Matthew Lasar talks with Brian Edwards-Tiekert, host of KPFA’s Upfront to commemorate the Birthday of Pacifica Radio.

The post Podcast #339- 75 Years of Listener Supported Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Arlo Guthrie’s seasonally appropriate “Alice’s Restaurant” is getting dusted off once again for radio airplay this Thanksgiving 2023.

I’ve been documenting this radio ritual for many years (even while suffering with COVID last year) and was pleased to be able to speak to THE Alice in 2020. Our Radio Survivor conversation with Alice Brock is recommended listening, as it provides perspective on how Guthrie’s song came to be and why it has resonated with so many people.

This year, I was amused to see that there’s a podcast, 108.9 The Hawk, about a fictional classic rock radio station. Apparently in prior years they have done episodes about the rock station staple, “Alice’s Restaurant,” and for 2023 they have produced a mega episode. They write, “Well, now for the very first time, experience BOTH specials – ‘Alice’s Restaurant Attacks!’ and ‘Alice’s Revenge’ combined into one blood curdling, spine chilling, family dinner ruining episode!” Sounds intriguing.

Have a wonderful 2023 Thanksgiving celebration! If catching “Alice’s Restaurant” is part of your holiday tradition, read on for my guide to listening options on your radio dial for 2023.

As always, this is an incomplete list. DO double check with your local stations to be sure that times have not shifted. Additionally, I am only including stations for which I have verified that they will be airing “Alice’s Restaurant” for 2023. However, you may want to consult my prior radio guides to identify other radio stations that tend to play the song annually.

Pre-Thanksgiving Servings of “Alice’s Restaurant” on the Radio in 2023

“Alice’s Restaurant” is also airing before Thanksgiving on some stations. On Monday, November 20, WDIY 88.1 FM (Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania) airs “Alice’s Restaurant” between 7 and 9pm on Steve Aaronson’s “Folk Classics” show, which features a Thanksgiving theme. Additionally, on Tuesday, November 21, “Alice’s Restaurant” airs on WESU 88.1 FM (Middletown, CT) at around 7pm during the Acoustic Blender show.

On Wednesday, November 22, Angelica Community Radio WRAQ 92.7 FM (Angelica, NY) broadcasts it at 9am and WTMT-FM 105.9 The Mountain (Asheville, North Carolina) will air it at 6pm.

Alice’s Restaurant on the Radio on Thanksgiving Day 2023 – November 23, 2023

Last updated on November 21, 2023 at 5:21pm PT. Note that all times are local to the area in which the station is located.

Terrestrial and Online Radio:

WAMC Northeast Public Radio 90.3 FM and 1400 AM (Albany, NY) writes of its Thanksgiving Day plans: “At 12 p.m. we’ll listen to our traditional airing of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’” followed by an interview with Arlo Guthrie at 1 p.m.”

Wyoming Public Media will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am on Thanksgiving Day, as part of the Wyoming Sounds Thanksgiving special (9am to noon) “with host Grady Kirkpatrick featuring roots music, Native American, and Wyoming artists along with the Arlo Guthrie Thanksgiving classic Alice’s Restaurant beginning at 11am.”

WRUR 88.FM at University of Rochester (Rochester, New York) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11:30am during Open Tunings with Scott Regan. Kane O, who has been airing this song for many years, writes on Facebook, “BIG ‘Ups’ to my Pal, Professor Scott Regan for letting me crash his show to carry on our wonderful tradition! Thankful indeed! #42.”

WDRC 102.9 FM “The Whale” (Hartford, Connecticut) writes, “Tune into 1029 The Whale on Thanksgiving at 6a, Noon and 6pm we will be playing Alice’s Restaurant in it’s entirety!”

WCSX 94.7 FM (Detroit, Michigan) is airing “Alice’s Restaurant” at 10am and 4pm on Thanksgiving.

WMGK 102.9 FM (Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania) continues its annual tradition. According to the station’s website, “Everyone can enjoy the tradition of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ on MGK three times on Thanksgiving day in 2023. Paul Kelly will start it off by playing the Arlo Guthrie Thanksgiving classic at 8 a.m., and Danny Ocean will play it at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.”

WZOO 99.9 FM (Central North Carolina) and 700 AM (Asheboro) and 106.1 FM (Greensboro) writes on Facebook of its plans: “Are you wondering if WZOO is going to continue the tradition of playing Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie on Thanksgiving? You bet we are! Listen at 12:05 pm, right after the news! Happy Thanksgiving from your friends at The ZOO!”

WAFX 106.9 FM The Fox (Chesapeake, Virginia) writes on Facebook, “The Thanksgiving tradition continues on Thursday at 12 noon with the airing of Arlo Guthrie’s performance of “Alice’s Restaurant” hosted by Mike Arlo!”

Rock Radio 559 (Porterville, California) posted on Facebook, “A radio tradition every Thanksgiving. Arlo Guthrie ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’ 12 noon and 7pm Thanksgiving Day on rockradio559.com.”

WTMT-FM 105.9 The Mountain (Asheville, North Carolina) is airing “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving Day and Thanksgiving Eve. On Facebook the station posted, “The Thanksgiving tradition continues! Alice’s Restaurant on 105.9 The Mountain. You’ll hear it on Wednesday night at 6pm and twice on Thanksgiving Day at Noon and 6pm.”

WTTS 92.3 FM (Indianapolis, Indiana) writes on Facebook, “Welcome to a short holiday week! We are all set to provide Thursday’s soundtrack. OverEasy Thanksgiving is back on 92-3 WTTS, with laid-back World Class Rock all day long. We’ll also play Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving classic ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ four times: 8am, 12pm, 4pm and 9pm.”

WEZX Rock 107 (Scranton, Pennsylvania) plans to play “Alice’s Restaurant” according to its Facebook post, “Alice’s Restaurant has become a timeless tradition. Tune in Thanksgiving Day at 9am, noon, 3pm and 6pm You can get anything you want at Rock 107.”

WEHM 92.9 FM and 96.9 FM (Water Mill, NY) tweeted, “Thanksgiving Day, don’t miss out on Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ hosted by Lauren Stone! Special airings at 12pm, 3pm and 6pm!”

107.5 The Breeze (Portsmouth, Ohio) tweeted, “We’re celebrating a Holiday Classic: ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ by Arlo Guthrie. Follow along as the story unfolds on Thanksgiving Day. It’s always brought to you by Preston Family Funeral Home on Rt. 5 in Ashland. Hear it this Thursday at 9am, Noon and 5pm.”

KPIG 107.5FM and KPYG 94.9 FM Cayucos/SLO (Freedom, California) reports, “On Thanksgiving day, tune into the pig and hear the full version of Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ four times…at 9:00am, noon, 4:00pm, and again at 9:00pm. We hope you and yours have a safe – and healthy – Thanksgiving holiday.”

101 The Fox (Kansas City, Kansas) writes, “A Thanksgiving gift from our family to yours…This Thanksgiving day at 12:00 noon and again at 6pm. 101 The Fox presents all 18 minutes, eleven seconds of Arlo Guthrie’s epic Thanksgiving masterpiece!”

Backland Radio (online) reports that it is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at 8am, noon, 5pm and 9pm Central Time on Thanksgiving on The Whip at Backland Radio.

92 KQRS (Minneapolis, Minnesota) reports of this year’s “Alice’s Restaurant” tradition: “Our long-standing tradition of spinning Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ on Thanksgiving continues! You have three opportunities to hear it this year: Tune in at 9am, 12pm and 5pm on Thanksgiving Day. Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at KQRS!”

KINK 101.9 FM (Portland, OR): Per its website, “It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving if we didn’t play the Arlo Guthrie classic, now would it. Listen at noon for ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and a full second helping at 5pm!”

WTHS 89.9 FM Hope College Radio (Holland, Michigan) is playing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon on Thanksgiving Day.

WRHQ 105.3 FM (Savannah, Georgia) writes on its website, “Tradition! That’s what Alice’s Restaurant is on the Q and you’ll hear it three times Thanksgiving Day…. 9:30 in the morning, 12:30 in the afternoon and 6:30 in the evening presented by O.C. Welch Ford in Hardeeville.  Alice and Turkey on the Q!”

KOZT 95.3 FM/95.9 FM The Coast (Ft. Bragg, CA) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12 noon on Thanksgiving.

WDVX 89.9 FM in Knoxville, Tennessee is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon on Thanksgiving. Its website says, “WDVX serves up ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’ a song by Arlo Guthrie and a long time Thanksgiving day tradition on WDVX.”

WUMB 91.9 FM (Boston, MA and environs) writes, “The Thanksgiving tradition continues with Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ airing in the 9am, 12pm, and 3pm hours.”

KSER 90.7 FM (Everett, Washington) writes, “Listen at 2pm Thursday for our annual broadcast of the Arlo Guthrie classic.”

WBJB Brookdale Public Radio 90.5 The Night (Lincroft, New Jersey): Will be playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon and 6pm.

KTOJ 105.7 FM (Thousand Oaks, California) airs “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving day at 9am, noon, 3pm and 5pm.

KTYD 99.9 FM (Santa Barbara, CA) writes on Facebook: “KTYD’s Annual Thanksgiving Tradition! Listen Thursday at 6:30 and 9:30am, 12:30, 3:30 and 6:30pm.”

WXOX-LP 97.1 FM (Louisville, Kentucky) reached out to alert us that they will be playing “Alice’s” at 9:40am on Thanksgiving Day.

WWSF Seacoast Oldies 104.3 FM (Exeter, Maine) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

WMVY 88.7 FM (Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod and environs) aka MVY Radio writes on Facebook: “Be sure to tune in to MVYRADIO this Thanksgiving at noon as we play Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving tradition, ‘Alice’s Restaurant.’ This will be the 40th year of this turkey day tradition.”

WQUT 101.5 FM Tri-Cities Classic Rock (Tri-Cities, Tennessee) reports on Facebook, “An enduring Thanksgiving tradition continues! Arlo Guthrie’s classic, ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ will play at noon and 6:00PM on Thanksgiving on WQUT!”

WEBN 102.7 FM (Cincinnati, Ohio) carries on the tradition. DJ Nudge writes on Facebook, “I have 0 clue why we do it or why it matters to you, I just know you go LOONEY for ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ getting a spin at high noon on 102.7 WEBN every Turkey Day” and asks, “Tradition for Tradition sake, I don’t think anyone high-a-top Frog’s Mountain knows why anymore. Why do YOU love us playing the song annually and what does it mean to you?”

WABF 1480 AM (Fairhope, Alabama) writes on Facebook, “Join us for Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ Thanksgiving day at noon and 6pm.”

KWSC 91.9 FM “The Cat” (Wayne, Nebraska) at Wayne State College tweets that, “@ProfAhern brought a Thanksgiving tradition to KWSC-FM. Tune in at 12 on Thanksgiving to hear about littering, the draft and a swell Thanksgiving dinner at Alice’s Restaurant.”

WXPN 88.5 FM (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) reports that it will be continuing its tradition amongst its Thanksgiving Day special programming. According to its website, at “12 Noon: Mike V presents our annual airing of Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant‘!”

The post Alice’s Restaurant on the Radio Thanksgiving 2023 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The FCC is not in the business of taking licensed radio stations off the air.

This is something I’ve been telling community and college radio folks for well over a decade, especially when they get themselves tied up in knots of anxiety trying to read certain regulations like literary theory, worried that a fine over a fleeting f-word or clueless DJ promoting their own live gig once will spell the end. (It won’t, and hasn’t in the last four decades.)

There’s no better evidence for this perspective than the Commission’s latest proposed rulemaking to let FrankenFMs stay resident at the FM dial’s back door of 87.75 MHz, permanently. 

To briefly review: FrankenFMs are TV stations broadcasting as radio stations that were never licensed as radio at all. Instead they’re the vestiges of analog low-power TV (LPTV) stations that broadcast on channel 6, where the formerly analog audio portion of their signals could be heard at the far left end of the FM dial. Essentially, once full-power TV in the US went all-digital in 2009, FrankenFMs exploited what was previously just a technical curiosity to create a backdoor service. 

However, LPTVs had to go all-digital in June 2021, ending analog audio and FM radio reception at the same. But then the FCC authorized Special Temporary Authority (STA) for 13 of these stations to maintain an analog radio signal alongside their digital one, and those stations remain on the FM dial today.

With this new proposal, the Commission is recognizing that to listeners FrankenFMs are real radio stations, even if that’s not what the rules intended them to be. Of course, one could say the same of pirate stations – which the agency is staffing up to fight – but the Frankens at least were authorized to have an audio signal at 87.75 FM, just not necessarily a standalone signal. Yet, that was never prohibited either.

Say it again: The FCC is not in the business of taking licensed radio stations off the air.

(Even if they’re not fully radio stations.)

Of course, this proposal does not come without controversy. The most common objection is that it’s otherwise difficult to put a new FM station on the air, and so it would be fairer not to authorize this backdoor scheme. An additional argument is that if these stations are legitimized, then the Commission should extend the opportunity to more broadcasters.

In fact, the FCC asks if they should do just that, adopting an idea that’s been floating around community radio and public interest circles for the last decade, more recently suggested by National Public Radio: reallocate analog channel 6 TV frequencies 82 – 88 MHz for new FMs. Obviously, this would require new radio receivers to get most of the new broadcasts. But there was a time not too long ago that the AM dial didn’t go all the way to 1710 KHz, so there’s precedent. 

No doubt, many entrenched broadcast interests will probably argue that it’s absurd to license frequencies for stations that won’t be heard on most receivers. I don’t think that is so absurd in today’s radio and media environment. I’ll make that case in a separate post. 

Now we’re waiting for the comment window on this proposal to open when it gets published in the Federal Register. That’s when we’ll see what arguments, pro and con, are made on these ideas, and any of us in the public may weigh in, too.

The post FCC’s Proposal to Legitimize FrankenFMs Proves It Isn’t in the Business of Taking Stations off the Air appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This past Sunday, February 13, was World Radio Day. I’m a few days late in recognizing it, but still have something good to share. Like last year, the BBC tapped radio journalist David Goren to produce a documentary highlighting community radio around the globe. “World Wide Waves ’22” profiles four stations:

• Koori Radio is the only First Nations radio station broadcasting Sydney, Australia
• Arta FM is an independent, multilingual community radio station broadcasting in the Jazeera region in North-East Syria
• Radio Victoria is a social justice station dedicating to fighting poverty in El Salvador
• Machnoor, India’s Sangham Radio is owned, managed and operated by women from the margins of the society, who have been mostly excluded in public forums

Boston public radio station WBUR reports,

“A group of lawyers and activists from Massachusetts are celebrating a ruling by an international human rights court in favor of indigenous broadcasters in Guatemala.

Nicole Friederichs, who runs Suffolk Law School’s Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples Clinic in Boston, said it’s the first time an international court has upheld native people’s right to operate media outlets.”

The unlicensed station was operating without a license when it was shut down by the government. The station appealed to the country’s Supreme Court, arguing that licensure was prohibitively expensive, but was ruled against. But the station prevailed in front of the Inter-American Court in December, finding the Guatemalan government had violated the broadcasters’ rights to freedom of expression. The ruling has implications for dozens of similar stations across the country.

Mazda owners in Seattle who listen to public radio KUOW are finding their car stereos taken over by the station, and that they can’t switch away. In fact, other features, like Bluetooth, won’t work either. No one, including Mazda, is quite certain what has caused the problem, though there are suspicions that it has something to do with KUOW’s HD Radio signal. The only fix, right now, appears to be replacing the entire in-car entertainment system.

