Well, depends... Radios are generally commercial/trying to appeal to wide audience/normies.

Alt, by definition, is not that.

However I don't think that preference of alt music results in hate towards the popular.

Mainstream radio has always been mainstream. It doesn't appeal to alternative sensibilities, aside from that cool DJ at some ungodly hour, that we all stayed up to tape

No, the 60s to 90s was the last and on some stations the peak of real radio. Internet killed it.

I don’t know if I qualified as alt but I listened to KROQ back in the day because they played Sublime and shit

Amusingly my local oldies radio is now mostly 60's-90's rock, some of it relatively obscure.

I grew up with pirate radio in la hell they even played shit like the germs or dead Kennedy’s sometimes. Listened to a lot of oldies stations too. Was huge into hardcore punk and thrash metal in the 80s

Pretty common, if nothing else to pretend that you hate mainstream.

You've got two camps; the whole "corporate rock sucks" ideology and the "it's cool to hate popular things" state of mind. Especially if their loyalty to a specific genre becomes part of their "persona," they tend to reject anything outside of what's acceptable in their inner circles.

Most will eventually outgrow it though. Can't tell you how many people I know from high school who were proto-goths now get excited about upcoming Def Leppard concerts (or other groups they sure as hell wouldn't have listened to as a teen).

Radio is still going?!

Pretty much. Sometimes it aligned with other less-savory movements (like the backlash against disco, where a lot of racist and anti-LGBT forces co opted a long-standing "fuck corporate radio" movement) or became a pseudo-pop style unto itself (prog, grunge) - but "you won't hear the best stuff on the radio" has been the advice of in-the-know music lovers since way back when radio was the peak of mass media (blacks need not apply).

Yes, I got to learn a lot of great music taping this alternative radio show when I was a teen (Villa 65, VPRO radio, NL). Not always got the name of the band on tape so wondering for decades which band it was. A few years ago I was doing stage monitors for Sebadoh, and they started playing one of those songs.

Top 40 used to be the only way to hear about new artists aside from magazines. Then the industry became saturated with "hits" and made it difficult to listen because it would constantly be the same music over and over and over again my friend, ah you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction. So that's where the phrase "rock is dead" comes from; the fact there was a corporate takeover of the industry. People typically hung out at record stores to find out what they were missing in a genre they liked. Music changed, culture changed, everything changed as the world does so often. Regardless, tastes are still subjective and it's difficult to open peoples' minds to other artists and genres. The digital revolution ruined what little dignity artists had left. Now everyone can release music and get paid three-thousandths of a cent per play. It's bizarre, so yeah, fuck radio and all the drivel being promoted for unoriginal and monotonous shit and autotuned electric wub blip. It's feeling like nobody plays instruments anymore. There's still plenty of great musics, it's just becoming difficult to find it except through word of mouth or random chance.

No, not if it was college radio. WFMU, KCRW etc. MRR Radio still gets syndicated to radio stations around the world.

"Radio" is a form of media. It's not a genre.

Yes. Lots of cool college & non-commercial stations around the world. 4ZZZ in Aus., WFMU, KEXP, KCRW etc in the U.S. Most of them stream online so you've got no excuse.

So grateful for the internet.

Freeform radio can be fine, depending on the DJ. Programmed radio, not so much.

It’s not necessarily true that narrative.

I was fortunate to meet Jimmy Chamberlin of Smashing Pumpkins fame a couple years back and when prompted about the band and success he said that the band weren’t like there peers in the alternative scene looking down on the mainstream and that they deliberately wanted to be a big popular band.

Yes, but…over the air is becoming more and more uniform. We HAD a pretty solid local station, until 1 week ago. Now there is just a message that plays over and over saying it was sold. I expect to hear I Heart Radio on it within the year.

I think early-mid 80s radio was pretty undeniable even by punks, etc. I remember Kim Gordon saying that it was hard to remain oppositional to mainstream music all the time when Prince and Cyndi Lauper was on.

Up until about 2006-2007, probably. After that the “poptimism” movement got bigger and you saw more openness towards the mainstream from alt folks until the lines were blurred. Nowadays I don’t even know what distinguishes one from the other anymore.

I also notice a lot of Boomers seem to think that their music was the mainstream back in the day when it wasn’t necessarily. The week of Woodstock the #1 song in the country was “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies.

That must have been awesome. I still get excited when I run across an original version of something that was sampled on Paul's Boutique

It was a totally surreal experience. Being right next to the stage behind the mixing desk and hear them play it during the encore, 25 years after I taped it from the radio...

There was a small window in the early 90s when most cities had one station that played current grunge and alternative, and one station played current rap with some deeper cuts at night and a DJ live mix during the lunch hour and on Saturday nights. And usually one station that had live techno mixes on weekend late nights. That 3-4 year span is the only time radio seemed exciting.

It's more about hating that 'the man' controls what we hear on the radio more than the artists do.