Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist, is now deriving his paycheck from Clear Channel. That's right: The spike-haired symbol of anarchic, anti-capitalist rebellion, the very punk, is sucking avatar of punk, is sucking the teat of the broadcast devil incarnate, the apotheosis of airwave-polluting, Britney-spewing corporate radio. Weirder still, it's all cool. Jones' five-day-a-week gig as a DJ at Indie 103, a Clear Channel-backed station in Los Angeles, is not a sign that he has pathetically sold out his youthful beliefs. "FCC no!" he says, dropping into his customary off-air vocabulary. "I'm out of here if they tell me what to FCCing play - that's it, mate." And the music on his two-hour show bears out his claim.
 
A head-snappingly diverse jumble of vintage punk, unsigned local bands, ancient pop novelties, and a whole lot of vividly alive rock and roll, Jonesy's Jukebox is, according to Blender magazine, nothing less than "the best show on the radio." More than that, Jonesy's Jukebox is just possibly a peek at the future of radio itself. Which may be the weirdest news of all - not so much that a Sex Pistol is, once again, helping to shake the dust off rock and roll, but that music radio could even have a future. Between the 1920s, when the first stations began to broadcast, and the end of grunge in the 1990s, music played over the radio was arguably the most innovative force in US popular culture.
 
The sound of jazz, country, and rock pulsing from every dashboard in the nation inspired and drove Hollywood, Broadway, Seventh Avenue, literature, television, and practically everything else. But in the past decade, radio changed from a village of small, independent stations to a bastion of the US media oligopoly, content to deliver sterile, cookie-cutter broadcasts. The transition made sense economically, because Big Radio was able to cut costs by consolidating advertising departments and using the same programming across the country. But alienated listeners fled in droves.  Noting radio's declining audiences, recurring low-level payola scandals, horrendous public image, and competition for drive-time ears from iPods, satellite broadcasting, and cell phones, pundits have been gleefully pronouncing the medium's last rites. But they may well be wrong.
 
Rather than being on life support, radio in fact is on the verge of its boldest technological change since the introduction of FM stereo in the 1960s. Not only that, it may be on the threshold of another golden age, one which could have almost as powerful an impact as the first. And in the vanguard of this movement, bizarrely enough, are many of the same flaccid, reactionary media giants that put radio in a coma to begin with. "I don't get it," Jones says. "But they're letting us put on some FCCing good radio here."
 
Source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/radio.html