.

But I don’t really miss that, either. We’ve got an awesome university station from Fordham here in the Bronx, but the commercial radio in NYC pretty much sucks. Who wants to hear the same damn Goo Goo Dolls song every hour, interrupted only by Jessica Simpsons crap and idiotic DJs and endless damn commercials? Not me... though I still can’t help but turn on the radio if I’m tooling around doing grocery shopping in my Zipcar. And so I was stunned when, on a recent weekend, one of the local corporate goose-steppers was playing Hall & Oates and Van Halen and Huey Lewis and Joe Jackson -- a whole bunch of cool stuff that brought me right back to high school -- as well as older cool stuff. Damn: they played a Carly Simon song. It sounded more like the Fordham U. station than anything I’d heard on commercial radio before -- they were barely even playing any ads, it seemed.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d stumbled across the new so-called Jack format that’s popping up all over U.S. radio markets. This particular station was only doing it for the weekend before going back to their "all Goo Goo Dolls, all the time" format, but I bet they switch over entirely eventually, and soon. Because I knew the instant I heard this eclectic mix of tunes that it was a desperate reaction to the competition corporate radio is facing from iPods, satellite, and cable, all of which offer more selection and more control. (My digital cable at home offers something like 40 commercial-free channels of all kinds of different music -- I’ve usually got the Big Band & Swing channel on while I’m writing.)

Not that Jack is gonna save radio. Plenty of people can’t stand Jack, and justifiably so -- it still cannot replicate the genuine eclecticism of a real music lover’s CD or MP3 collection. And Jack has no more personality than the more-limited playlist its replacing -- I’d still rather listen to an interesting and knowledgeable DJ who is allowed to put together an engaging and diverse playlist, who’s allowed to play stuff for a reason other than "this new cloned boy band is on a label owned by the same corporate overlord as this station."

And satellite is making greater inroads. USA Today is reporting that automakers are starting to offer new-car buyers a choice of either XM or Sirius equipment in their new cars. (This VHS/Betamax type competition in proprietary hardware can’t last forever -- satellite radio will really take off when the same equipment can pick it all up... but that’s another discussion entirely.) Reuters is reporting that BBC Radio 1 will soon be listenable over Sirius... and if you’ve ever heard some of the spectacular offerings BBC Radio broadcasts, you know to be excited about this.

The narrowcasting and the niche programming we’ve gotten used to on the Web and thanks to toys like MP3 players are the cause of this -- people know there’s an alternative to corporate "entertainment," an alternative that’s hardly "alternative" in the sense of the word we’re used to. "Alternative" doesn’t mean "cult" anymore: it means "I’m damn sick of being told what I’m supposed to enjoy." And maybe radio will be forced back to its roots as a means of truly local broadcasting, one whose content isn’t dictated by MBAs in another city. Wouldn’t it be cool if we geeks brought corporate radio down to our size? It seems we’re halfway there already.