The post Rough Notes: BBC Profiles 4 Community Stations Around the World; Inter-American Court Sides with Indigenous Station; Mazda Owners Stuck on KUOW appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This is my ninth installment on how to listen to the Super Bowl on the radio, and this year there isn’t much change from last. It seems like most of the same outlets will be carrying the big game in the US, Canada, Mexico, UK and Australia. While the match up between the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams can be found on television in most other countries, radio broadcasts are harder to come by.

Sure, if you’re doing something where you have to keep your eyes off a screen you can always tune into a TV or video stream and just listen. But the radio play-by-play is designed for screen-less consumption, making sure every play is described for your stadium of the mind.

Each year I hope to find a new international broadcaster – or better yet, a shortwave station – stepping up to provide audio coverage. Alas, the only truly intrepid network is Australia’s SEN, which will be sending their own announcer for the fifth year in a row.

Here’s where to listen to Super Bowl LVI live from Los Angeles, CA on the radio, Sunday, February 13:

Terrestrial Radio

United States

English: Westwood One Sports affiliate stations

Spanish: Entravision stations

Canada

TSN Radio – Edmonton, Hamilton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg

Australia

1116 AM SEN Victoria / 1629 AM SEN South Australia
(also online)

Mexico

W Radio

United Kingdom

BBC 5 Live (also online in the UK)

Armed Forces Network

Armed services members deployed overseas can listen via AFN Radio on satellite, and AFN 360 Internet Radio.

Internet Radio

NFL Game Pass (subscription required)

TuneIn Radio

Satellite and Internet Radio

United States

SiriusXM Super Bowl Radio

Canada

SiriusXM Canada

Is there a terrestrial, online or satellite radio broadcast of the Super Bowl we’re missing? Please let us know.

Feature image credit: Joe Haupt / flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The post How to Listen to Super Bowl LVI on the Radio around the World this Sunday, Feb. 13 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Franken FMs are the radio service that refuses to die, even after the FCC ostensibly pulled the plug this past summer. Recall that these are former analog low-power TV stations on channel 6 whose audio could be heard at about 87.7 FM. Analog LPTV shut down on July 13, 2021, but then Venture Technologies Group was granted “Special Temporary Authority” to keep a couple of its stations broadcasting an analog FM audio signal alongside their digital video signals.

Now the number stations has grown to about a “half-dozen,” according to Radio World, in an piece that taps some of the architects of the new generation 3.0 digital television standard to get their take on this experiment. One says to make space for the analog FM signal, “is to actually lower spectral efficiency.” Another is skeptical, as well, saying, “[t]he system may work and be useful, but the information is not available yet to prove it.” A third was more optimistic, noting, “[w]ith the limitations of FM spectrum, they are making use of the FCC rules and channel segmentation philosophy. They’re putting it to good use.”

That said, the experiment still is temporary, and it would seem the initial six month lease is coming due soon. The stations may still petition for an extension, which the FCC would likely grant at least once. But an actual rulemaking will be required if Franken FMs are to become permanent fixtures on the dial.

Radio futurologist James Cridland observes that the BBC has announced plans to make some radio shows available as podcasts exclusive to the BBC Sounds app for 28 days, which also means they’ll be unavailable outside the UK during that period. It also means these programs will not be playable on other podcast apps, like Apple Podcasts, even for UK listeners. Cridland deems it, “another disappointing move from a broadcaster that should be widening its potential audience, not limiting it.”

He also notes additional broadcasters doing the same, while others, like Norway’s NRK, are pulling older archives off open, third-party apps. “In an age where radio consumption is in slow decline in many parts of the world, I’d suggest that anything that removes opportunities for listeners to discover new stuff is regrettable,” he concludes.

If CDs were recently declared dead, they’re sure enjoying the afterlife in 2022, as the format approaches the ripe age of 40. This past week erstwhile online music publication Pitchfork tossed its hat in the ring, but taking the additional step of talking to actual young people who’ve acquired the compact disc habit. A New York University sophomore and WNYU DJ says that she and her friends are, “on the CD wave.” Another college radio DJ at the University of Texas at Arlington reveals, “I have three big cases full of CDs that I play all the time,” while a student who writes for the Lawrence University newspaper reports, CDs are desirable because, “[w]hen all your life is virtual, even looking on Spotify can seem like draining work.”

As I’ve noted before, at least some of the Gen Z interest in CDs is driven by the current price advantage. The co-owner of California chain Amoeba Music says many classic albums can be had for just $4 to $5. I saw that for myself when I visited the Hollywood outlet back in 2019.

Meanwhile, across the pond, NME columnist Mark Beaumont admits,

“When the coroners come to collect my body, with ghoulish press photographers trailing behind to document the horror and depravity, local press will no doubt dub me The Disc Man. Entering my office space will feel like unearthing Spotify’s underground database – thousands upon thousands of CDs, stacked high to the ceiling and piled in mounds across doorways.”

Yet, despite his own passion, he had doubts about a full-fledged revival in 5-inch silver discs. Comparing the physical operation of playback to operating a household appliance, lacking in the romanticism of vinyl and turntables.

Back in April 2020 we talked with author, filmmaker and former DJ Bill Lichtenstein about groundbreaking Boston freeform radio station WBCN, the subject of his documentary “WBCN and the American Revolution.” Lichtenstein has authored a new companion book about the station, and recently guested on Monocle Radio’s “The Stack” to discuss it.

The post Rough Notes: Franken FMs Live On, BBC Geofences, More CD Revival, WBCN Book appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Actor Howard Hesseman passed away on Saturday, Jan. 29, perhaps most well-known – at least to radio nerds – as the burned-out former hippy morning radio DJ Dr. Johnny Fever on sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” for four seasons beginning in 1978. Hesseman was actually once a real radio DJ, for a short stint in 1967 on San Francisco freeform station KMPX.

I can only imagine how many viewers his Johnny Fever character inspired to become DJs, including this guy, who watched the first-run weekly as an elementary school kid, then in reruns whenever I could. The contrast between the on-air persona and the much more beleaguered real-life person was entertaining and believable (for a sitcom), but also offered up an example for how being on the radio lets you reinvent yourself – possibly many multiple times, as Johnny rattles off the air names and markets he’d been through in the series’ pilot episode.

Of course, Hesseman’s career was longer and more multitudinous than the four years on WKRP. But Dr. Johnny Fever, and WKRP, have become a part of the national radio mythos. The cast reunited in 2014 for an entertaining and enlightening event at the Paley Center in Los Angeles, which you can stream online.

Following years of declarations that the compact disc is dying or dead, we’re all-of-a-sudden seeing an about face in the zeitgeist, summarized most recently by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield, who declares “the CD Revival Is Finally Here.” This cultural reckoning comes on the heels of data showing CD sales actually increased in 2021, driven by popular releases from Adele, BTS and Taylor Swift. These chart-topping artists also released vinyl versions, which, tend to be more expensive and often harder to get than digital discs. At Amazon Adele’s “30” is $35 on LP and just under ten bucks on shiny silver.

Of course, I’ve been an unabashed CD partisan for years, three years ago logging “10 Reasons Why CDs Are Still Awesome (Especially for Radio).” For me it’s not about CD vs. vinyl – I’m listening to a record right now – or even CD vs. streaming – I listen to streaming more than CDs. It’s always been about utility; CDs provide great sound in a durable medium for a great price. Sure the same $9.99 that buys you the new Adele CD also gives you a month of unlimited, ad-free access to millions of albums on several streaming services. But once you quit paying that bill you lose your music. Put the same money on a CD and you have it forever.

That said, I’ve streamed countless dozens of albums just once, or maybe not even the whole way through. Streaming is a great way to try new music without the commitment of a purchase. That sure is an improvement over the pre-streaming days where often you just had a to take a chance, especially on less popular artists and albums that you didn’t hear on the radio. Now I can preview with a stream and seal the deal with a CD (or record). The two media can be very complementary, not mutually exclusive.

I still buy CDs, though I certainly amassed the largest majority of my collection in the 90s and early 2000s. I’ve thinned the herd over the years, but still own several hundred. I recently moved and have more space in our new house, allowing us to get a cabinet to properly store the discs more accessibly than in our previous place. I’ve enjoyed browsing through and rediscovering albums I haven’t thought of or heard for years. A not-inconsiderable percentage I discover aren’t available to stream at all.

In the last few years I’ve bought a fair number of used CDs at what I consider to be bargain prices. Now I’m wondering if this renewed interest will trigger price increases, as young people want to check out what they’ve been missing, and older folks refresh their collections. I wonder if we’ll see any hint of the rebuying phenomenon I’ve observed with the vinyl resurgence: folks who had vinyl in their youth, which they ditched for CDs, which they ditched for iTunes downloads, which they ditched for streaming, then rebuying those albums on vinyl. Will they now be springing for their third or fourth copy of “Sgt. Pepper’s,” “Hotel California” or “Led Zeppelin IV,” on CD?

Perfect sound forever, again!

The post Rough Notes: RIP Howard Hesseman, WKRP’s Dr. Johnny Fever; Perfect Sound Forever, Again appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A belated happy New Year and welcome to 2022. It’s not quite a New Year’s resolution, but I want to return to regular blogging here at Radio Survivor, at least covering interesting radio stories of note, along with other radiophonic observations.

With the Super Bowl coming in just under three weeks you can look forward to my (nearly) annual how to listen to the Super Bowl on the radio post. Research has already started, so drop us a line if you know of a source beyond the usual US commercial radio affiliates.

First up is this report from Spin Magazine (it still exists!?) on Ice Radio at McMurdo Station on Antarctica. Conducted over email, writer Lukas Harnisch interviews a group of workers at the scientific outpost who volunteer at the station, broadcasting at 104.5 FM. Longtime readers and listeners will recall that we covered the station on our podcast and radio show back in 2019, talking with McMurdo broadcast engineer Elizabeth Delaquess. Nevertheless it’s nice to see the station get some press. Love this quote from Ralph Maestas, who manages TV and radio operations:

“For the last 10 years we’ve had an essay prompt on the back of the sign-up sheet to volunteer that asks them what they think it means to be a DJ in this community. Almost every response is that they want to give something back to the community.”

Next up, amid concerns that Russia plans to invade Ukraine, one or more radio hackers were reportedly jamming a Soviet-era Russian numbers station, UVB-76, this past weekend. According to Motherboard, the hackers were been broadcasting signals over the station’s frequency that appear as pictures – largely troll-inspired memes – when viewed on a spectrum analyzer.

El denominado "The Buzzer" (UVB-76) un sistema de radiocomunicaciones militares rusas desde hace casi 40 años, lleva días interferido por "piratas". Muchos vinculan esta actividad con el conflicto de Ucrania. La pasada noche se emitieron imágenes muy bizarras en su frecuencia pic.twitter.com/5QOMKPtIA1

— David Marugán (@RadioHacking) January 20, 2022

The Motherboard story somewhat inaccurately states that the rogue broadcasters “hijacked” the shortwave station. However, that implies that they’ve taken over the actual broadcast facility or transmitter, either physically or virtually. Instead, what’s happening is that they’re jamming the station by broadcasting over it.

At the moment this seems more of a curiosity than anything else. While numbers stations have long been thought to be transmitting coded messages for international espionage, it’s hard to know if the Russian station in question is still in use by actual spies (if it ever was). Of course, jamming with frequencies that show up as images in the spectrum analyzer is a clever touch, even if it seems like a there’s a pretty limited audience. Thank goodness we have social media, though, else we’d never know about it.

The post Rough Notes: Antarctic Radio Revisited & Jamming Soviet-Era Numbers appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Catch Alice’s Restaurant on the 2023 radio dial. See our latest listening guide.

As Thanksgiving approaches, my thoughts turn once again to “Alice’s Restaurant,” the epic Arlo Guthrie song that is a beloved turkey day tradition for radio stations all over the United States. I’ve been chronicling this ritual for many many years and was pleased to be able to speak to THE Alice last year as part of our lead up to a very strange 2020 holiday season. DO check out our Radio Survivor podcast conversation with Alice Brock, as it will give your some perspective on how Guthrie’s song came to be and why it has resonated with so many people.

Here’s hoping that your 2021 Thanksgiving celebrations are a bit more festive than last year and that everyone near and dear to you is healthy and happy! If you are eager to tune in to a radio station to hear “Alice’s Restaurant” this year, take a look at the following options. Check back for updates as Thanksgiving draws near.

Pre-Thanksgiving Listening Options:

Perhaps you’ve already heard “Alice’s Restaurant” over the airwaves, as many stations get into the Thanksgiving spirit early. WDIY in Lehigh Valley played it Monday night. KSRW 92.5 FM in Bishop, California played it on Monday at 11am and will also air it on Wednesday at 3pm and Friday at 8pm. KZUM 89.3 FM in Lincoln, Nebraska aired it on Tuesday at 5pm.

Alice’s Restaurant on the Radio on Thanksgiving Day 2021 – November 25, 2021

Last updated on November 24, 2021. Note that all times are local to the area in which the station is located.

Terrestrial and Online Radio:

WCSX 94.7 FM (Detroit, Michigan) writes on Facebook: “Our Thanksgiving tradition continues with Arlo Guthrie’s classic holiday story ‘Alice’s Restaurant”’ It airs first at 10am Thanksgiving Day and if you’re up for a second helping, again at 4pm!”

92 KQRS (Minneapolis, Minnesota) reports on its website, “Our long-standing tradition of spinning Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ on Thanksgiving continues! You have three opportunities to hear it this year: Tune in at 8am, 12pm and 7pm on Thanksgiving Day!”

KSRW 92.5 FM Sierra Wave (Bishop, California) is airing “Alice’s Restaurant” before and after (but not on) Thanksgiving: Monday, November 22 at 11am, Wednesday, November 24 at 3pm, and Friday, November 26 at 8pm.

WKZE 98.1 FM (Red Hook, New York) writes on Facebook: “Enjoy the ENTIRE 15 ½ minutes at 12-noon, 3pm and 6pm. If you’re traveling or want to have a listening party with absent friends, tune into our live webstream at https://981kze.com/listen-live/.”

WROI 92.1 (Rochester, Indiana) Giant FM writes on Facebook: “Our Thanksgiving Day treat for you is coming up on Thursday at noon! We will play the entire/long version of Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ on Giant fm 92.1 WROI.”

WEZX Rock 107 (Scranton, Pennsylvania) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving Day at 9am, noon, 3pm and 6pm.

WTMD 89.7 FM (Baltimore, Maryland) presents the annual airing of “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

WTHS 89.9 FM Hope College Radio (Holland, Michigan) shares on Twitter, “WTHS will again serve up the perfect side dish to your turkey day feast with Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, Thanksgiving day at noon…on WTHS, 89.9FM and streaming.”

WMMR 93.3 FM (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) tweeted, “@PierreRobert933 will play Alice’s Restaurant 3 times on Thanksgiving: 10am – original recording Noon – ‘The Massacree Revisited’ 2pm – vinyl cut.”

WXPN 88.5 FM (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12noon as it does every year.

101 The Fox (Kansas City, Kansas) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon on Thanksgiving.

MVY Radio (88.7 FM Martha’s Vineyard, MA and 96.5 FM Newport, Rhode Island) reports on Twitter, “Plan to be listening to MVY at noon on Thanksgiving day! We will play @folkslinger‘s Alice’s Restaurant!”

TNN Country Radio writes on Twitter, “We’ll be playing Arlo Guthrie’s classic Alice’s Restaurant on Thursday at 12pm ET! Tune in for our new Thanksgiving tradition!”

107.5 The Breeze (Portsmouth, Ohio) tweets: “Join us this Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, as we play a Holiday Classic: ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ by Arlo Guthrie. Hear it at 9am, Noon and 5pm. Follow along as the story unfolds on Thanksgiving Day. It’s brought to you by Preston Family Funeral Home, Rt. 5 in Ashland”

WXPK 107.1 FM The Peak (White Plains, New York). Poughkeepsie Journal reports that the station will air “Alice’s Restaurant” five times: “It will play on the eve of the holiday, as part of the station’s 10@10 block of songs at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Wednesday, at noon and 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving, and on the Weekend Replay of the 10@10 on Sunday after Thanksgiving at about 6 p.m.”

