Collective Soul, Stale and Fresh Music

Collective Soul is a long-established rock band whose biggest hits were from the early-to-mid 1990s. Their breakout hit, Shine, was from their first album Hints, Allegations, & Things Left Unsaid. They followed this up in grand style from their self-titled second album, producing several tracks that received a lot of mainstream rock radio airplay: December, Smashing Young Man, The World I Know, Gel, and Where the River Flows. Then, in early 1997 the group's third album Disciplined Breakdown came out, with the first track Precious Declaration being released with much fanfare and radio play. After that, though, only a trickle of their songs were played on the radio (Heavy, She Said, Vent, Why Part 2, and Counting the Days). And of those latter "hits", they are now very rarely played on mainstream rock stations in their "past hits" rotation.

Although Collective Soul has continued as a band and keeps releasing new material, they are not receiving the same radio play as they used to, at least for that new stuff. But from what I can tell after listening to their more recent music, they have maintained their high standards and have continued to produce very good songs that are just as good as (if not better) than that string of hits they had from their first two albums in the mid-nineties. And yet, those ancient hits continue to get played a lot, while their fresher material is ignored.

And here is another example of my problems with commercial radio as it exists today. With all of the choices that exist on the albums that today's popular rock artists offer, the stations' programmers only play certain tracks over and over and over again. Not so on Internet radio, though. If you tune in, for example, to AOL Radio, you will hear deep tracks from many different prominent artists, as well as from a few who are breaking in on the musical scene.

I think that if I hear December played on Rock 104/WRUF one more time, I'll scream, and that would be very embarrassing for me if I were out in public when it happened. So I'll just play it safe and avoid listening to them altogether!