14 February 2018
I have an obsession with radio, especially BBC Radio 1.
I’ve started listening to BBC Radio 1 since 2011. I’m listening from UTC+7 and UTC+8 time zones. Because of that, I can only listen to daytime radio shows. Greg James is my favorite, as he has more similar music taste to me. Some other shows that are okay: Alice Levine. Danny Howard’s Dance Anthems were great too. This show plays song remixes only, and for first hour or two, it was usually good, but after a while, you kinda sick of remixes.
First and foremost, you don’t have control over what is playing. This is a feature! The radio DJ will select one and play it for you. Like it or not, you must listen to it. There is no skip, rewind, or even replay button.
Occasionally, very good music could be played in the radio. BBC Radio has this feature so you could log into their website, and see what song is being played, and you could bookmark it. This bookmarked songs could be exported as a playlist to sites like Spotify, Deezer, and YouTube.
You got to keep up with contemporary pop songs. Since it is BBC Radio 1 we’re talking about, usually songs that got popular there hasn’t got popular in my circle yet. So I could be the first ones to know pop songs. How cool is that?
Another thing about UK is that, it is usually US music that got popular worldwide, and UK taste is a bit different. Sometimes, you could get some gems that only got popular in UK but not the rest of the world. This is really true with the case of Noah and the Whale with their 2011 album “Last Night on Earth”. Few singles from that album reached top 40 in the UK, but never hit the charts in my area.
Talking about charts, yeah, I used to be excited with UK’s Official Charts. I followed the charts around 2011-2013. This chart is quite special, because it only consider song sales and not radio play count. More recently, they incorporated stream counts from Spotify, Deezer, etc.
And the best thing about BBC Radio? THERE ARE NO ADS!!!! Since BBC is publicly funded by the UK people, they don’t have ads in their radio streams :)
Update: 18 March 2018: Okay, this post has been stuck at draft for more than a month and I have no idea what to add now. So, I’ll just publish it now :P