WDVX 89.9 FM in Knoxville, Tennessee is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

Wyoming Public Radio is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am during the Wyoming Sounds Thanksgiving Special (10am-noon) with host Grady Kirkpatrick. Program will include roots music, Native American and Wyoming artists along with the Arlo Guthrie Thanksgiving classic Alice’s Restaurant beginning at 11:00 a.m. with a special introduction from the original restauranteur Alice Brock.

WDRV 97.1 FM The Drive (Chicago, IL) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 6am, Noon, and 4pm.

KOZT 95.3 FM/95.9 FM The Coast (Ft. Bragg, CA) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12 noon on Thanksgiving.

WRHQ 105.3 FM (Savannah, Georgia) writes on its website, “Tradition! That’s what Alice’s Restaurant is on the Q and you’ll hear it three times Thanksgiving Day…. 9:30 in the morning, 12:30 in the afternoon
and 6:30 in the evening presented by your Vinyl Headquarters Rody’s Records“

WNCW 88.7 FM (Spindale, NC) writes that on Thanksgiving Day it will play “songs of food & gratitude all day long, with Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’ just past Noon.”

WUMB 91.9 FM (Boston, MA and environs) writes, “Tune in on Thursday, November 25th for special programming highlights including airings of Arlo Guthrie’s classic ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ at 9 AM, noon, 3 PM, and 7 PM, as well as selections from The Band’s The Last Waltz concert that took place on Thanksgiving Day at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in 1976.”

KINK 101.9 FM (Portland, OR): Per its website, “Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant has been a KINK Thanksgiving tradition for more than 30 years. Catch it twice on Thanksgiving Day (November 25th) this year, 12pm and 5pm.”

Backland Radio (online) writes that it will air Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie four times at 8am, 12 noon, 5pm and 9pm Central time on The Whip.

KSER 90.7 FM 89.9 FM (Everett, Washington) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 2pm.

KXT 91.7 FM will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon and 6pm.

99.1 PLR (New Haven, CT) is playing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” in its entirety at 6am, 12 noon and 6pm.

WCMF (Rochester, NY) is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

WXOX-LP 97.1 FM (Louisville, Kentucky) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 10am on Thanksgiving.

The post “Alice’s Restaurant” Remains a 2021 Thanksgiving Radio Staple appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’ve been staying in the San Francisco Bay Area this week and stumbled upon an AM talk radio network that is new to me: the Black Information Network. The format mirrors that of conventional 24-hour all-news stations like KCBS, Los Angeles’ KNX, New York’s WINS or Philadelphia’s KYW, with regular headline news, business and entertainment segments alongisde breaks for local weather and traffic. But that’s also supplemented with short segments on Black history and other topics for Black audiences.

A quick search informed me that it’s actually owned by iHeartRadio and went on the air June 2020 with 15 stations, now up to 31. I found BIN while tuning around the dial on 910 AM Berkeley, in the East Bay of the San Francisco metro. Even before hearing an ID the station immediately stood out from the sports talk and conservative talk that otherwise predominates on the AM dial.

One striking difference is a lack of conventional commercials. Instead, corporate sponsors are identified in a manner more like public radio underwriting. IHeart CMO Gayle Troberman told AdExchanger that they limited the sponsors to just 10, in order to “ensure that our journalists don’t have to write sensational headlines and be motivated to drive clicks[.]” In the same interview BIN CEO Tony Coles said they’re doing some custom branded content, which it seems isn’t too different from what you more often find in podcasting, even on shows from public radio organizations.

I’m surprised I missed BIN’s launch last year, but perhaps it was better to stumble upon it and have the pleasant surprise. Though different in approach and tone than what many folks from progressive community radio might prefer – it is definitely more mainstream – in my listening the emphasis on Black issues, history and culture is nevertheless front and center, and the network does not shy away from the politics of race. The mix is lively and useful.

Although still a national, rather than local, endeavor, It’s good to hear commercial radio try a new approach to news, an area that has seemed drained of investment as the “news” portion of the “news/talk” format on most stations has been pushed definitively to the conservative talk side, with most of the news limited to top- and bottom-of-the hour headlines and maybe some limited drive-time programming. I am curious to learn how this network evolves, especially if it expands to more cities.

The post Tuning in Black Information Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It seems like physical media continues to have a hold on humans, even while most of us in the West engage with online, streaming and virtual media for much, if not most, of our time. Audiocassettes are like radio, in that they have been declared dead multiple times in the last three decades, yet continue to be found, employed and enjoyed by new generations who insist on keeping them alive. Eric just completed a weekend-long cassette hacking workshop, joined by a diverse group of musicians and sound-makers of a variety of ages. He shares that experience as we discuss conjoined histories of cassettes and radio.

That leads us into a presentation Jennifer watched at this year’s virtual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, where she learned about a pre-VCR underground of people who recorded the audio of television shows onto cassette. It turns out some of these recordings may be the only surviving artifacts of some broadcasts that were not preserved, or have never again been seen or heard in their original form. We show how cassettes are for everyone who cares about sound in its myriad forms.

Also under discussion: the shutdown of internet radio directory service Reciva, and the perilousness of proprietary platforms.

Show Notes:

• Dogbotic’s Cassette Hacking Workshop
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies
• Broadcast Historian Nora Patterson
• Podcast #297 – Radio Studies and Soundwork
• Negativland: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
• Wobbly (Jon Leidecker)
• Wikipedia: Iannis Xenakis
• Podcast #145 – Hip-Hop Radio Archive
• Radio World: Reciva Internet Radio Platform Shutting Down
• “Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160-in-1“
• Mystery Show Case #6 Kotter
• The Real World Homecoming: New York
• Billboard: ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ to Return With Fewer Music Videos Due to Licensing Constraints
• “The State” FAQ
• Podcast #141 – How Radio Isn’t Done, According To Negativland’s Don Joyce
• An Affectionate & Honest Filmic Portrait of Negativland’s Don Joyce
• Radio Garden
• Exploring Radio Garden on World Radio Day
• Radio Preservation Task Force
• Podcast #133 – Preserving Brooklyn Pirate Radio
• Soundtap’s College Radio Discovery Tool
• 82 Best Freeform College Radio Stations
• RIP: Podcast #125 – Radio Free America Is an Online Hub for Noncomm Radio
• Internet Archive
• Podcast #168 – A Time Machine for All the Radio plus Shortwave

The post Podcast #299 – Cassettes for Art, Radio and Recording TV appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I bought my first CD player in 1987, using money I saved from my 16th birthday and working as a stock boy at the local Party Fair store. I could only afford to buy two discs to try out on my new purchase, owing to the fact that new CDs cost about $15.99, roughly $37 in 2021 dollars, or about 3.5 hours of my teenaged labor. 

Arguably I was ahead of the curve, especially for a 16 year-old. CD players wouldn’t be in even half of all US households for another six years. I fashioned myself a bit of a burgeoning audiophile, though I don’t think I knew the word. I voraciously consumed Stereo Review magazine every month and pored over the multi-page J&R Music World adverts in the New York Times. I was more than ready to take the leap into “perfect sound forever” by the time players’ price came into reach – for me, that was under $300 ($700 in 2021, or maybe 12 weeks of my part-time labor). 

Because of CDs’ relatively high cost, I took advantage of the public library’s small, but growing selection, taping selected discs. I only added new titles maybe once a month, at most.

Then one day I was browsing the music section at my local Bradlees discount department store when I saw the display for a CD compilation enticingly titled, “Steal This Disc.” Most of the artists were a mystery to me – Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, The Residents, Schooly D – but I’d heard of a few, like Frank Zappa, Devo, George Thorogood and Jimi Hendrix. Priced at just $5.99, it sure did seem like a steal, so I picked it up. 

At home, I was in for a sonic adventure. The blues of Josh White Jr. and Johnny Adams then takes a sharp left turn into Zappa’s Synclavier orgy of “G-Spot Tornado,” only to veer into Sugar Minott’s reggae, followed by McLaughlin’s cover of Glenn Miller’s “Something Spiritual.” This was a kind of eclecticism wholly unaccustomed to this exurban New Jersey kid raised on classic hard rock, new wave and the pop edge of punk. 

Digging into the extensive 18-page booklet I learned that “Steal This Disc” was a label sampler for Rykodisc, the first CD-only record label. Most of the tracks were taken from first-time CD releases for these albums and artists. Clocking in at 70 minutes – just four shy of the format’s limit at the time – it sure felt like a bargain, compared to the more typical 40-minute run time of 1980s albums. As one of the few compact discs in my collection, that comp saw a lot of spin time for a few years. 

Of course, compilation albums, as well as label comps, were nothing new. Back in the 1970s Warner / Reprise records advertised double album “Loss Leaders” on the inner sleeves of their releases, originally costing as little as $2 by mail order. And we can’t leave out the “as seen on TV” K-Tel records stuffed with a selection of the recent Top 40, with names like “Full Tilt” and “Music Machine.” (Not coincidentally, I own both of those.)

But with new LPs or cassettes still priced around eight or nine bucks in the late 80s, laying down only six buckeroos for more than an hour of pure digital music was a revelation. As the 80s turned into the 90s, the compilation CD earned a growing space in my musical life. You see, the dirty little secret of compact discs is that even by 1990s they became cheaper to produce than vinyl LPs, but labels kept their prices artificially higher in order to support and justify their reputation as a premium product. However, that also meant that when labels wanted to put out cheap surveys of their roster or genres, CDs were actually preferable to vinyl. I started finding more discount priced compilation CDs in the record store aisles, and was more than happy to snap them up when it seemed like more than a few tracks would suit my taste. Plus, I enjoyed the surprise of hearing something new and reliving that “Steal this Disc” experience over and over again.

College Radio Disc-overy Mechanism

Arriving in college radio in 1989, by 1991 the majority of new releases were arriving on CD. Our “new rack” housed a growing stack of comps made just for college radio. From CMJ’s “Certain Damage” series to major label entries, like Warner Brother’s “Follow Our Trax,” sometimes they allowed a lazy DJ (or one busy studying for mid-terms) to program an entire shift with just a few discs. More importantly, they were designed to place new artists next to more established ones, enticing a listen by proximity. Because they often arrived at the station in multitudes, extras were given away to DJs – most certainly by design.

After getting turned on to an artist from a compilation, I often learned that was their only good track. The one I most vividly remember is the minor college radio hit, “Three Strange Days,” by School of Fish. I thought the track was unique, fuzzy, catchy and still rocking, seeking out their self-titled debut. I gave the disc a number of tries, but found the songs mostly all sounded like the single, only not as good. I kept the comp, ditched the album. I have many, many sampler CDs I’ve kept because they perform the vital function of serving up the wheat, not the chaff.

As the 90s wore on, it seemed like label comps featured more exclusive tracks, live versions or remixes you wouldn’t or couldn’t find elsewhere. And then there were the tribute albums. Inspired by underground indie and punk rock tributes that were more than a little tongue-in-cheek, discs like 1994’s “If I Were a Carpenter” let alternative bands on the cusp of the mainstream sneak into your ears on the back of familiar middle-of-the-road tunes.

Reality Bites Pulp Fiction on Judgment Night

I’d be remiss not to include the rising prominence of soundtrack albums bring together nostalgic classics, alongside contemporary artists. The best had high concepts matching, or exceeding the ambitions of the film. I’m thinking about the indie rock / new wave hybrid of “Reality Bites,” the emerging Seattle grunge scene survey of “Singles,” or “Pulp Fiction,” which is arguably the ultimate expression of this pastiche, an auditory mirror of Tarantino’s then-fresh genre-bending style. The trailblazing hip-hop and rock crossover of “Judgment Night” is one where the soundtrack was a greater artistic success than the lackluster exploitation movie it ostensibly supported. All of these discs see semi-regular play when I dig into my CD collection.

Of course, aside from the shiny plastic disc, there’s little to differentiate a compilation CD from a playlist. Many an ungracefully aging music commentator has lodged complaints about the decline of the album with the rise of the streaming playlist. But rarely acknowledged are the tens of minutes of “bonus track” filler, or the one outstanding hit surrounded by meandering soundalikes crowding albums since the compact disc let albums grow past vinyl’s hard 40-minute limit. The compilation was a brilliant, and artistic solve to that problem, which playlists bring into the present.

Vinyl Carries Forward the Flag

While this piece may seem like a eulogy, I acknowledge the compilation has gone nowhere. In fact, I’d argue that the vinyl LP stepped back into the take on the mantle, as every Record Store Day list is piled high with rarities and dusties comps sources from tapes and acetates buried in garages, basements and attics from around the world. For many of these artists probably one track suffices, and we should be grateful we can have it. 

But gone are the bargain prices. The 21st century economics of vinyl make these $30 or $40 outlays. Even though that’s less real-world scratch than it was in the 1990s, it’s still more of a gamble than that five-buck CD comp. 

Hard Limits and Editing

Playlists, for all their compilation-like appearances, can also suffer from their near infinity. I’ve enjoyed many a three-, four- or even ten-hour playlist employed as enjoyable background music. But I’d be hard pressed to say I’ve paid focused attention to them. 

A CD’s hard limit of 80 minutes forces an edit. Not everything can be included, so choices must be made. No doubt, many playlists are just as carefully curated, but sometimes function follows form. 

I was inspired to write this ode because I dug out my two editions of “Steal This Disc” the other day on the occasion of buying a new CD player (yes, you can still do that), to replace an aging and finicky, and once-expensive, Blu-Ray player that never quite lived up to the promise of being a “universal” player, only becoming universally glitchy and annoying. Today the “Steal This Disc” sequence still feels familiar and right – it’s the only way I expect to hear “G-Spot Tornado.”

The Comp of 2055

Will a playlist last 34 years? This is not rhetorical question. I won’t predict that Spotify won’t be here in 2055, holding intact our digital crates of tracks, albums and playlists accumulated over decades of listening and gathering. I can say with certainty that when 16 year-old me bought “Steal This Disc” I gave no thought to whether or not I’d be listening to it in middle-age. I also didn’t necessarily think that I wouldn’t. CDs were the format of the future, I’d never seen the internet, and had no reason to think my future wouldn’t have CDs. It was nary a concern as I plunked down my six bucks.

I have no problem finding on Spotify many of the compilations I cited, including the Carpenters tribute. But “Steal This Disc?” It’s not there. Possibly a victim of multiple ownership changes for parent label Rykodisc, combined with its very essence as a demonstration of the new physical format. Its materiality is entirely irrelevant with streaming. Can you “steal this stream?”

For the intrepid music hunter tiring of the cost and competition involved in uncovering obscure sounds on vinyl, I suggest plunging into the “Various Artists” section of your local compact disc vendor (or Goodwill). There’s gold to be found in those silver stacks.

The post In Praise of the Compilation CD appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’ve been making radio for just about as long as Audacity has been available, and the thing that I love about it is that it is always getting better. According the video posted above, they are still making it easier and more powerful and it’s still completely free.

The post Audacity, the free audio software, is always getting better. appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Non-commercial radio stations will join together to air 24 hours of the circadian rhythm emanating from the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Saturna Island, British Columbia this coming Earth Day, April 22. Produced by artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, the “Wetland Project” broadcast features a soundscape of birds, frogs, airplanes and more sounds of the natural and encroaching man-made world, that “engages listeners in real time and promotes a deeper awareness of, and a re-enchanted engagement with, the living environment.”

The project is an exercise in “slow radio” that “creates an immersive sonic space to contemplate what it means to be human in the ‘more-than-human world’ and to reflect upon what it means to listen in contested indigenous lands.”

