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Air Adam Podcast

About

Some of you will already know me from my DJing and production, while others might know my photography work. Those that don't know me will have have picked up on the fact that I have my fingers in a lot of pies!

So why am I doing a podcast? Well, I wanted a way to widely play some tunes I was interested in! Commercial radio is inaccessible to most would-be hosts of course, and while online radio shows can be good, you're relying on people to be able to tune in at a specific time on a specific day. That's not even taking into account the fact that it locks you into playing at that specific time, or all the streaming problems that seem to pop up! Playing in clubs is cool but restricts you to how many people you can get into the venue, and of course you need to keep it danceable so there's a lot of stuff which is difficult/impossible to fit into a set. Besides all that, mixtapes are harder to sell than they have been in the past, as the market has changed and there's more of an expectation of getting things for free. With a podcast, I can use a radio-like format, go on at length or keep it brief, and everyone can download easily/automatically and listen at a time of their choosing!

Putting all the "technical" considerations aside, it's really a way for me to share and get into discussions on music. I grew up in the pre-internet era (cue Hovis music or EPMD's "Strictly Business," whichever you prefer) - at that time, there was little if any Hip-Hop on TV or commercial radio, and so for a kid with a limited budget wanting to learn about it there were three main sources of music and info; tape swapping, pirate radio and magazines.

The pirate stations would play whatever they thought was good - the DJs weren't in anyone's pocket, and were playing records they'd bought with their own money - and over the years I got the chance to hear a wide selection; some of the records they played came from artists who went on to become legends, while others were one or two-hit wonders, but wonders all the same. The variety of stuff they played allowed me to develop and define my taste - finding an artist or record you liked lead to searching for info on them in the magazines, seeing who they were associated with or might be similar to, and then trying to get hold of some of that, and so on...then exchanging tapes of albums you'd bought with friends would send you on another path. This kind of cycle meant that records could become underground hits in one particular area while being pretty much ignored elsewhere. 

Somehow, despite the explosion in media availability and speed of access in the modern era, this seems to be happening less and less! The DJs I grew up with very much kept a balance between playing stuff that people would obviously like and playing things they personally liked themselves, and so the range was very interesting. This is what I'm going to try and do with this podcast; I guarantee pretty much every episode, someone I know will say "I was really into (song x) that you played" and then go on to say "but what was up with that bullshit (song y)? You actually like that?" There'll be a mixture of Hip-Hop and music more generally, "underground" and "commercial," the somewhat known and the utterly forgotten, new and old, the conscious and the ignorant, and the straightforward and the slightly bizarre! I hope you'll find it interesting and entertaining, and that it leads you towards discovering and enjoying some music that's new to you :o)