When did radio become irrelevant to you?

1) 1984 was a tough year, I got so sick of hearing the songs from Born in the USA on the radio all the time.
2) Around 1990 I had accumulated about 100 records and 20 cd's, simultaneously my 12 year old Pioneer receiver gave up the ghost, so no more listening to radio at home.
3) About mid 2005 the narrow programming on all radio formats finally drove me away for good.

Except for....KCSM jazz radio station in the Bay Area. I'll listen to that cool, listener funded station, any time I can get a signal in my car.

 

As a boy of 12 growing up in a suburb of Montreal , Canada we had only 2 English language radio stations. One was the local CBC station and the other was CFCF who claimed to be "Canada's first radio station" Neither played rock and roll in that year of my rock awakening, 1960. A Fench radio station with the call letters CKVL began broadcasting a nightly 1 hour show loosely translated as the "American Hit Parade". Ahe, the pleasure of hearing the likes of Presley, Domino, Lewis and all of those marvelous doo wop groups. The following Christmas, Santa brought me a crystal radio. Can you imagine the joy of hearing WBZ in Boston and the various stations in New York? Later on, I received one of the earliest transistor radios, a Sony. It could pick up stations like WLS in Chicago and countless other stations in the USA. I had countless sleepless nights listening to the wonderful DJ's of the era. Ah, I can still here those great artists and recordings. Radio became irrelevant to me when disk jockeys ceased to be personalities

 

It was about 2000. I had been losing interest since about 1994, but by 2000, even the alternative stations were sounding stale. It's like they tried to make everything sound like Blink 182.

 

I would say my listening to radio has been sporadic over the past several years. I have fond memories of listening to KAAY from Little Rock as a kid, then KSTM in Apache Junction a few years later. More recently I have enjoyed KSCL, a local college station, until their signal became too weak to listen to following a storm a few months ago. I do still enjoy listening to BBC radio 2 online on weekends and my car radio is usually set to the local NPR.

 

I forgot to mention that another reason why radio became errilavent to me: in my opinion rock music pretty much died when Incense and Pepermints by the Strawberry Alarm Clock was released.

 

Same here. Everything by 1999 was promoting that severely overcooked "Cowla'fornyah" crap on the vocals brought by Turd Eye Blind and pushing it on top of the music. Alongside it was the "Eddie Vedder For The Trailer Park" bands - Creed, Days Of The New, Lifehouse and others with their "Err-merra-gerrd-werff-legz-ride-errpen".

Linkin Park came along with their monotonous "I was a geek back then, but now I'm cool, depressed and damaged" with some tool screaming "DAMAAAAAGED, I AM SO NOW COOOO-AWOOL!" in the background...

...and that nailed the eff'ing coffin shut with additional nuts and bolts.

The Killers a few years later and a few other groups gave me some hope, but that was wrecked before it really took off.

 

It is really weird to tune into KROQ in LA in 2014 and hear a trio of songs played that they would usually play in 1993 when I was in high school.

 

The only thing I've ever used a radio for is Howard. As far as I'm concerned, that's the only reason it exists and the only thing it's good for.

 

I grew up listening to the radio in Phoenix. By the time I was 10 or so I never missed Casey Kasem's weekly Top-40 countdown. But early MTV made radio seem kinda boring - MTV was actually a lot more adventuresome in what it would play than any single radio station in Phoenix, and it typically only played new stuff in those early days. So I think that's when I first started drifting away from radio, realizing it was becoming irrelevant. Also, my growing record collection - and copies of stuff from my uncle's massive library - became accessible on cassette via my kickass Sony WM-10 Walkman, which was as small as a tape case and went with me everywhere for a few years. I had my own radio station - I didn't need any other.



Of course, by the late '80s MTV had turned to complete crap, but radio unfortunately wasn't much better. I still listened to the radio, but not very much - it was mostly my own CDs by that point, on my Discman. When I finally got a car with a tape deck and a radio I started listening to the radio a bit more, and I'd wake to a clock radio, but radio was pretty dire in the late '80s and very early '90s. On TV I aged into VH1, which like MTV was actually pretty good in its early days, before it became the "Behind The Music" channel.