Nine stations across Canada have signed on to air part or all of this year’s broadcast, and all non-commercial stations are invited to take part. In 2020, Local Public Radio in San Francisco even used the program to anchor a successful on-air fundraiser. Interested stations can learn more by emailing info@wetlandproject.com.

The broadcast is also available online and I tuned in throughout Earth Day last year. I had it on in the background and also took time to sit with focused listening, finding it all quite rewarding. And, really, what other platform besides community or college radio would dedicate more than a minute or so to sounds that invite patient and calm listening rather than demanding attention and action? I’m certainly looking forward to this year’s “Wetland Project.”

Feature image credit: Wetland Project

The post The Wetland Project Returns for Earth Day 2021 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Back in October 2019 I published a response to the breathless news reported across the tech, music and popular press that “vinyl outsold CDs” for the very first time. While true in terms of raw dollars, as I demonstrated, it wasn’t true in terms of volume. More than twice the number of CD albums were sold than vinyl – the revenue difference likely accountable to the fact that records now typically cost twice as much, or more, than the equivalent CD.

Now the sales numbers for all of 2020 are out, and the headlines look much the same as they did. It’s true that vinyl did hit a new sales peak not seen since the late 20th century, increasing its revenue lead over vinyl. In fact, the format’s take increased 28.7% over 2019, while CD’s share dropped 23%.

Nevertheless, 38% more CDs were sold – 31.6 million to vinyl’s 22.9 million. Clearly, the gap is closing. Yet, as audio writer John Darko points out, overall digital album sales outclassed both, at 33.1 million.

Of course, this all seems like peanuts compared to streaming revenue, which racks up $10bn, compared to a combined $1.1bn for physical formats.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-vinyl. I’m also not arguing that CDs are better. Rather, I’m an advocate for looking at the whole picture. In 2021 CDs are simply cheaper and easier to get made than vinyl records. So, while they’re declining in popularity, compact discs are still a very viable medium for distributing music in a physical format.

I stream music pretty much every day, and I buy downloads. But an internet outage or label pulling its catalog cuts off my stream in an instant, while one bad hard drive easily separates a person from their downloads. My CDs, and records, are still the most persistent way to own my most favorite music.

Moreover, the RIAA report does not account for the used market. There, too, vinyl is popular. But so are CDs (and cassettes). In its mid-year 2020 report, online marketplace Discogs said overall physical media sales were up 30% compared to the first half of 2019. Vinyl was up 34% and CDs were up 31%. In terms of raw volume, Discogs saw 5.8 million records change hands, compared to 1.7 million CDs.

Of course, we have to keep in mind that vinyl had a 40 year head start on CDs, and these are global numbers – compact disc was much more delayed in some countries compared to the US or Western Europe. Though I’m not betting that it will surpass used vinyl sales, I expect to see that used CD volume will continue to grow. It will be fueled by renewed interest in physical media, inflation in vinyl prices and concomitantly lower CD prices, combined with the fact that there are thousands of albums on compact disc that never saw a vinyl release that are still hard to find in legitimate digital streaming or download.

As I’ve proclaimed before, now is a great time for music lovers to either get back into CD or give the format a try, especially if the compromises of streaming aren’t quite cutting it for you. Used racks are bursting at the seems with bargains, as are eBay, Discogs and thrift stores. It used to be that way for a fair amount of used vinyl, too, about a decade ago. But just like with records, the compact disc bargains may not last as more listeners realize what is out there, and what they’re missing.

The post More New CDs than Vinyl Records Were Sold in 2020, Yet Again appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’m a bit of an audiophile, because I really enjoy music that is nicely reproduced, not because I’m up for dropping five figures on an audio component. One of the most enduring debates among audiophiles is analog vs. digital.

I don’t really take a position in this debate. I’ve owned a turntable since my age was in single digits, and never gave up my vinyl collection. I listen to records every week, but I’ve owned a CD player for 34 years. Convenience combined with darn good sound mean digital audio fills more hours of my day.

The recent news that the FCC approved all-digital AM broadcasting got me thinking about how radio is still a mostly analog sound medium, and arguably the most accessible and convenient one, at that. While digital HD Radio has made some inroads, in the US I’ll bet a strong majority of people tuned into live terrestrial radio are receiving an analog signal.

Analog partisans – many of whom also advocate for open reel tape in addition to vinyl – often argue that non-digital audio reproduction sounds more natural. Given that most music in the last decade or so was recorded digitally, they even posit that a digitally sourced recording sounds better when pressed into a vinyl LP than when heard on a CD or streaming service.

If that’s the case, then FM radio, in particular, deserves recognition as a great analog medium alongside records and open-reel tapes. In fact, I’ll argue that radio is the most accessible and ubiquitous sound medium in the world.

I have no doubt in my mind that most music heard on the radio is sourced digitally, whether from a CD, a hard drive or an automation system. At college, community and progressive-leaning commercial stations a small percentage of tunes still come from vinyl records played live on turntables. But I’ll even bet that a portion of those are first digitized for more convenient or time-shifted playback. Moreover, a lot of stations have transitioned to digital airchains, using digital mixing boards and networked components to more efficiently route signals between studios and transmitters.

Yet, in the end, right now all signals must end up as analog in order to be broadcast through the airwaves.

Fidelity vs. Processing

At the same time analog does not inherently equal high fidelity, just as digital fails the same equation. Plenty of music stations – especially commercial pop music stations – use processing that squeezes the life out of everything. Intended to make a station sound louder than adjacent ones, especially for listeners seeking across the dial, this compression makes everything sound shouty and eliminates any variation in dynamics that might have been in the original recording.

The overuse of compression in modern digital recordings is already a source of contention for many music lovers, with the controversy known as the “Loudness Wars.” But when you take an already over-compressed recording and put it through another stage of broadcast processing I find the result to be headache-inducing for more than a few minutes of listening.

Luckily, not every station pounds the hell out of its signal. I find many more college, community and public stations go a lot easier on the processing, letting more of the original dynamic range – the difference between softer and louder signals – come through. Classical stations, in particular, tend to have the lightest touch, since dynamics are considered especially vital to the form compared to rock, pop and R&B.

A little bit of audio processing is almost impossible to avoid in broadcast. In part, there’s a need to keep the softest passages above the noise floor. Even though FM stereo is pretty noise-free, there’s always a little bit of low-level static, which can be more prominent as you get further away from the transmitter. A little bit of compression helps keep the music comprehensible most of the time.

Unfortunately, there’s also the need to keep up with the Jonses. When surrounding stations are keeping the needle pegged in the red, your station risks sounding obscurely quiet by comparison. You may have experienced this phenomenon when spinning the dial in the car. You’re listening to one station at a reasonably volume, then switch to the next and feel like you get blown into the back seat. That’s because the second station is overusing (or abusing) processing and compression to sound louder, at the expense of fidelity.

Fidelity AND Processing

This might seem like I’m saying broadcast processing and compression is a bad thing, or a necessary evil. That’s not necessarily the case. Keep in mind that all music is processed and compressed for distribution. Music that goes to vinyl also goes through some processing that in some ways is pretty similar to broadcast processing. There are peculiarities inherent to vinyl records that need to be compensated for, one of which is a smaller dynamic range than you have with digital recordings (or open reel tapes); a little compression helps keep the music above the clicks, pops and surface noise, and can keep the stylus from physically jumping out of the groove. Though high-end vinyl playback systems can achieve pretty impressive dynamics, in practice a good FM broadcast and decent vinyl record are roughly equivalent.

That said, one might argue that playing vinyl on broadcast radio subjects the music to double-processing. In that case, you could say that playing a CD or digital recording on the radio might yield the best results.

Still, all that is just hypothetical perfectionist prognostication, with real-world effects that are mighty difficult to detect. For most people, analog FM radio sounds pretty good, especially where it matters most: in their vehicles. Compared to portable bluetooth speakers and skinny soundbars, the oft-forgotten car stereo is possibly most people’s best sound system.

I’m not claiming that analog FM radio is the ultimate in high fidelity. Though, having tuned in a ton of internet feeds for World Radio Day this past weekend, I can attest that the online stream for a lot of broadcast stations is unmistakably inferior to what you hear on air. Rather, I’m saying that if there is still value in analog sound, then we must include radio in the mix.

Listen, digital audio is here to stay, and I, for one, won’t be tilting at that windmill. But there are aesthetic and fidelity reasons to enjoy, and sometimes prefer analog audio.

I’m not here to convince anyone to give up their streaming account, YouTube or internet station. But if you enjoy vinyl and care about sound at all, fire up an analog radio sometime, particularly if you haven’t in a while. Tune around to the left end of the dial and you might be surprised in what you experience. Find yourself a full-bodied table radio, a receiver connected to a nice set of speakers or a good car radio and you’re probably in for a treat.

The post Radio Is the World’s Most Accessible & Popular Analog Sound Medium appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Updated Feb. 6, 2021

Last year I was in New Zealand during the Super Bowl season. In the week before I was hiking the Milford Track on the South Island, backpacking for four days across 33 miles, away from internet and television (though I did pack a little travel radio). For the actual game I was in the capitol city of Wellington, but I didn’t even try to watch because I actually don’t care much at all about football. 

I am, however, fascinated by the global phenomenon, and figuring out how radio listeners can tune in to hear it. But, due to my vacation I didn’t write my annual “how to listen to the Super Bowl” post in 2020. Even some six months ago I wasn’t sure there would be a Super Bowl to write about in 2021. But here we are with the Buccaneers facing off against returning champions the Chiefs for Super Bowl LV on Sunday, Feb. 7, 2021 at 6:30 PM EST.

US Super Bowl Radio Broadcasts

In the US it’s pretty easy to find a Westwood One Sports terrestrial radio affiliate carrying the game. Some stations black out their internet feed, and it’s generally hard to predict which ones will. However, I’ve found that clicking around will eventually land you on a functioning live stream. Note that your experience may vary depending on what state or country you’re connecting from.

A reliable internet radio stream can be had with a NFL Game Pass subscription.

The Super Bowl will be broadcast in Spanish on Entravision stations in 24 US radio markets.

Satellite radio subscribers can listen in on SiriusXM channel 104 in the US. Canadian subscribers have it on XM 88. Both are also available online. (Full disclosure: I’m an employee of Stitcher, a subsidiary of SiriusXM Holdings, but that has no influence on including this listing).

International Super Bowl Broadcasts

It’s also easy to find a television broadcast just about anywhere on the globe. But radio is much more of a challenge. Yet not everyone is in a position to watch a screen – whether they’re working or driving, or are visually impaired. For many folks the most descriptive radio play-by-play is the best or most appropriate experience. That’s why my annual quest is to find broadcasters all over the world that carry the game. 

On terrestrial radio, our neighbors to the north in Canada can reliably follow the Super Bowl on the TSN Radio Network in Montreal, Ottawa, Hamilton, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver. To the south, Mexican listeners can tune in to W Radio and W Radio Deportes, as well as Los 40.

Further afield, Australians will be able to hear the game called by a home-grown announcer for the fourth year in a row on SEN 1116. In the past years I’ve been able to listen to this broadcast live online without problem.

UK rights to the game seem to bounce around different networks, but this year Super Bowl 55 will be heard on BBC 5 Live. In my experience the online stream is geofenced so that only UK audiences can catch it.

People serving in the American Armed Forces deployed around the world, as well as those who live near a base, can hear the big game on AFN Radio. Military personnel can also hear it the online streaming via AFN 360. 

Otherwise I haven’t been able to track down terrestrial radio broadcasts anywhere else in the world. Please send me your tip if I’m missing one.

Here’s where to listen to Super Bowl LV live from Tampa, FL on the radio, Sunday, February 7:

Terrestrial Radio

United States

English: Westwood One Sports affiliate stations

Spanish: Entravision stations

Canada

TSN Radio – Edmonton, Hamilton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg

Australia

1116 AM SEN Victoria / 1629 AM SEN South Australia
(also online)

Mexico

W Radio

Los 40

United Kingdom

BBC 5 Live (also online in the UK)

Armed Forces Network

Armed services members deployed overseas can listen via AFN Radio on satellite, and AFN 360 Internet Radio.

Internet Radio

NFL Game Pass (subscription required)

Possibly: Westwood One Sports A on TuneIn

Ultimate Sports Radio Network (added Feb. 6)

Satellite and Internet Radio

United States

SiriusXM Super Bowl Radio 104

Canada

XM 88

Is there a terrestrial, online or satellite radio broadcast of the Super Bowl we’re missing? Please let us know.

The post How to Listen to Super Bowl LV on the Radio Around the World, Feb. 7 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

For the first time in a while I needed to dip into my dwindling archive of cassette tape airchecks. A couple of tapes immediately caught my eye and spurred me to restart the digitizing project I’ve been working on and off for the last five years. They took me on a fun journey back in time.

A Micropower Radio Forum in 1998

The first is a recording from a “Micropower Radio Forum” in Berkeley, California, which brought together 1990s community radio activists in celebration of the publication of the book “Seizing the Airwaves,” edited by Free Radio Berkeley founder Stephen Dunifer and radical scholar Ron Sakolsky. Recorded in February 1998, I remembered that I actually sourced the audio from an online archive uploaded to the A-Infos Radio Project, one of the first open internet archives for progressive and radical radio programming.

I had recorded these MP3 audio files to cassette in order to play excerpts on my radio show, “Radio Free Conscience,” which aired biweekly on Community Radio WEFT in Champaign, IL from 1996 to 2002. You see, in 1998 we (like most community stations) didn’t have an audio-capable PC in our main studio, nor any digital playback facility. Therefore the simplest way to bring the audio in was on a cassette. (The station would embrace minidisc for digital recording and playback later that year.)

Upon finding this tape I immediately searched A-Infos and found its entry. Unfortunately many early uploads have become dissociated from their database entries, and a half-hour of searching the site and the internet didn’t turn up the original files. That’s why I decided I should go ahead and digitize the tape now.

I had to take some delight in the path this audio took in its journey back onto the internet. Since cassettes were still the dominant amateur recording technology in 1998, there’s a good chance that the original audio was recorded to tape, then digitized to MP3 for distribution on the internet. Then I downloaded it and recorded that audio to cassette. After being broadcast on FM radio – with no known aircheck – it sat undisturbed for nearly 13 years until I again digitized the audio. I have now uploaded it to the Internet Archive.

This program is significant because it captures a moment in time when unlicensed micropower radio stations were going on the air in communities around the US, as an act of civil disobedience against the FCC’s policy of not licensing low-powered stations. The pressure these illegal community stations put on the FCC would help spur the agency to create low-power FM in 2000.

In this particular program you can hear from a principal of San Francisco Liberation Radio, one of several Bay Area micropower stations in operation at the time. Though somewhat well known then, the memory seems somewhat faded now. You can also hear testimony from prominent activists about why the cause of accessible community radio was so trenchant at the end of the 20th century.

Tree Radio Berkeley

The other tape is also from 1998. It’s a 90-minute aircheck of Tree Radio Berkeley, which was an unlicensed low-power radio station that literally broadcast from a tree in a Berkeley, California park for 11 days in November 1998. In this recording you can hear the hosts taking questions from an elementary school field trip below, sending their questions first by yelling, and then later by what sounds like a walkie-talkie. What’s great about this is that you get to hear the organizers explain what they’re doing, and why.

The FCC, aided by federal marshals, had conducted a number of armed raids on unlicensed radio stations that year, which were fresh on the organizers’ minds.

The funny thing is that I can’t remember how I obtained the tape. The recording is very clear and high quality. It almost sounds like it was recorded in-studio rather than from a radio. The handwriting on the tape is not mine, either. But again, I can’t remember who might’ve passed it along to me.

