By Jesse Walker (from March's RBR/TVBR Solutions Magazine)

The next time you're surfing the Web, look for some of those sites where people post what they've loaded onto their iPods. A fellow named Scott Dunlap has a playlist just for when he runs marathons; the tracks range from Metallica to early Michael Jackson.

Lee Long's list has room for both Andrew Lloyd Webber's sugary show tunes and the gritty gospel of the Blind Boys of Alabama. One anonymous iPodder has posted a playlist that stretches from Frank Sinatra to Depeche Mode.

Some bloggers like to play a game where they generate random playlists from their collections and post them online. One of them discovered the nu metal rockers Limp Biscuit segueing into the late reggae godfather Bob Marley. Another found himself hearing a George Carlin routine followed by a Snoop Dogg rap.

That last combination makes a perverse sort of sense: Carlin has the soul of an angry rapper, and I understand that he and Snoop have smoked some of the same illicit herbs. But outside of a freeform community station or a low-watt college outfit, you'd never hear that segue on the air. Not on any of the regular formats, and not on one of those "Jack" stations that pride themselves on allegedly sounding like an iPod shuffle either. It's too individual, too unplanned: It's geared to the eccentric tastes of one particular listener, not to any familiar demographic. You can't replicate that with research, no matter how hard you might try-and given that you'll want to have an audience much larger than one, you probably wouldn't want to do it anyway.

---

That's the trouble I have with the Jack format. I don't own an iPod, but the iTunes on my Macintosh is filled with stuff a commercial radio programmer would find wildly incompatible: Charlie Rich and Funkadelic, Millie Jackson and Spike Jones, Osymyso and Duke Ellington. I'm a man with very eclectic tastes. Yet when I listen to my local Jack operation, I'm almost always bored-most of the songs don't appeal to me, and they don't usually sound all that different from each other either. BusinessWeek's Burt Helm summed up the problem pretty well. After listening to a Jack station in Denver, he wrote that "most often a vaguely familiar '80s pop song would collide with a sort-of-familiar '70s rock ballad. Somewhere, surely, a standard-format programming executive was going into a cataleptic fit. To my ears it was neither that jarring nor interesting." Indeed, "It often felt like I was listening to the soundtracks of several car commercials in a row."

Now, there may well be a market for that. In some cities one clearly exists. But the format is not going to do what so many people in the radio industry clearly hope it will do. It's not going to lure back the listeners who've been lost to iPods, virtual jukeboxes, and all the other media that can profitably serve a demographic of one. Even if iPod-lite is an improvement over ordinary broadcasting, it still can't beat an actual iPod. The way to compete with technologies that threaten to replace radio is to do what they can't do, not to emulate them poorly.

The last time I made that argument was as a guest on the wryly titled San Francisco-based podcast No One's Listening. After my segment was over, another guest-Bill Conway of the soft-rock station KOIT-took issue. "They say the iPod's gonna kill radio," he argued, "but we have a lot of people spending hours every day programming the radio station, and it's hard work. While most people will use iPods, I think commercial radio's still going to be there because it's easier to let somebody else do it." I think Conway overlooks the extent to which people can let somebody else do it without turning on the radio, simply by trading files and playlists online. But I basically agree with him: There are things that an iPod or a virtual jukebox can't do, and radio stations can attract an audience by doing them.

Unfortunately, some of the most potent tools at radio's disposal have gone MIA.

Let me speak up for one of those tools. How about bringing back the disc jockey? Technically, I realize, the DJ never went away. There are still voices on the radio that introduce what you're about to hear and, if you're lucky, that tell you what you were listening to a few minutes ago. Sometimes the person speaking is actually there in the studio as you listen to him in your car. But aside from a few creative outlets scattered around the country-Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles, KPIG in Freedom, California-you aren't going to hear a knowledgeable jock who picks (or at least plays a role in picking) his own music. Someone who knows how to mix old records and new ones, classics and obscurities, songs that obviously fall into a station's genre and left-field choices that fit in unexpectedly. Someone who has a personality that's made for the intimacy of radio, a knack for introducing people to records they'll probably like, and a sense of how to experiment without turning people off. Someone, in short, who treats music the way a good talk show host treats the news of the day.

That's something you'll never get from an iPod on shuffle. You can get it from radio, but most music stations don't bother to provide it anymore. Radio is a medium with unique strengths -why not use them instead of burying them?

Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine and author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press, 2001).