Radio Exclusive

Technology is all about instant gratification. In this modern world, you pretty much have access to anything, antime, anywhere. Gone are the days of waiting for the newspaper in order to get yesterday’s baseball scores, or having only one chance to watch a television show until it appears months later in reruns.

Music has been similarly affected. I used to own what seemed like millions of CDs. Some of them were good from start to finish, but too many had only a few good songs, and the rest was filler. This made it annoying to listen to them, because you’d have to either listen to the entire album, while cringing at the bad stuff, or just pop it in, listen to the two good songs, and then pop it out five minutes later.

Now, however, I can pick and choose what I want to buy, down to the individual song, and it all goes on an iPod, where I can pick and choose which songs I want to listen to, whenever I want to, with all of the filler already excluded. It’s all at my fingertips. No more clutter. Instant gratification.

But there’s a small exception to this, and it’s a wonderful exception.

You see, there’s a small window of time from when a debut single for an album comes out to when it’s available for purchase on the internet. In that timeframe, the only real place to hear it is on the radio, and, for that short while, you have no control over when you’ll be able to listen to it.

At times this seems annoying, but isn’t that how you want it to be? Put it this way: When is a song the most fresh and exciting? When it first comes out, of course. Add onto that the fact that you don’t have instant access to it, and it makes it incredibly enjoyable when it does come on the radio.

(Plus, you may not even be able to listen the entire song. You could switch over from another station and just catch the very end, which is probably worse than not hearing it at all. Better luck next time!)

This only applies to the first single off of an album, making it a rare event. By the time the second single has been released the album is normally already for sale, and, if you like the artist, you’ve already purchased it and heard the “new” song. So, you really only get this chance for a radio-exclusive song once an album.

Take the song ‘Old Alabama’, by Brad Paisley. It’s actually the second single off of an upcoming album, but the album still hasn’t been released. I really dig the song, and what’s fun about it is that it’s not on my iPod, so the only time I get to hear it is on the radio in my car. So, for the time being, it’s quite elusive, and that makes it that much more enjoyable when I do actually hear it. Up goes the volume. The window may roll down. I may even have to help out with the vocals a little.

Soon I’ll have the ability to purchase the song, which I’ll do with several greedy clicks of the mouse. Then, a short time later, it have been lost amidst the sea of music on my iPod. Sure, it’ll still be fun to hear, but not nearly as much so as hearing it on the radio when that was the only place where it was available.

It kind of makes me want to go for a drive.