Of course, I also uploaded the Tree Radio Berkeley aircheck to the Internet Archive.

Though unlicensed radio is still very alive, especially in places like Boston, South Florida and the New York Metro area, I think it’s important to remember that the civil disobedience of the unlicensed micropower radio movement in the 1990s helped to fuel what would turn out to be the greatest flowering of community radio in history in the 21st century. It’s a reminder that people and communities can organize for material change that can have lasting impact.

The post Preserving Pieces of Microradio History appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Catch Alice’s Restaurant on the 2023 radio dial. See our latest listening guide.

Happy Thanksgiving week 2020! Time once again for the cross-country “Alice’s Restaurant” radio listening party. As we approach our annual harvest celebration in the United States, the coronavirus is still swirling, with cases spiking across the country. Holidays have been upended due to the public health crisis and it’s strongly recommended that we not gather in groups with friends and family around the Thanksgiving table. Because of that, many of us are breaking with tradition and dispensing with some of our long-standing rituals, from cooking massive turkeys to inviting extended family into our homes.

As we adapt to a different sort of Thanksgiving this year, you can still enjoy the socially distanced custom of tuning in to “Alice’s Restaurant” on your radio dial. With so much in flux, this will be a welcome bit of nostalgia for listeners who look forward to hearing the song on Thanksgiving Day. Similarly, for those who dread forced family listening sessions, this year’s distanced holiday may be an auditory respite.

This year there’s even more reason to celebrate, as 2020 marks the 55th anniversary of the 1965 Thanksgiving day events that inspired Arlo Guthrie to pen his 18+ minute anti-Vietnam War story-song. Pressed to vinyl in 1967, it’s a seasonal staple on many rock, college, public, and community radio stations. Some stations even play it multiple times on turkey day, allowing for fans to catch it while on the road, during dinner preparations, amid the meal or while socializing. Perhaps this year, there will even be scheduled listening parties over Zoom, text strings, live chats, or twitter conversations while people listen at the same time.

If you’re lucky, you might also be able to hear a special message on your local station from the woman, Alice Brock, who plays a central role in both the title and story of “Alice’s Restaurant.” She’s our guest on this week’s Radio Survivor show and podcast, which has just been released on the evening on November 24, 2020. After penning these radio station listening guides for over a decade, it was certainly a thrill to speak with THE Alice! She’s fallen on hard times, so I’d also encourage anyone able to visit her GoFundMe campaign.

If you’re eager for more insight into “Alice’s Restaurant,” don’t miss the new video interview with Arlo Guthrie over at the Bruce Springsteen Archives. Guthrie speaks not only about the song, but also about his recent announcement that he’s retiring from touring. Also, Jon Kalish tweets that on Thanksgiving, the radio shows/podcast 1A is airing a “segment on Arlo Guthrie’s anti-war classic Alice’s Restaurant. The segment chronicles the song’s debut on Bob Fass’ late-night show on WBAI, Radio Unnameable.” He adds, “The segment leads off an hour-long special on the National Recording Registry. You’ll hear an excerpt of Guthrie’s debut of Alice’s Restaurant on Radio Unnameable, as well as Bob Fass recalling that night. Other voices: Alice Brock, folkie Cathy Fink & of course Arlo Guthrie.”

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I will continue to update this list as I learn of additional stations leading up to Thanksgiving.

Pre-Thanksgiving Listening Options:

Some stations play “Alice’s Restaurant before Thanksgiving. Catch an irreverent version on KFJC 89.7 FM (Los Altos Hills, CA) around 7:30pm on Tuesday, November 24 and then a regular version around 9:30am on Wednesday, November 25. KKUP 91.5 FM (Cupertino, CA) played “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am on Tuesday 11/24. WYEP 91.3 in Pittsburgh, PA played it on Sunday, November 22nd at 1pm. WFVR-LP 96.5 FM Royalton Radio (South Royalton, VT) aired it at 5pm on Monday, November 24.

Risky Business Hayseed Hoot radio show from November 21, 2020 includes a 1997 live version of “Alice’s Restaurant,” airing on various affiliate stations, including KJIV 96.5 FM (Bend, OR), KJYV (The Dalles, OR), KORC 105.9 FM (Corvallis, OR), KYAC 94.9 FM (Mill City, OR), KUNR 88. 7 FM (Reno, NV), KPHT-LP 99.9 FM (Laytonville, CA), KTRT The Root 97. 5FM (Methow Valley, Washington), KGFN 89. 1FM (Goldfield, NV), KDUP 88.1 FM (Surprise Valley, CA). Check with these stations for specific air dates and times.

Alice’s Restaurant on the Radio on Thanksgiving Day 2020 – November 26, 2020

Last updated on November 26, 2020 at 9:54am PT. Note that all times are local to the area in which the station is located.

Terrestrial Radio:

WXPN 88.5 FM in Philadelphia, PA will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12noon as it does every year. It’s amid a day’s line-up starting at 6am that they dub “XPN Classics Thanksgiving.” Following “Alice’s Restaurant,” WXPN will play the Band’s Last Waltz at 4pm.

KPCW 91. 7 FM in Park City, Utah will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12noon as it has been doing since the station began in 1980! Other holiday programming on Thanksgiving Day includes “Giving Thanks” at 9am and pre-recorded cooking tips on “Turkey Confidential” at 10am.

Frosty 105.7 FM (Part 15 station in Ventura, CA) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 9am, 2pm, 3pm and 5pm on Thanksgiving Day, 11/26/20.

WXRT 93.1 FM in Chicago, Illinois will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon and 8pm on Thanksgiving.

Arkansas Rocks stations throughout Arkansas will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon CST on Thanksgiving.

WDVX 89.9 FM in Knoxville, Tennesee is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

WPLR 99.1 FM in New Haven, CT will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 6am, noon, and 6pm.

KZHP 93.3 FM K-ZAP (Sacramento, CA) writes on Twitter, “…we continue a tradition as American as friends, turkey and gravy by playing ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ on Thursday at 10a & 6p PST. Tune in for an amazing story by a legendary storyteller.”

WGXC 90.7 FM aka Wave Farm (Acra, New York) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” on the “WGXC Morning Show” between 9am to 11am. The station writes on Twitter, “Thursday tune in holiday traditions such as Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” Rush Limbaugh’s “The True Story of Thanksgiving,” WKRP’s “Turkey Drop,” William S. Burroughs’ “Thanksgiving Prayer,” Andy Griffith’s “What it Was, Was Football,” and more @WGXC 90.7-FM.” Later in the evening at 7pm, WGXC airs an interview with Alice Brock from a few years ago. Their full lineup of holiday programming includes shows about Thanksgiving radio traditions (2am) and rituals (11am).

WXOX 97.1 FM ARTxFM (Louisville, Kentucky) will play “Alice’s Restaurant at 10am on Thanksgiving.

WFUV 90.7 FM (Bronx, NY) is playing “Alice’s Restaurant at 12 noon as part of its Thanksgiving Feastival.

Wyoming Public Radio is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am during the Wyoming Sounds Thanksgiving Special (9am-noon). The program will include “roots music, Native American and Wyoming artists along with the Arlo Guthrie Thanksgiving classic Alice’s Restaurant beginning at 11:00 a.m. with a special introduction from the original restauranteur Alice Brock.”

KBCO 97.3 FM (Denver, Colorado) airs “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

WTTS 92.3 FM (Indianapolis/Bloomington, Indiana) is airing “Alice’s Restaurant” at 8am, noon and 8pm.

WDRV 97.1 FM The Drive (Chicago, IL) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 6am, noon, and 4pm.

KOZT 95.3 FM/95.9 FM The Coast (Ft. Bragg, CA) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12 noon on Thanksgiving.

WAFX 106.9 The Fox (Hampton Roads, VA) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon on Thanksgiving day.

WRHQ 105.3 FM (Savannah, Georgia) plans to play “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving Day at 9:30am, 12:30pm and 6:30pm.

WNCW 88.7 FM (Spindale, NC) will air Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” just past Noon, and again at 9pm.

WERS 88.9 FM in Boston writes that the station “continues our long tradition of playing Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, with Jersey Hal, at 11am on Thanksgiving!”

KNHS 102.3 FM/91.9 FM (Haines, Alaska) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 3:30pm on Thanksgiving. The station has a line-up of special programming on Thursday and Friday, including “Turkey Confidential” and music appropriate to the season.

KXT 91.7FM (North Texas Public Broadcasting) reported via tweet: “It’s a KXT tradition! Tune in at noon and 6pm to KXT 91.7 FM for all 18+ minutes of Arlo Guthrie’s classic, ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ on Thanksgiving Day.”

WUMB 91.9 FM (Boston, MA and environs) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” three times on Thanksgiving this year “at the top of the 9am, 12pm and 3pm hours on Thursday!” according to its website.

KINK 101.9 FM (Portland, OR): Per its website, “Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant has been a KINK Thanksgiving tradition for over 30 years. Catch it twice on Thanksgiving Day (November 26th) this year, 12pm and 5pm.”

WLVQ 96.3 FM (Columbus, OH): Per its website, “Tune in this Thanksgiving Day around 6am, Noon, and 6pm to hear Alice’s Restaurant, a Qfm96 tradition.”

KTYD 99.9 FM (Santa Barbara, CA): The station reports on Facebook that they will play “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving at 6am, 9am, noon, 3pm AND 6pm.

MVY Radio (88.7 FM Martha’s Vineyard, MA and 96.5 FM Newport, Rhode Island) reports on Twitter on Thanksgiving Day: “Nothing beats a holiday tradition! We will play ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ by @folkslinger at noon today! And tonight at 9PM, we will play the full ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ album! Happy Thanksgiving!”

KQRS-FM 92.5FM (Minneapolis, Minnesota) is playing the epic song at noon and 7pm on Thanksgiving.

WVNW 91.7 FM (Scranton, PA) at Marywood University is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at 6pm.

KKSM AM 1320, Cox Digital Cable 957 (San Marcos, CA) at Palomar College is playing “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12pm and 5pm.

Online Radio Stations:

Backland Radio (online) writes on Twitter, “It’s a Whip tradition – Tune in on Thanksgiving to hear Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie four times at 8am, 12 noon, 5pm and 9pm Central time on The Whip at http://backlandradio.com.”

The post Thanksgiving Radio Tradition withstands the Pandemic as “Alice’s Restaurant” Hits the 2020 Airwaves appeared first on Radio Survivor.

You may have watched The Vast of Night already. It has been out for about year on Amazon Studios (aka Amazon Prime). But if not and you can, it is a must see not only for Twilight Zone style sci-fi fans, but for devotees of prior broadcasting/telecom environments, in this case the 1950s. The Vast of Night tells the story of two frenetic southwestern teenage geeks who bond while on the verge of having a Close Encounter.

In the small fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico there is a radio station, WTOW, which runs a popular Saturday night rockabilly show hosted by Everett Sloan, a cocky and confident nineeen year old. Just before getting to his job, he tries to help his alma mater, Cayuga High, with some electrical wiring problems interfering with the public address system. It is urgent, since Cayuga is hosting an important basketball game with a rival. A lengthy discussion ensues about invading chipmunks electrocuting themselves. Then Everett runs into his friend Fay Crocker, she three years his junior and hopeful that he will help her learn how to use her newly purchased Westinghouse portable reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Everett walks Fay to her job as the town telephone exchange’s night switchboard operator, which happens to be near his radio station. The two take turns saying things into the recorder. “Are you a member of the Communist Party!?” he demands in a faux congressional voice. She summarizes Popular Mechanics type articles forecasting trains that will take commuters from Manhattan to San Francisco in two hours. Everett starts his show and Fay begins her shift. But then she gets a call full of strange radio signal noises. Intrigued, she patches the audio over to Everett’s studio. He quickly decides to broadcast the noises, asking his audience if they sound familiar. Fay worries if that could get in him trouble somehow. “I don’t care,” Everett responds. “It’s good radio!” When a retired Black-American Army vet calls in to say he knows exactly what those signals are, the duo discover that they’re in for a very strange ride.

The Vast of Night is a movie that takes its time, and thus serves as a wonderful reminder that every generation has its cutting edge telecom landscape, run by people who in their minds and hearts live in the future. As I watched, memories danced in my head of my first portable tape recorder, conversations with actual telephone operators, and New Jersey radio hosts suddenly going spontaneous. I was not crazy about the film’s less-than-subtle ending. But I loved watching Everett and Fay, both charming with their thick angular 1950s eyeglasses, connect and start finish each other’s sentences, long before their first date.

The post The Vast of Night: a vast 1950s community radio/telecom fantasia appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I got my first Sonos speaker more than five years ago, and since then I’ve installed a speaker in nearly every room of my small house (except the bathrooms). Just a few weeks ago I treated myself to the rechargeable and portable Sonos Move so I can better enjoy music in my back yard.

Though there are many more networked audio systems out there, with some reported to offer higher fidelity, I’ve stuck with Sonos because the system is pretty intuitive, sounds very good and supports the widest array of audio services. The latter reason is why I wrote that “My Sonos Is an Internet Radio” in 2015.

Earlier this year Sonos made internet radio even more accessible by rolling out the simply named Sonos Radio. The key value of Sonos Radio is that it offers a bevy of curated internet stations to every Sonos owner, whether or not you have an account for any other service, free or paid.

What I appreciate about Sonos Radio is that they didn’t choose just one partner. There are stations from both the iHeart and TuneIn directories, which means you’ll find nearly most local broadcast stations as well as plenty of internet-only ones, from local to international.

Sonos Radio: From Cruise to Chill

Sonos also has about three dozen of its own stations across most genres, from hip-hop to show tunes. Though I was skeptical at first, they quickly won me over.

One of my “guilty pleasures” is the genre now known as Yacht Rock, thanks to the parodical early YouTube series of the same name. While I enjoy the soothing melodies of Michael McDonald, Steely Dan and Christopher Cross, I find most yacht rock styled internet radio to be either too Catholic, maintaining a too-tight playlist centered only on the most well-known hits, or too soft, serving me too much Bread and America, and not enough sophisticated pop.

With a bit of trepidation I dialed up Sonos Radio’s “Soft Rock / Yacht Rock” station, Cruise Control. I got some tasty Michael McDonald-era Doobie Brothers right off the bat, but then I heard some Phoenix. Originating in the 21st century I didn’t expect to hear the latter band, but their smooth but sophisticated sound totally fit in with the groove. Clearly the Sonos Radio programmers were more fixated on the idea of Yacht Rock rather than a frozen-in-time definition. Since then Cruise Control has been on my backyard chilling-with-a-drink rotation along with the more indie-rock focused Sunset Chill.

Other Sonos stations follow a similar familiar-but-just-different-enough pattern to make them stand out in the sea of ultra-genrefied (and calcified) internet stations. My only quibble with Sonos Radio is that it’s ad supported, and mostly the same ther ads from well-known national radio advertisers are in heavy rotation. Luckily the ad load is low – maybe three or four an hour at most.

AccuRadio Shows a Human Touch

I also want to give a shout out to AccuRadio, which requires a free account to use with Sonos, but that’s it. The service has 1000 stations across 50 genres, and can get very, delightfully, specific. My favorites right now are World Fusion, which melds jazz and world music – but not remotely in an easy listening way – and 1980s Alternative, which doesn’t hew as closely to new wave and synth pop as similar channels from other services, adding in a healthy dose of punk, post-punk, industrial and guitar rock.

All of AccuRadio’s stations are curated by humans and you can tell. There are enough deep cuts and left-field choices mixed in with more familiar tracks to keep you interested over the course of many hours of listening.

The post My Sonos Is Now an Even Better Internet Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Thanks to our intrepid and loyal readers I’ve learned a bit more about the mystery signal I reported on last week.

