KNDD has been running spots where Mike Kaplan is soliciting listener input. I wish I could say I was optimistic about anything good happening because it seems to me it’s just gone downhill the last few years.. Now Harms is leaving.
I enjoyed about Lazlo’s time there because he went out of his way to get the audience involved in the station. The Alki Beach House gave people a chance to get to know both artists and the on-air personalities face to face and it added a lot of excitement to the station.
DJ No-name was another person who was really good at getting the audience involved and creating community.
They seemed a lot less prone to censorship in those days, songs tended to have a better chance of being played unneutered. The emphasis on independent artists seemed stronger than today.
Automation used to be reserved for the wee early morning hours, which if there is any place for automation, that would be it. These days, people have portable MP3 players, smart phones, mp3 players on their computers, etc. If they want automatic music they can program their own selection to their specific tastes without commercials, so why should they want to listen to automation that is hit-n-miss as far as their musical taste is concerned, interrupted by commercials, and with audio quality that is generally crushed and inferior to what they can get from their player?
Which brings up another of my complaints, The End’s audio quality has also gone down hill in the last three years, at least that’s my perception.
And I know I’m old school but I really like it when the on-air personality can hit queues well, so well you sometimes can’t tell where one song ended and another begins, so well they never have dead air nor do they ever stomp on lyrics. Harms was all that and he also knew the music, the artists, and was a good people person. I hate to see him go.
Since Mr. Kaplan is asking for input, let’s oblige him and give him some. I’d really like to see KNND get the kind of audience involvement it used to have, the sense of no fear let’s do it-ness it used to have, and I know they’ve got a bunch of highly competent engineers that could restore the audio to what it used to be if they so desired, turn off that filter that drops everything below 80hz and stop clipping the highs to death, or maybe everyone’s gone deaf and doesn’t care:
Mike Kaplan, KNDD Program Director
mkaplan@entercom.com
206-577-2445