College Radio Wrapped
Introducing RIYL.fm: no bots. no fake fans. no algorithmic feeds.
emwhitenoise is a monthly essay exploring the future of music through the lens of fandom, technology and culture—from Emily White, a music product builder and Spotify and Billboard alum. Welcome to the 566 subscribers who joined since April’s essay!
Explore what’s playing on college radio at RIYL.fm. Listen to the artists, tracks, and releases that defined 11 station’s sounds this semester:
We have access to more music than any generation in history, yet discovery increasingly feels worse.
The algorithm is your private Top 40 radio station, endlessly tuned to only you. AI song generators pump out the equivalent of Spotify’s entire catalog (100M tracks) every two weeks. Spotify wants you to “take control of your listening and describe exactly what you want to hear” by prompting a playlist of countrygaze classics you haven’t heard:
I don’t want to “prompt a playlist.”
As a college radio DJ, I spent hours each week painstakingly curating playlists for my weekly show, emwhitenoise. Those acts of curation are what developed my taste, my judgement, my musical identity.
Why let a robot tell you what to listen to when you can discover Ora Cogan’s “Honey” from a student DJ in Toronto who hand selected the song to play on air? That signal is 100x more meaningful to me than autoplay ever will be.
So I built a way to explore music through the college radio DJs who meticulously select tracks for their communities on a weekly basis: RIYL.fm.
“Recommended If You Like” is a phrase college radio DJs and record reviewers have used forever to describe similar artists. Pronounced rile (verb): to make agitated and angry.
The spin data is from playlist logs submitted by college radio stations to our partner Spinitron, the playlist-management system used by many non-commercial community and educational radio stations in the country.
College radio is idiosyncratic, imperfect and deeply human. So is RIYL.fm. It’s a little rough around the edges, created with a lot of love and late nights over the past month to coincide with the end of the spring semester for students.
That’s the deal with college radio: you exchange some dead air, static and friction for magic, surprise and community.
While the music industry bets on AI, fake fans, and TikTok trends, student participation in college radio is surging. Driven by more than analog nostalgia:
“You can’t scroll on reels and run a radio station at the same time,” WRFL’s Aidan Greenwell told me when I interviewed college radio stations last fall, “You have to be in the present.”
Every tech oligarch wants you sitting alone with a blinking cursor and a prompt box, generating your own personal songs, software, and entertainment on demand, into oblivion. Your own version of culture. Your own version of the truth.
In an individualistic world that constantly demands more more more, faster faster faster faster, it’s not hyperbolic to say that music is one of the last things that truly connects us.
Music pulls people out of isolation and into community.
So, go explore a station. Dig through the stacks. Some of these artists will be shockingly familiar to you (see: old art is strangling new art.) Some will be brand new.
College radio DJ who wants to see your station in the next recap? Add your station here.
A special thank you to Rie McGwier (data), Carrie Walters (art), the DJs at KANM for testing the earliest version of this, and to Tom and Eva at Spinitron for their collaboration.
A few of my personal favorite artists I discovered while exploring the data:
32 DJs at Colorado State University’s KCSU playlisted Annabelle Chairlegs’s “Waking Up” RIYL: disaffected vocals, Ty Segall production, Dum Dum Girls
58 DJs at Texas A&M University’s KANM spun Gustavo Cerati’s 1999 album Bocanda. RIYL: genre bending Argentine “alt-rock”, fucking masterpieces
10 DJs at WNYU played Brooklyn’s own Julian McCamman’s Victoryland. RIYL: Myspace, jangly bedroom-pop, 2000’s indie
fabulous concept! as a college radio alumni, i recommend two Atlanta stations: WREK 91.1 and WRAS 88.5 (where i worked) 💜
Brilliant. This is just what we humans who make and love music need. I hope this encourages people to listen to more collage and independent radio and support the radio dj’s. These are the people who have done the obsessive work of musical treasure hunting for you, all you have to do is tune in to their vibe. Thanks Emily for connecting undiscovered music, the people who need to broadcast it with the people who want to hear it. Cheers!