To recap, I DX’d a station at 1700 AM – a frequency with very few stations assigned across the continent – that simply played 80s pop music, with station IDs that were difficult for me to suss out, though they seemed to be in Spanish. I surmised it to be XEPE-AM in Tecate, Mexico.

Two readers emailed to confirm my identification. Eric, who lives north of me in Lake Stevens, WA, wrote that, “XEPE on 1700 kHz does indeed play English pop songs, especially from the ’80s or so, when it needs to fill time between the Spanish language talk shows. I was confused the first time I heard that as well.”

Chris, a “a fan of casual DXing AM,” shares his journey:

I checked that frequency right away to see what was there.  (I am in Pleasanton, near the SF Bay Area of California.) Being only about 4:00pm or so at the time, there was nothing to hear, no surprise there…

Later, my wife and kids and I drove out to a park at about 9:00pm to try to see the Neowise comet, and on the way I told them I wanted to try the station I read about.  They know I like to find oddball AM stations and the kids (11 y.o. twins) “allowed” me a minute away from their pop FM stations.

Well, that same station in Tecate made itself apparent, with the Four Seasons’ “Who Loves You” from 1975, clear as a bell.  Didn’t even get the whole song in before the kids shut it down, from the rear console of our ‘03 Odyssey, their own little radio command center, but I was satisfied that I had found it.  On our way back home, after not seeing the comet, I hit the station again and caught a few crumbs of Carol Douglas doing “Doctors Orders” from 1974.

Chris was later able to tune it in from home on his (Jay Allen approved) Sangean PR-D18. Awoken by his cat a little before 5 AM, he heard the transition from music into talk programming.

Teacher and scholar Sonia Robles authored a book on border radio from the Mexican perspective, “Mexican Waves,” and dropped us a line to assure us, “-honestly- that Mexicans love 80s and 90s US music.”

Of course, we were very excited to hear from Sonia, and have booked her for a forthcoming episode of our radio show and podcast. You can read a review of her book in Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

We also heard from our old friend Tha Dood, who reminded me that a rare breed of AM pirates like to use 1700 and 1710 AM, for two reasons. First, these frequencies are relatively clear of licensed stations. 1710, in particular, is reserved for Travelers Information Stations (TIS), operated at low power by state and local governments to provide travel advisories and tourist information.

The other reason is that because these are the highest frequencies on the AM band, they also have relatively short wavelengths, making it a little more efficient to transmit with a shorter antenna. Mind you, the word relative is operative here – 530 kHz AM has a wavelength of 1800 feet, while 1700 kHz AM is 578 feet. Generally speaking, you want your transmission antenna to be like a half or quarter of that length, but could get away with a smaller fraction. (For comparison, 88.1 mHz FM has a wavelength of just 11 feet.)

I’ve never heard an AM (mediumwave) pirate here in the Pacific Northwest, and the ones I’ve seen reported on message boards like HF Underground seem to be primarily on the US East Coast or in Europe. Greece, Turkey and the Netherlands seem to be particular hotspots.

All of this should be an incentive to take a journey to the right end of the AM dial with a decent radio every so often. You never know what you might hear.

The post Confirmations of 1700 (AM) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Before going to bed I often enjoying scanning the radio dials, listening for signals that don’t come through while the sun is out. A couple of weeks ago the AM band was particularly fertile, especially at the upper end of the dial. These frequencies north of 1600 kHz are known as the “expanded band” because they were added to the service in 1990.

Some factors aiding the reception of distant signals on these frequencies are that there are relatively few stations, and they are limited to a maximum of 1 kilowatt of power at night. That limited power of course is a limitation on overall propagation, but when conditions are right it can mean pretty good long-distance catches.

I received one station over the course of several nights that particularly fascinated me. At 1700 kHz I heard continuous 80s pop music – think Huey Lewis and the News – with an intermittent station ID that was hard to make out, as the signal faded in and out. On the occasions when the ID was clearer I’m pretty sure it was in Spanish, but difficult to understand. Even over the course one hour-long listening session I never heard even one commercial, or anything but the short ID or pop songs.

Very few stations are assigned this frequency – just seven in North America in fact. Looking the list of 1700 AM stations in the US, none is closer than 1400 miles away from my Portland, OR location (that station is in Des Moines, IA). While a couple stations have a Spanish language format, they don’t seem like they’d be playing American 80s pop.

At 949 miles, the closest station is actually in Tecate, Mexico, part of the Tijuana metro area. Unlike the US stations, XEPE-AM broadcasts with 10,000 watts at night. While still about a fifth of clear-channel power, that much signal in a relatively uncrowded band also helps explain why it can come in well on occasion in Oregon.

According to Wikipedia the station has a news-talk format, but that’s not what I’m hearing after dark. It might be that’s the daytime format, and perhaps it reverts to automated music at night just to fill the time. I don’t have a better explanation.

I wasn’t equipped to get a recording of the station, and it hasn’t been coming in clear since about July 6. The radio I’m using is a C.Crane CCRadio 2, which was designed to have excellent AM reception. Radio guru ‘Radio’ Jay Allen says, [f]or raw sensitivity the CC-2 is right up there with the best.”

I’ll keep trying with a recorder handy to see if I can’t get an aircheck to share. Otherwise, let me know if you have another theory on the station’s identity.

The post DX Adventures at 1700 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As the Remain at Home era uneasily subsides, the time approaches when I will return to my car and resume driving up and down the Highway 1 to get to and from UC Santa Cruz, where I teach history. That means that I will plug my iPhone into my Honda Fit and listen to my playlists on Spotify. And the other day I was thinking to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plug a little widget into your playlist that allowed Spotify to pick just one tune based on its AI take on your choices?”

So, for example, here’s my Schubert piano music list:

My imaginary widget would allow me to insert a “wild card” entry into some numerical place on the playlist, spot number four, perhaps. There Spotify would make its own choice, based on its own reading of my list. That would not be difficult, in this instance. After all, the playlist is very clear: Schubert + Piano Music. Duh. For more complicated lists perhaps the widget would allow users to input a set of criteria for the wild card, eg: Broadway Musicals + Fifties + Sixties, for example.

The point of this feature would be to try to keep the playlist fresh. One inevitably gets bored with one’s playlists. Here is a possible way that they could be programmed to stay interesting. Users could even insert the widget into their playlist more than once, allowing two, three, or even four moments of uncertainty.

I should mention that Spotify offers something along these lines: its collaborative playlist option. This allows groups of users to team up in the creation of playlists. Admittedly, in comparison to this my suggestion is kind of lazy, even complacent perhaps. And who knows whether Spotify is really up to the task of adding tunes to our playlists that measure up to our own rigorous and exacting standards for entertainment?

Still, the idea might turn out to be fun.

The post The case for a Spotify wild card widget appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The other day I went to a Zoom postcard campaign writing party. About forty people attended the event, and they were a lively, entertaining bunch. But what I found most interesting about the afternoon is that at some point our Zoom room doubled as a radio station.

There we were, all busily writing postcards to the voter addresses that we had been given, and suddenly Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” began streaming out of our computers. As the music continued, I asked the host how she was doing this. 

“Well, I’m just playing my speaker into the laptop microphone,” she replied.

It sounded quite good for such a simple arrangement. I suppose that another way to do it would to access “share screen,” then check off “share computer sound,” then play a Youtube music video – or something like that.

Maybe at some point Zoom will come up with a music background feature not dissimilar to its “choose virtual background” option in video settings. Until then, an external speaker or “share computer sound” seem like good options. 

The post Turning Zoom into a radio channel appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This is the last entry of my diary of thoughts on Walter Benjamin’s radio talks. The anthology of his programs, from which I have been quoting for some time, concludes with an unpublished essay titled “Reflections on Radio.”

“Every child recognizes that it is in the interest of radio to bring anyone before the microphone at any opportunity,” Benjamin wrote in 1930 or 1931, “making the public witness to interviews and conversations in which anyone might have a say.”

“While people in Russia” were capitalizing on this recognition, he continued, “here [Germany] the dull term ‘presentation’ rules, under whose auspices the practitioner confronts the audience almost unchallenged.” In response, audiences resort to “sabotage” in their reactions, he observed, mostly switching off the radio at particularly intolerable moments.

“It is not the remoteness of the subject matter,” Benjamin warned;

“this would often be a reason to listen for a while, uncommitted. It is the voice, the diction, the language—in short, too frequently the technological and formal aspect makes the most interesting shows unbearable, just as in a few cases it can captivate the listener with the most remote material. (There are speakers one listens to even for the weather report).”

All this reminds me of the contemporaneous comments of Bertolt Brecht, who in 1932 famously (at least in media studies circles) critiqued radio as “one-sided when it should be two- . . . “

“It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.”

Yet I can find nothing that Benjamin broadcast during his three or so years as a radio commentator that offered a version of his “public witness” model, much less Brecht’s two-sided proposal. Many of Benjamin’s wonderful talks focused on formal subjects: the history of an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, a visit to a brass factory, a tour of a public market, and reflections on the snarky cracks for which Berliners were famous. He did write radio plays for children. But it is unclear how those carefully scripted dramas created radio “in which anyone might have a say.”

Why this contradiction? Perhaps because while Benjamin hoped for a radio landscape that brought “anyone before the microphone,” he was also apprehensive of it. Like almost no other writer in his time, he saw the future, our present, and also saw its risks. In his famous 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction,” he sensed a world emerging in which the great masterpieces of the past could be reproduced and appropriated by ordinary people in infinite ways. He argued that with the expansion of publishing, almost everyone would become an author, even predicting that “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.”

But Benjamin also asked whether this revolution would be accompanied by a redistribution of power in society, or would be offered as a sop to the public. “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate,” he warned. “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”

I wonder, as I write these words, whether we are living through Walter Benjamin’s nightmare version of the future. Today we can copy everything, download everything, sample everything, and scream to our heart’s content on Twitter. Meanwhile most of the world’s actual property remains safely in the hands of a tiny percentage of the human race. Benjamin must have sensed this possibility as he carefully composed his essays for Radio Frankfurt and Radio Berlin. He certainly predicted its fruition in our time.

Yet his legacy should be understood as so much more than that. What stands out in Walter Benjamin’s radio talks is his intense love of life: of cities, food, urban legends, children, theater, history, philosophy, jokes, open markets, literature, and technology. Using his radio shows as a vehicle, Benjamin took the time to relish and celebrate most of what he saw, smelled, tasted, or heard over the course of each of his days. We would be wise to follow his example over the course of ours, at least as best we can.

The post What did Walter Benjamin think radio was for? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Community and college radio stations are unique in broadcasting because in addition to being important community services, many are also a community crossroads, hosting dozens or hundreds of people in their studios and spaces in any given week. That means the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic poses a specific challenge for these broadcasters.

KPFA’s “UpFront” co-host Brian Edwards-Tiekert and National Federation of Community Broadcasters program director Ernesto Aguilar join to help us understand how college and community stations should deal with the pandemic on and off the air. As a community journalist, Brian has been on the front lines of helping Bay Area listeners get the best information and advice. He has recommendations for how stations should address critical information, and misinformation, on air, and how they can frame issues for vital community discussion.

Ernesto observes that the pandemic is a “learning opportunity” for stations to be sure they have an emergency response plan that keeps them on air, even if functioning with just one staff, volunteer or engineer. Having automation can be one important tool, causing him to warn that the current situation is a “wake up call” for stations that have resisted the technology as a “badge of honor.”

We also review feedback from listeners and readers who let us know how the stations where they work and volunteer are managing the pandemic.

Show Notes:

• KPFA UpFront
• Brian Edwards-Tiekert shares thoughtful, well-researched advice on Twitter
• Ernesto Aguilar in Radio World: Community Broadcaster: COVID-19 Concerns
• National Federation of Community Broadcasters: Coronavirus Resources For Community Radio

The post Podcast #237 – How Community & College Radio Can Deal with COVID-19 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As we enter our second decade of everything-digital-on-demand, the desire for tactile media only seems to grow new buds. By now the vinyl resurgence is old news, and while mainstream publications still gasp or tsk-tsk at the cassette revival, I think we can safely say the tape medium has retaken a beachhead, too.

Today is all about the minidisc. Quite literally, because it’s been declared International Minidisc Day.

Yet, even I, a longtime minidisc user and aficionado, find this new holiday a bit curious. Before I explain, a little history is in order.

Long a format of choice for grassroots and independent radio production, the humble minidisc bridged us from the end of tape days in the early 90s to the full maturation of solid-state digital audio recorders in the mid- to late-2000s. Sony, the format’s originator, imagined the little digital discs as an eventual replacement for the compact cassette. In 1992 this was a plausible proposition, because it offered near-CD quality digital recording in a smaller and more robust package. Sony – and a few other labels – even released several dozen pre-recorded minidiscs to provide an alternative to pre-recorded cassettes, already in steep decline.

But in the days before CD-Rs and iPods it was minidisc’s digital recording capability that was the real attraction. Due to that, MD did become a cassette replacement for millions of people around the world who recorded their own mix minidiscs or just dubbed over their CDs for more convenient listening on the go.

Even In its heyday of the 90s and 2000s minidisc never really took off as a medium for distributing music. I knew plenty of musicians and radio producers recording on the format, but the end products ended up on the radio, on CDs and eventually online.

This might seem odd, since independent musicians and labels distributed on cassettes from the 70s through to today, and once CD-Rs came down in price in the late 90s, they, too, spawned their own music underground. But not minidisc… at least not in the United States.

It’s true minidisc was never as popular in the U.S. as in Japan or the U.K., even though millions of recorders and players were sold here. It’s just that they never reached the kind of per capita penetration of cassettes, CDs or even 8-tracks. It seems to me that running a minidisc-only label even 2003 would have been just too limiting, though I don’t doubt that there must have been some limited or one-off releases.

Coming back to today, Minidisc Day, the funny thing is that the celebration is modeled after Record Store Day, in that record labels are releasing albums on minidisc today. However, unlike Record Store Day, there are no actual brick-and-mortar retail stores participating, as far as I can tell. Instead, small independent labels are selling tiny runs of discs from their Bandcamp or web stores. Quantities seem to run in the tens up to maybe 100 per.

It’s funny because it’s actually kind of a new thing to have a minidisc label, rather than a revival. The labels and releases appear to be dominated by the vaporwave genre, which is itself an extremely post-modern reinterpretation of 1980s and 1990s music, culture and cliches through contemporary musical technology. Clearly there’s a strong harmony between the medium and the message that would make McLuhan smile.

Those 1990s pre-recorded minidisc releases were actually pressed like CDs in factories. All evidence indicates those pressing plants have been offline for nearly two decades. That means today’s minidisc releases have to be recorded onto blank discs, more like cassettes than CDs. Also like cassettes, this is something that an artist or label can do entirely themselves, or can outsource to a few companies that mass produce minidiscs. The advantage of the duplicators is that most will silk-screen art on the disc housing and print up professional looking cases. Those preferring the DIY look can of course just fire up their recorder and inkjet printer.

The International Minidisc Day labels and artists come largely from the UK, where most of those duplication houses also are. As I mentioned before, on a per capita basis minidisc was more popular there than in the U.S. Thus I suspect it has more cultural pull and the nostalgia is more prevalent than across the pond.

Although my minidisc players don’t get much use these days, except to archive old recordings, the whole enterprise of Minidisc Day makes me smile. I’m guessing that a lot of the artists and participants may not even have been alive when minidisc was invented, or even when it was popular(ish). That matters not to me. The point is to have fun and make things. By that score, mission accomplished.

That said, I don’t anticipate Minidisc Day to become even as popular as Cassette Store Day. There were never as many minidisc players as cassette players, and because they haven’t been manufactured in nine years, the number of working units will be in constant decline. Even though decent cassette decks also haven’t been manufactured in at least as long, you can still go to a local discount store or Urban Outfitters and pick up a player.