At this point it was '93 or so, and we got one of those new adult-alternative channels in town - the kind that would spin the occasional Joni Mitchell track alongside new offerings from Everything But The Girl, Crash Test Dummies or k.d. lang. That was hit-or-miss, but at least it wasn't idiotic. But now I was down to essentially one station on the dial that didn't make me want to trash the radio with a sledgehammer...

When I moved to San Francisco in '95 I honed in on the local version of the same format - KFOG - and listened to that most mornings on the clock radio, my only radio exposure for the next decade or so. On relocating to Los Angeles in '03 I found the local morning radio so obnoxious I finally gave up on it completely and purchased a Philips clock radio with a built-in CD player. I started waking up to my new Nina Simone's Finest Hour CD instead.

So that's when radio finally drove me away for good, a little over a decade ago. I've probably listened to the radio less in the subsequent decade than I would have in a single week when I was a teen. Like the record business, radio has nothing but itself to blame for its demise.

 

Still listen everyday. My kids have Capital on in the morning (top 40 stuff). The missus puts 6Music on at the weekends. Other than than its Radio 4 usually.

 

Well pardner, I ain't listening to the stations most folks would and I don't care about being relevant. I alternate by listening between a few different radio stations; a classic country AM station with 50s/60s/70s/80s country, a blues/r&b program on college radio, a jazz program on college radio and the occasional libertarian talk radio program, which isn't as fun as the music of course.

 

When they got away from the wonderful variety that they used to broadcast back in the day!

Radio used to be a joy to listen to, nowadays it's just the absolutely terrible top 40 repeated over and over again.

 

I'd say it happened at some point in the early 2000s. Most of my favorite DJs were either getting fired, retiring, or dying off. At the same time, stations where automating their playlists via Mp3 files. The last gasps of personality and originality were leaving the biz, via the rubric of "efficiency."

As opposed to the era when a cool local DJ could actually make a song into a local (or eventually national) hit. See also Bob Seger's song "Rosalie."

 

Radio 4 is (as Boomers would say)"Da Bomb", but I think OP means music radio.

 

I still think radio is relevant. Is TV relevant?
I was on Maui recently and I picked up a really good modern rock/alternative station that I spent many hours listening to as I was driving around the island.
Also where I reside we have a classic rock station, oldies rock/pop station and a really great alternative rock station. I think radio is a great thing to have on when you are moving around. Maybe because I'm not much of a couch potato.
And I love music, so I am still ga ga over radio! [See if anyone gets this - lol]

 

Since I was a young teenager in the 80s. It was obviously growing more formulaic, less adventurous with each passing year. With the exception of some cooler college radio stations, I've never looked back and don't regret it one bit.

 

I still listen to AM talk radio, but as far as music, I was done (for the most part) when burning your own CD's became something that mere mortals could afford. I could fit a heck of a lot more music on a CD, and they took up less room than cassettes. When it became feasible to hook up an iPod to my car's head unit, that was pretty much it as far as radio music listening.

 

It didn't become irreverent to me. I listen to talk radio often.

 

I stopped listening in the late '80s , mainly because of my own ever-growing music collection.

 

I still listen to FM radio in my car - usually WDCB for Jazz or WPWX for Hip Hop.

So I guess it's still relevant for me.

As for Rock Radio - that died some time in the early '90s.

 

1985.

 

Mostly since I first got a CD player in my truck for the first time back in 1987. I would still listen to public radio and Tejano stations if I was still driving in Texas, like I often did when living in Oklahoma. The last time I was there sometime in 2010, Texas still had a vibrant local music scene that made it's way onto public radio rather frequently.

 

To many commercials.

 

Rock radio became irrelevant some time in the early 90's, when I both jumped off the rock train for most of the decade AND it became a playlisted, automated bland buffet. I switched to public radio for classical music and AM-talk radio for politics. I bailed on both of those in the last 10 years or so, mainly because every time I turn on my public radio station it's something other than music, and AM-talk radio has become a theater of people with personality problems - sometimes the host, and almost always the callers!

 

I pretty much gave up both on listening to music on the radio and to buying singles around 1973. Got into both through the 80s, and have recently started listening to BBC Radio 2 in the evenings. Love Paul Jones' weekly Rhythm and Blues programme.

So radio is still relevant to me, but in a different way.