Radio Drama as we Knew it

When reading this week’s article, I felt as if I was reading something extremely outdated. While I saw that the article was written in 2014, I realized that all the quotes used were taken from the late 2000s, a time in which technology had not progressed nearly as far as it has today.

Also at that time, radio, and the BBC, were much more important to society in relaying audio drama. At a time where ITunes charged a certain amount of money for songs and/or podcasts, radio drama was the other alternative to listen to new and free music, as well as talk shows, through ‘live radio.’

However, several years later, the radio industry has taken a backseat role to newer forms of music listening. Some of these newer forms include Pandora, SoundCloud, and Spoitfy. With these new forms of listening, everything that had once attracted listeners to radio drama can now be accomplished with fewer interruptions and the listener can even choose what songs they want to hear at any given time. Radio drama is simply outdated.

So that gets us back to the BBC. Why would this corporation want to invest money in something that will not provide positive return to them? They too have surely noticed these trends and it is reflected by their scheduling, something that is mentioned in the reading. While it may provide certain limitations to practitioners for radio drama, it benefits the BBC as a whole. They have realized that they simply cannot compete with the newer music listening ‘apps’ and still profit from the competition; so simply put, they don’t.

While I feel as if the article is defending radio and audio drama, it actually supports what I just mentioned. At one point it says, “in radio drama there has been no fringe” when referring to the BBC’s policy on scheduling. Later, the article reads, “Change has been the subject of philosophical meditation throughout human history.”

With these quotes, one should be able to conclude that audio drama and the “creativity” that it provides has shifted to a new and improved version of music listening; more specifically, SoundCloud. This app provides the listeners with new, creative genres of music with several up and coming artists expressing their creativity. With this being well-known to the general public, artists that would previously look towards audio drama instead choose to advertise their craft through SoundCloud, in this example.

If one is still skeptical about my stance on radio drama as being outdated, simply follow this link to an image search on Google of “radio drama.” If this is done, one will see a majority of the pictures displayed in black and white. If this isn’t a clear sign that technology has propelled creativity in music in a different direction and left radio drama in the past, I don’t know what will be.

With this being said, radio and audio drama, as well as the BBC, were monumental in the advancement of music and the ability to offer new, creative practitioners, to music lovers. However, with the light-speed nature of the growth in technology, radio drama simply could not keep up. While it will may remain popular for a select number of listeners, radio drama will be left on the backburner as an expensive, unprofitable mean of audio drama that sadly has a dying audience.

(creativity of the title is created by using the past tense use of the verb "know")