But I don’t think scale matters for this project. It’s a marriage of early-internet, home to minidisc fan sites, and contemporary internet, which takes for granted the rapid emergence of international memes-turned-movements. Not everything has to, or should scale. God knows that’s the story of most of my hobbies and passions.

¡Viva la minidisc!

The post Happy International Minidisc Day – A Post-Modern Revival appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Mid-way through the last decade I declared that, “[w]ith regard to new stations going on the air, 2015 represented the biggest single-year leap forward for non-commercial and community radio in U.S. history.” That’s because 524 new low-power FM stations signed on that year. That was an increase of 56% over the number of existing LPFMs at the end of 2014 (924).

Over the next four years another 753 signed on, bringing the total number low-power stations to 2,186 as of September 30, 2019 according to the FCC. At the close of 2009, when the service was on the cusp of its 10th birthday, there were 864 LPFMs in operation. This means the count more than doubled in the 2010s. No doubt this period saw the biggest expansion of low-power FM in history.

But because the LPFM service is specifically designed to be locally owned-and-operated, with hyper-local service, it’s clear that the last decade also saw the greatest flowering of community radio in US history. In fact, low-power FMs now make up a full 35% of all non-commercial stations in the country. That’s an increase of 14% from the end of 2009. The reason why the percentage didn’t jump more is that the last ten years were good for full-power non-commercial licenses as well, with 942 launching in that time.

Defining & Counting ‘Community’ Radio

Now, one might argue that not every low-power FM station is operated as a true community station, programmed and staffed by local folks who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to broadcast. It’s true that many are owned by groups – religious and otherwise – that fill their schedules primarily with syndicated programming beaming in by satellite or streamed over the internet. There are others that are mostly filled with automated music that feel more like vanity jukebox stations, with no sign of any kind of live or local hosts or DJs. Added together I can’t tell you how many there are, but I could be convinced that they even make up a full half of all LPFMs.

The problem with counting community radio stations is that there is no central authority. The FCC only cares if a station is non-commercial or commercial – it doesn’t dig into the differences between public, religious, college or community stations – or that it meets the ownership and operational requirements to have a low-power license. While the National Federation of Community Broadcasters represents and assists community stations, there’s no obligation for a station to join, even though the organization has worked hard to connect with these new broadcasters.

Nevertheless, even if only a decent minority of these new stations operate with the spirit of community radio, that’s still on the order of at least 200 to 300 new community stations. This estimate is easy to justify by taking a look at any of the top 100 radio markets in the country, where you’ll find a minimum of one new community LPFM. More likely you’ll hear two, three or more. I’m thinking of cities like Portland, OR, Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago which all added a few. And while some cities, like Philly and Chicago, long have had rich college radio scenes, they didn’t have true community stations, owned by local non-profits and open to local people unaffiliated with a school or college, until this past decade.

But LPFMs didn’t only go up in major markets, although that was a vitally important aspect of this growth. Dozens or even hundreds of smaller cities and towns got new community stations, too. That leads me to think my estimate of 200 to 300 is too conservative.

Growth for All of Radio, too

Despite the supposed imminent death of radio, the medium continued to grow as a whole in the 2010s – by over 2,300 stations – and community radio outpaced all previous growth in the sector. Radio’s share of most folks’ daily listening may have declined, given so much other audio media competing for their ears. But the need and desire for the terrestrial radio hasn’t gone away.

Why a Radio License still Matters

Today, in this always-connected internet environment, it’s significant that many, if not most, community LPFMs have internet streams, which help them reach audiences – especially younger audiences – that don’t use over-the-air receivers. However, this fact doesn’t make their broadcast licenses and terrestrial signals redundant or vestigial. Rather, being a licensed broadcast station is an assurance to the community that the organization is serious, and intends to stick around. The official sanction of a license shouldn’t be underestimated or overlooked, because it’s also a shared asset that a community is more likely to rally behind and value, in part because, if lost, it’s not easily replaced.

Community stations function as community media centers, providing local residents a chance not only to broadcast, but to learn audio or video production, train up on live sound engineering or create podcasts. These are functions that most commercial, public or religious stations don’t serve, even if their programming is a community service. Though an LPFM’s listening audience may be small compared to a town’s local NPR affiliate, the interpersonal network and impact is often much stronger, especially with people who aren’t amongst the local elite or traditionally well-connected.

An Historic Global Flowering

Not only was this the biggest ten-year increase in US history, it was arguably the biggest in world history, too. India certainly adds a lot to that total, with 428 letters of intent (like a US construction permit) issued to groups that applied to build stations, on top of many other countries. This is why the explosion of community radio, especially via low-power FM, is one of the most important radio trends of the last decade.

The post The Greatest Flowering of Community Radio in History Happened in the 2010s appeared first on Radio Survivor.

If you are, like me, a total sucker for “one hundred years ago today” anniversary stories, you are going to love this decade when it comes to broadcast radio history. To be fair, the 20-teens had their moments, case in point the Radio Act of 1912. But that decade offered slim pickings compared to the 2020s.

The fun starts in 2020. Many anniversary journalists will focus on the launching of KDKA in Pittsburgh. “Its first broadcast,” write historians Christopher Sterling and John M. Kitross, “held on election night, November 2, 1920, came from a 100 watt transmitter in a tiny makeshift shack atop a Westinghouse manufacturing building.” The Pittsburgh Post fed election returns to the station via a telephone connection. KDKA broadcast the data “to an estimated few thousand listeners, including some people at a Pittsburgh country club, over Westinghouse-supplied speakers.”

Does this mean that KDKA had launched the “first broadcast by a licensed radio station”? I predict that the 2020s will not only see lots of anniversary “first” stories, but plenty of battles over who was really first.

Then there was (get out your hankies folks) the first broadcast radio commercial. The trade news site Campaign US notes that it aired on August 28, 1922 on a station owned by the AT&T corporation: WEAF in New York. The Queensboro Corporation paid for fifty minutes at the rate of a dollar per minute to extol the virtues of an apartment complex in Jackson Heights, Queens.

“Friend,” the sales pitch explained:

“you owe it to yourself and your family to leave the congested city and enjoy what nature intended you to enjoy. Visit our new apartment homes in Hawthorne Court, Jackson Heights, where you may enjoy community life in a friendly environment.”

1922 not only witnessed this heartwarming moment, but also the first worried speech about the potential impact of commercials on radio. Herbert Hoover read the first generation of broadcasters the riot act that year at the First National Radio Conference. “The wireless spoken word has one definite field,” Hoover proclaimed, “and that is for broadcast of certain predetermined material of public interest from central stations. . . .

This material must be limited to news, to education, and to entertainment, and the communication of such commercial matters as are of importance to large groups, of the community at the same time . . . It is therefore primarily a question of broadcasting, and it becomes of primary public interest to say who is to do the broadcasting, under what circumstances, and with what type of material. It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising chatter.”

“Inconceivable”? Isn’t that what Wallace Shawn said in The Princess Bride? Moving right along, on September 13, 1926, a duo of RCA executives announced the creation of the National Broadcasting Company.

Here is my favorite part of the statement:

“The Radio Corporation is not in any sense seeking a monopoly of the air. That would be a liability rather than an asset. It is seeking, however, to provide machinery which will insure a national distribution of national programs, and a wider distribution of programs of the highest quality.”

Fifteen years later the Federal Communications Commission concluded that, contrary to this assertion, NBC was, in fact, monopolizing the airwaves. In 1941 the agency issued its ban on “dual networks,” forcing the company to divest holdings that would eventually become the nation’s third network, the American Broadcasting Company.

Meanwhile at the same time that all this monopolizing took place, college radio spread across the USA. I wish that I could identify the first college radio station in the country, but as Jennifer Waits notes, it is not so easy. Still, candidates for the 1920s would include the University of Minnesota, Grove City College, the University of Wisconsin, the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, Haverford College, and Dartmouth.

Alas, no good deed goes unpunished. In 1927 the government appointed a regulator for broadcast radio: the Federal Radio Commission. The FRC repaid this decision with an Order that reorganized the nation’s radio licenses in favor of big commercial operations at the expense of smaller non-profit and college radio outfits. What happened? As I put it myself ten years ago:

“The result? In 1926 most stations belonged to civic groups, or colleges and universities, or trade unions. Only 4.3 percent were commercial stations. But by 1934 the vast majority of licenses were now commercially supported (98 percent). Early 1920s proposals like Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s to fund radio with a two percent tax on receivers were forgotten by all but a handful of media reform groups.”

I am sure that I have missed many wonderful bullet points in this timeline. And if for some reason (like preserving your sanity) you decide to skip the 2020s altogether, rest assured that the 2030s will offer one hundred year broadcast anniversaries galore, such as Orson Welles’ famous 1938 rendition of War of the Worlds, which scared the daylight out of America . . . or did it?

This article was edited on January 5, 2020; I suspect that it may be edited some more. Stay tuned.

The post The 2020s will be heaven for radio anniversary history buffs appeared first on Radio Survivor.

One of the fun aspects of writing for Radio Survivor as we enter a new decade is that our efforts have become more idiosyncratic. When we first started the site in 2009, I think we sort of envisioned it as a radio news site, but one with a decidedly non-commercial focus. An early motto offered by Matthew Lasar, “not the voice of the industry,” illustrates this emphasis on community and college radio, alongside the quirkier and independent commercial operations.

As the last decade wore on, the newsiness of Radio Survivor declined. Speaking only for myself, I can say that the daily or weekly grind of keeping up on stories for the sake of writing about them got old. On the one hand, it was exciting to document the roll out of the largest expansion of community radio in history every week from December 2013 to July 2016, but few other topics were quite as alluring for me to dedicate such weekly time and attention. Instead, I gradually chose to follow my muse, writing from the spark of inspiration (or obsession) rather than obligation.

It also became apparent that appealing to a more mass audience was difficult, and only occasionally successful. For me, it made sense to settle in to the idea that Radio Survivor the website and podcast is for a relatively select group of radio lovers. That bunch includes broadcasters, producers and listeners, but really nobody whose job depends on what we cover and write about. As we say on the podcast, it’s for “the love of radio and sound,” and I think it’s love that we’ve really doubled-down on over time.

On the newsy side, Jennifer Waits’ weekly College Radio Watch reviews – Radio Survivor’s only remaining regular news feature – certainly qualify as a labor of love.

So, it’s interesting to take a look back at our most popular posts of the decade, all of which received between 29 times and 614 times the traffic of the average Radio Survivor post. It’s an instructive exercise because these posts represent a fascinating overlap area in the Venn diagram of what is popular or important in the culture at large, and what is of intense interest to folks who love radio and audio.

The Enduring Popularity of “Alice’s Restaurant” and the Super Bowl

This seems particularly true for a full half of the raw top 10. Three are posts from Jennifer’s annual Thanksgiving rundown of stations playing “Alice’s Restaurant.” This shows that tens of thousands of people are still into this holiday tradition. It also provides an example in inadvertent search engine optimization, where having a reliable post every year – that people click on – puts you at the top of search results.

Two of the top 10 are installments in my annual “how to listen to the Super Bowl” posts. As I freely admit, I don’t really care about the NFL or about the Super Bowl. But it’s a steadfast American cultural event that cuts across media. So I’m always curious to see what’s available to people who can’t view it on television, no matter where they are in the world. Obviously, tens of thousands of readers agree, or at least find the guide useful.

Incidentally, the Super Bowl posts rank pretty well in search results, too – coming in at number three – but not as well as the “Alice’s Restaurant” posts, which come in at number one and two.

The Strategy of Holding on for 10 Years

If we combine these “Alice’s Restaurant” and Super Bowl posts into just one entry each, the rest of the top 10 also highlights this coincidence of the popular zeitgeist and our deep radio nerdery. I’ll come clean that one reason for writing my yearly “Super Bowl on the radio” posts is because they bring in traffic. However, because Radio Survivor has been ad-free for about two-thirds of the decade, clicks themselves don’t add up to a payday. And while it’s nice to be popular, that’s not really my point either. Rather, I hope that some tiny percentage of these readers are radio nerds who come back.

It’s not entirely clear this strategy works. Overall, as we begin 2020 our monthly pageviews are about 25% greater compared this time in 2010. But this number fluctuates, and at times has been as much as almost double that figure from a decade ago.

That said, as a relatively niche, untrendy and not-clickbaity blog, holding on and even growing during this time is an actual accomplishment. Anecdotally, I’d say the group of devoted radio lovers reading and engaging with us has grown to a larger portion of the overall audience, judging from feedback we get from social media, email and old fashioned interpersonal networks. I like to think we’ve helped coalescence a community of Radio Survivors.

Nevertheless, looking at the rest of our most popular posts of the decade we gain insights about what a broader population of internet denizens thinks is attractive, intriguing or simply just useful about radio in the 2010s.

People Are Looking for Guidance

In at second most popular is a post from 2015, “In Search of High Fidelity Internet Radio.” For a while, this one’s popularity was a little puzzling, because it’s a very techie subject, and because I tend to think the topic of high fidelity itself is very niche. Yet, the explosion in headphone listening has won over a new generation of listeners who care about sound quality in the last ten years.

Also, if we see a tiny trend here, posts that are resource guides seem to have an outsized draw, and this one includes a list of better quality streaming stations. However, it’s a list that I haven’t reviewed or updated in a long time. Maybe that goes on the 2020 to-do list.

If we use that resource-guide frame, I think that explains a full 70% of the top 10. This includes a 2010 piece on, “Make Your Own Radio Kits and DIY Projects,” one from 2012 that explains “There’s still jazz on Chicago radio, despite the death of Smooth 87.7,” and a 2017 entry from Jennifer’s yearly examination of Princeton Review’s “Best College Radio Station” list.

News with a Curiously Long Shelf Life

At number four is one of only two straightforward radio news stories, “FCC Fines iHeart $1 Million for Airing Fake Emergency Alert Tone during Bobby Bones Show.” Though published nearly five years ago, this post saw many spikes in traffic in 2019. While Bobby Bones is a popular radio and American Idol personality, it’s a mystery to me what drove all this recent attention.

The other news story – at number 10 – is, “Apple Kills Off Its First and Only FM Radio” from 2017, reporting the cancellation of the iPod Nano, the only Apple device to ever have a radio receiver built in. Most of its hits came when the news was hot, though at least a hundred people or so read it every month in 2019.

CDs and a Question

The least radio-centric post is also the only one in the top 10 that was written in 2019, “10 Reasons Why CDs Are Still Awesome (Especially for Radio).” Like most of these pieces, it saw a spike of traffic around the time it was published, which quickly fell off. But then it’s been picking up steam since March, going up in traffic ever since. I’m not sure why this is happening, though I get the sense that it taps into a rising interest in CDs and physical media in general, as streaming music has become less novel and more everyday.

Finally, last in this haphazard review, but not least, is the fifth most popular post of the decade, “Can your radio receiver access 87.7 FM?” Now, content that is titled with a question often does well in search results because many people literally type in questions to Google. If we search for exactly this question, our post is the first result. Matthew’s inquiry taps into a long running vein at Radio Survivor, following the creation and evolution of channel 6 low-power TV stations that effectively broadcast as radio stations owing to the fact you can hear their audio at the far left end of the FM dial.

One such station that once played smooth jazz for Chicago, was the jumping off point for the number seven most popular post on jazz stations in that city. Yet, none of the posts specifically about these stations ranks in the top 50. Perhaps there are more questions than answers?

The Numbers Don’t Lie, but What Do They Say?

It’s always a humbling experience to look at your web stats, which provide at least one score on how many people took in what you created. But, as I’ve said on the podcast many times, I think the modern internet distorts our perception of reach and audience. A post that reaches 140 people may seem like a failure compared to a major tech blog or an Instagram post that got 3000 likes. Yet, if you filled a room with all those people for a talk, performance or meeting, you’d probably feel like a great success.

