In that regard, the emergence of other people who became involved with the station to pursue their own agendas made the process easier. I suspected my successor in the chair thought that I’d stick around and could be persuaded to take on some other role but that was never going to happen.
Still, the experience and The Internet Years as a whole had brought plenty of welcome developments and the on-air experience ended up being rewarding in itself. Actually, it had been a lot of fun, but I’d reached the point where the fun quotient wasn’t enough to justify the time I was expending on the exercise.
As well, the need to keep on adding material to the playlist gave me the excuse to fill in the gaps in the CD collection, so that by the time I’d escaped from the airwaves I’d built up the collection to the point where I had the complete works of most of the artists who interested me.
I’d also had to actively go looking for interesting new material to add to the mix and while a glance at the 1500 Most Played playlist in my iTunes reveals most of the tracks there probably would have been there anyway, regardless of the airwaves factor, that’s more a result of an existing mindset rather than any amazing new discoveries.
Seriously, when you look at it, there’s not much out there that is new, and what there is doesn’t interest me all that much. I’m finding things are, effectively, some of the same old elements put together in a slightly different way.
There’s the odd exception, but even there you’re going to find that it’s a matter of taking something familiar and adding a couple of interesting influences to see what happens.
The perfect example of what I’m talking about is a guitarist named Derek Trucks, and I’m inclined to use Derek as the perfect example of some of the things I’m talking about.