Clinton murdered music in America while they grandstanded and took credit for the internet, a thing that was already fucking happening.
More people need to know about the TCA and the damage it is still doing to our media landscape. People think of it as just "oh the internet made all that obsolete so who cares" but don't realize how much that shift has been accelerated in part by the extremely rapid enshittification of the airwaves in the late 90s.
There's another great thread about this here: https://twitter.com/patchdj/status/1460294743435399175
I started high school in 1996, and watched real time as we went from a world where the Butthole Surfers could somehow get airplay, to a world where you might as well turn off the radio and turn on TRL, because it's the same tracklist, and it was all just whatever boy band or manufactured crapola the big labels were squeezing out. Everywhere. Even the classic rock stations track lists shrank and they started trying to slip newer songs in to grab more audience.
By the time I graduated, I had given up on the radio, given up on MTV, and just about given up on music. Piracy became a mainstay, I ripped CDs I got from friends, or the library or the discount stores, or just hit Limewire or whatever, because it was the only way to get music I actually wanted to hear. The only time the radio came on after about 2001 was during a brief Air America phase when I found myself stuck alone in an apartment without a computer.
I didn't really start following new music again until retro/synthwave blew up on Bandcamp and I actually even started buying tracks again.
I started high school in 1996, and watched real time as we went from a world where the Butthole Surfers could somehow get airplay, to a world where you might as well turn off the radio and turn on TRL, because it's the same tracklist, and it was all just whatever boy band or manufactured crapola the big labels were squeezing out. Everywhere. Even the classic rock stations track lists shrank and they started trying to slip newer songs in to grab more audience.
There was a three-month period in high school where I could walk out to my car at the end of the day with a particular Metallica song in my head and be synced up with it, often to the exact lyric, when turning on the radio.* I'm not saying this to refute the "it was all boy bands" notion, but to help illustrate that even the biggest rock station in the area with live DJs capable of independent thought was locked into churning the same 20 tracks Warner, Epic and SonyBMG wanted you to hear.
* Really. I was actually scared that I was becoming psychic for a minute.
There never really was a big boy band scene so most of the radio stations played contemporary and classic rock, hiphop, rap, and that weird white rap-rock mix that Kid Rock milked for twenty-five years. Most of the exposure to modern pop came through MuchMusic.
