Last week while reading this very newspaper, I was pleased to see the short piece on Nash FM - New York's new country music station. Why? Obviously I'm a fan of the genre, so it's great having such a station to listen to as I make my daily 45-minute commute to Seton Hall. But more than that, it's nice to see some actual variety in metro area radio programming.
My favorite types of music are rock and country, which means I don't have a wide selection of station options to choose from around New York. Nash is literally the only country station in the area. And as for rock stations, there are only three -WDHA, Q104.3 and Seton Hall's own WSOU.
But in flipping through the radio frequency, I hear plenty of stations playing pop, hip-hop, rhythm and blues, adult contemporary and talk. I even had to stop listening to one station after it was bought and turned into an FM simulcast of WFAN.
I know that I'm not the only rock and country fan in the metro area, and I know there are many followers of other under-represented genres like jazz, classical and alternative as well. There are definite niches in New York for those types of music.
Media corporations could be very successful if they would just take the risk and establish stations with those formats. Instead, they play it safe and provide programming that most of the other stations are also putting on the air.
I realize there are simple solutions to my grievance. I could just get Sirius XM or listen to stations from across the country on my computer.
But I don't want to pay all that money for satellite radio, and I only listen to music in my car, so those services don't help me. Nor should I need them. The New York radio market should never have gotten this saturated by the same programming - variety is a consumer necessity.
Sean Quinn is a junior journalism major from Cranford, NJ. He can be reached at sean.quinn@student.shu.edu.
