For a while this afternoon, I have had WLS (94.7 FM, Chicago) streaming in the background. Like most stations, they replace a lot of the on-the-air content with stream-only content. They play a lot of the same inane stream ads over and over again making it hard to listen for more than an hour.
Lots of stations do the same grating substitutions. If they continue, there will continue to be a market for competitors with fewer or no ads. These burglar alarm, vitamin supplement, and hormone replacement ads are insulting to anyone with an IQ over room temperature.
09-02-2012, 12:25 PM
sunkast
Pandora can be just as bad. Which is unfortunate because I really like their service. But hearing the same ad every few songs is annoying.
09-02-2012, 06:29 PM
mcphillips
Fred Winston was on WLS (AM) back in the seventies. He was always one of my many favorites. He's back on WLS (FM), and the station streams. As much as I like listening to Fred, I've already lost interest because of the ads and nonsense the station is inserting in the stream. That makes me sad.
09-03-2012, 06:14 AM
Donovan
It's sad to say, but nothing is truly free. They have to pay their costs somehow. For these online stations, a subscription model doesn't really seem to work all that well. Consider Pandora - I paid for Pandora One for one year. The cost per year wasn't that bad, but I didn't' renew it for the 2nd year. The reason? I didn't use it enough and the times I did use it, I was ok with an ad here and there. I guess the fact that I didn't listen to it several hours per day is what made the decision for me not to renew the paid service.
I'm not defending them by any means; I'm just saying I understand why they do what they do. Do they go overboard with the advertising sometimes? Yeah, probably - terrestrial radio, IMHO, has always done that. :)
