Creativity Quote by Bob Seger

Radio used to feel like a shared hometown: a handful of stations deciding what the whole car heard on a Friday night. Seger’s line lands because it mourns the collapse of that commons while admitting it’s already gone. “So fragmented” isn’t just a complaint about too many presets. It’s a diagnosis of a culture where music no longer arrives as a collective event, but as a scatterplot of niches, formats, and micro-audiences that barely touch.

Coming from Seger, a musician forged in the era of mass-market rock, the subtext is personal. His career grew in the slipstream of gatekeepers who could turn a song into a national ritual. Fragmentation means fewer moments when everyone knows the chorus at the same time. It’s also a business reality: advertising models, corporate consolidation into cookie-cutter “formats,” and the long tail of stations chasing narrow demographics. The irony is that fragmentation often travels with homogenization: local quirks disappear even as options multiply.

Contextually, Seger is talking from the fault line where radio stopped being the main artery and became just one input among many. Even before streaming finished the job, satellite radio, iPods, and internet playlists taught listeners to defect from the DJ’s authority. The line works because it’s blunt, almost bewildered, like someone watching a familiar map dissolve into pixels. It isn’t nostalgia for a perfect past; it’s the uneasy recognition that the old way of making a hit - and making a public - doesn’t operate anymore.