The Passionate Niche Is Alright by Me

The paradox of the internet is that while a significant percentage of all humanity can find your stuff, that doesn’t mean they all are interested or will see it. Then again, the spirit of the radio (inclusive of podcasting and internet radio) we love and champion here is the kind that reaches maybe only dozens at a time, late at night on a frequency on the far-left-end of the dial, maybe broadcasting to a town with fewer residents than the number of people attending Coachella. At Radio Survivor we celebrate the passionate niche. We are the passionate niche.

And every once in a while – maybe even a few times a year – a group that would fill the United Center for a Bulls game stops by to check us out. A few stragglers come by again, but for most this is just a little morsel in one day’s enormous internet diet.

But along the way a community forms around this shared love for radio and sound. If this enterprise were a newsletter or magazine this core audience would outpace most academic journals, and many magazines you might find at your local indie bookstore.

I’m not arguing that size is so important or that it’s an indicator of merit. No, I’m just grateful to everyone who has read this far, and continues to spend a little time and attention with Radio Survivor, whether it’s once a week, once a month or once a year. Thanks for benefit of your attention, and I hope I’ll be writing another review like this in 2030.

Here are the Top 10 most popular Radio Survivor posts of 2010 – 2019:

(With “Alice’s Restaurant” and Super Bowl posts conflated.)

1. How To Listen to Super Bowl LII on the Radio this Sunday – Jan. 2018
2. Digital Watch: In Search of High Fidelity Internet Radio – March 2015
3. Alice’s Restaurant Maintains Spot on Thanksgiving Radio Dial in 2018 – Nov. 2018
4. FCC Fines iHeart 1 Million for Airing Fake Emergency Alert Tone during Bobby Bones Show – May 2015
5. Make Your Own Radio and DIY Projects – Sept. 2010
6. There’s Still Jazz on Chicago Radio despite the Death of Smooth 87.7 – May 2012
7. Can Your Radio Receiver Access 87.7 FM? – March 2015
8. Princeton Review’s Best College Radio Station List Released – Aug. 2017
9. 10 Reasons Why CDs are Still Awesome (Especially for Radio)– Jan. 2019
10. Apple Kills Off First FM Radio – Aug. 2017

The post Understanding Radio in the Popular Zeitgeist – An Analysis of Radio Survivor’s Most Popular Posts of the Decade 2010 – 2019 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This year we celebrated 10 years of Radio Surviving. We ended out our first year of publication in 2009 with a look back at the “Decade’s Most Important Radio Trends.” As the 2nd decade of the 21st century draws to a close, we will now similarly review the last ten years of radio.

Some changes are obvious – for instance, Clear Channel is now known as iHeartRadio – while others are more subtle. The majority of the technologies that most influence audio and radio media today were extant in December 2009: smartphones, mobile broadband, internet radio and podcasting, to name just four. So what is different?

That’s the question we’ll take up between now and January 31, 2020. As we publish each trend we’ll list it here for easy reference.

What do you think are the most important trends in radio for the years 2010 – 2019? Drop us an email, tweet at us or comment on our Facebook page.

The Trends:

• The Rise and Possible Fall of FrankenFMs Is One of the Most Important Radio Trends of the Decade
• The Near-Death of Independent Internet Radio Is One of the Most Important Radio Trends of the Decade
• The Greatest Flowering of Community Radio History Happened in the 2010s
• Preservation is One of the Most Important Radio Trends of the Decade
• More College Radio than Ever in the 2010s as it Takes New Forms

The post Introducing the Most Important Radio Trends of the Decade 2010 – 2019 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Catch Alice’s Restaurant on the 2023 radio dial. See our latest listening guide.

In fall, 1967, Arlo Guthrie released “Alice’s Restaurant,” unintentionally launching a Thanksgiving radio tradition that persists more than 50 years later. The Thanksgiving-themed 18+ minute story-song is beloved by folkies and classic rock fans who continue to search the radio dial for it on Thanksgiving Day in order to take part in ritual listening sessions. In 2019 you can listen any time you like thanks to streaming music, but there’s nothing like tuning in to hear the same song at the same time as legions of fellow fans on one of the most American of holidays.

Guthrie has been on the tour circuit in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the film version of “Alice’s Restaurant,” with plenty more concerts scheduled through spring, 2020. For followers of his annual Thanksgiving weekend Carnegie Hall gig, this year’s event on November 30th is expected to be the last.

For a decade, I’ve been compiling a list of radio stations that air “Alice’s Restaurant” as part of their Thanksgiving schedule. I will continue to update this list as I learn of additional stations leading up to Thanksgiving.

Update as of 11/25/19:

The weekend before Thanksgiving, “Alice’s Restaurant” aired on the “Dr. Demento Show” online, on WPRB‘s (Princeton, NJ) “Music You Can’t Hear on the Radio,” and on WMUH’s (Allentown, PA) “Radio Free Hippie” show. Additionally, some stations will continue the “Alice’s Restaurant” festivities after Thanksgiving. John Furphy of Radio Free Hippie shared on Facebook that the Sunday overnight show “…will play both the original and the revisited massacree during this week and next week’s program, as has been done since 1983. There is also a very good chance one or both versions will be played between 10 AM and noon on turkey day.”

Charles Reinsch also reports, “The Rainbow Roach version of Alice’s as performed on Bob Fass’s Night Into Day can be heard anytime in the KRAB Archive: http://www.krabarchive.com/krab-programs-music-1960s.html…”

Ted Coe writes on Monday, November 25, 2019, “I’m doing an hourlong variation on this on my music-and-cultural arts show The Freak Power Ticket on KCSB-FM 91.9 in Santa Barbara, in just about an hour!” That show airs on Mondays 11am to noon Pacific time.

Update as of 11/27/19:

I also got a note from Bill Revill, who writes, “WESU (Middletown CT) airs ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ the Tuesday before Thanksgiving between 6-8pm on ‘Acoustic Blender.’  I’ve been doing that for ten years now.”

Also on Tuesday nights for the past two years, Cynthia Lombard at KFJC 89.7 FM (Los Altos Hills, CA) has been playing an atypical version of “Alice’s Restaurant” during her 7-10pm Pacific time show. This year it aired at around 8:45pm (playlist here) and program is archived for two weeks.

Alice’s Restaurant on the Radio on Thanksgiving Day 2019 – November 28, 2019

Last updated on November 27, 2019 at 3:30pm Pacific Time

Terrestrial Radio:

Wyoming Public Radio will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am during the Wyoming Sounds Thanksgiving Special (9am to noon).

KBCO 97.3 FM (Denver, Colorado) airs “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

WAMC 1400 AM and 90.3 FM (Albany, NY) Northeast Public Radio, per tradition, will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

WTTS 92.3 FM (Indianapolis/Bloomington, Indiana) is airing “Alice’s Restaurant” at 8am, noon and 8pm.

WCLY 95.7 FM (Raleigh, NC) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 10am and 5pm.

KPIG 107.5 FM (Freedom, CA) and KPYG 94.9 FM (Cayucos/San Luis Obispo, CA) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 9am, noon, 4pm, and 8pm.

WERS 88.9 FM (Boston, MA) plans to play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 9am.

WXYG The Goat 540 AM/107.3FM (Sauk Rapids, MN) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon.

WCMF 96.5 FM (Rochester, NY) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am prior to the Buffalo Bill’s game!

WMMM 105.5 FM (Madison, WI) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon and 6pm.

92 KQRS (Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving at 10am and 2pm

WDRV 97.1 FM The Drive (Chicago, IL) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 6am, noon, and 4pm.

KOZT 95.3 FM/95.9 FM The Coast (Ft. Bragg, CA) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12 noon on Thanksgiving.

KRCC 91. 5 FM (Colorado Springs, CO) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 7pm on Thanksgiving.

WRUV 90.1 FM (Burlington, VT) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am EST.

98.5 WNUW-LP (Aston, PA) at Neumann University airs “Alice’s Restaurant” every Thanksgiving at 9am, 12noon, 5pm, 8pm and 10pm.

WXOX 97.1 FM Louisville will be playing it on Thanksgiving between 10-11am on Artebella with DJ Keith Waits.

WAFX 106.9 The Fox (Hampton Roads, VA) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon on Thanksgiving day.

The Creek 100.9 FM (Macon, Georgia) will air it at noon and 5pm on Thanksgiving.

KTYD 99.9 FM (Santa Barbara, CA) posted on Facebook, “KTYD’S Thanksgiving Tradition continues! Listen for Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” Thursday at 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm.”

Frosty 105.7 FM (Part 15 station in Ventura, CA) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am, 1pm, 3pm, 4pm (Massacree Revisited), 5pm on Thanksgiving Day, 11/28/19.

101 the Fox (Kansas City, KS) will air “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon and 6pm on Thanksgiving.

WRHQ 105.3 FM (Savannah, Georgia) plans to play “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving Day at 6:30am, 12:30pm and 6:30pm.

WZZZ 107.5 The Breeze (Portsmouth, Ohio) posted on Twitter, “Join us this Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, as we play a Holiday Classic: ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ by Arlo Guthrie. You’ll hear it at 9am, Noon and 5pm. Follow along as the story unfolds on Thanksgiving Day–It’s brought to you by Preston Family Funeral Home, on Rt.5 in Ashland.”

WXPN 88.5 FM (Philadelphia, PA) will air its annual broadcast of “Alice’s Restaurant” at 12noon.

WXRT 93.1 FM (Chicago, IL) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon on Thanksgiving Day.

WNCW 88.7 FM (Spindale, NC) writes, “Join us from Jasmin’s ‘Mountain Mornings’ at 6am, through Joe Kendrick’s Thanksgiving music and history spotlight between 7 and 9am (in lieu of ‘Morning Edition’), and our eclectic feast of songs throughout the rest of the day. We’ll air Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’ just past Noon, and again at 9pm.”

MVY Radio 88.7 FM (Vineyard Haven, MA) will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at noon on Thanksgiving.

WERU 89.9 FM (East Orland, Maine) reports that, “This year Brother Al, host of Thursday’s Morning Maine show on WERU-FM will be playing it just after 8 a.m. We live stream at weru.org and via the WERU app.”

Online Radio Stations:

The Whip Radio will play “Alice’s Restaurant” four times on Thanksgiving: 8am, 12 noon, 5pm and 9pm Central time.

REC-FM will play “Alice’s Restaurant” at 11am Eastern time on Thanksgiving.

KMCJ Radio (Moorpark College in Moorpark, CA) posted on Facebook, “…tune into KMCJ on Mixlr Thursday at 10am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm and as a bonus tune into KMCJ tomorrow Night [Tuesday, November 26, 2019) at 7:45 after our all day remote at Club M then after we air Alice’s Restaurant at 7:45 our annual Sounds of the Season begins.”

The post Alice’s Restaurant on the 2019 Thanksgiving Radio Menu appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Last month news spread that, “Vinyl Is Poised to Outsell CDs For the First Time Since 1986,” as Rolling Stone reported. The source of that prediction is the recording industry’s own mid-year report, which showed vinyl sales racking up $224.1 million on 8.6 million units in the first half of 2019, creeping up on CD’s $247.9 million on 18.6 million units.

You don’t have to stare at those numbers long to notice one disparity is significantly bigger than the other. It’s true that vinyl records accounted for only $23.8 million fewer than CDs. But the units moved tell another story. In fact, more than twice as many CDs were sold than vinyl records – 116% to be more precise.

I don’t know about you, but that looks to me like vinyl records are still a long way towards outselling CDs. Rather, each of those records sold generated more revenue than each CD, $26.06 per record vs. $13.32 per CD.

Those numbers should look pretty accurate for anyone who’s bought new music lately. Whereas in 1989, when the CD was ascendant and a new record generally cost at least a few bucks less, the situation has reversed in the intervening three decades. And that makes sense if you account for the industrial history at work here.

As vinyl sales dropped in the 90s in favor of digital discs, companies pressed fewer records, and pressing plants gradually shut down. While CD sales have slowed in the last decade, they haven’t yet experienced the kind of drop-off that vinyl did. Although the last ten years have seen a vinyl resurgence, aging plants struggled to keep up with demand, and new plants came on line, all increasing costs. CDs, on the other hand, became a mature technology, with production costs having pretty much bottomed out in the early 2000s, and not having increased much since then.

At core, this disparity is due to the fact that vinyl now costs more to manufacture than CDs. On top of that, I suspect that demand and the popular perception of records as a more premium product conspire to help push and keep prices higher.

So, it isn’t really the case that vinyl is outselling CDs. “Outselling” means that something is exceeding something else in volume of sales. Instead it’s the case that vinyl is outearning and generating more revenue than CDs.

Based upon those per-unit revenue numbers, if vinyl were actually proportionally on pace to outsell CDs in volume sold, they’d be generating more like $438 million on about 16.8 units.

Picking Apart False Narratives

Why do all this nit-picky math? Because I think a false narrative is being spun here. It’s the narrative that CDs are dying at such fast pace that even a once-thought-obsolete technology like the vinyl record is going to surpass it.

I care because it’s the same kind of narrative that’s been used to smear radio for the last generation or so. This, despite the fact that some 90% of the population still listens to terrestrial radio.

Now, I’m not a luddite (which seems like a strange thing to call someone who’s defending the digital compact disc). I don’t dispute the fact that radio listenership and CD sales are declining. Given the ubiquity these technologies enjoyed in the year 2000, pretty much the only way to go was down, especially with the proliferation of new, often more convenient and diverse technologies. But that slide does not mean the technologies are dead or obsolete.

I have a particularly sore spot for FAIL culture and tech triumphalism, which go looking for receding tech or trends to pronounce ready for the trash heap of history. The pernicious aspect of this is that it causes some folks to think maybe they’re backwards or out of it for continuing to enjoy their CDs or radios.

For CDs specifically, what I see happening is people dumping their perfectly good collections, ones that were often painstakingly acquired and curated, and at great expense. I get that streaming is more convenient; I listen to more streaming music than CDs. But even if I’ve pared down the collection, I’m not going to just chuck away favorite albums like that. You never know when Spotify is going to lose the rights to your beloved music out of nowhere.

History Repeating Itself

I’m having flashbacks to the early 90s, when I knew so many people dumping their vinyl collections – often for free or very little money – in favor of rebuying many of the exact same albums on new, supposedly superior, shiny digital discs. Being both a poor student then, and also vinyl enthusiast, I scooped up dozens of great albums for a fraction of what they originally cost or even what they go for now, new or used.

I’ve definitely talked to other Gen Xers who admit to now rebuying yet again favorite old albums on vinyl reissue, that they once had on CDs that replaced their original vinyl copies. Oy, the revolving door!

Look, if you’re into downsizing and Marie Kondo-ing your music collection, I have no beef with that. Streaming Spotify takes up significantly less space than any CD or vinyl collection. As long as you understand that some albums may mysteriously disappear from your streaming playlist and are fine with that, then forewarned is forearmed.

But dumping CDs because there’s a popular misconception that they’re inferior or obsolete, that’s what doesn’t make sense to me. Especially since decent CD players are easier to get and less expensive than all but the flimsiest record players (never mind smartphones), not having a player shouldn’t be your excuse. In fact you probably have a CD player and just haven’t realized it – it’s your DVD or Blu-Ray player.

18.6 Million Is a Hell of a Niche

I have no doubt that physical media will become increasingly less prominent and more niche. But still, 18.6 million CDs sold in 6 months (some 37 million in a year) is a hell of a niche!

Even if most people stop buying new CDs altogether, there are still billions of discs on the used market, in flea markets, thrift shops, garage sales and free bins. In fact, the online music database and marketplace Discogs says CDs saw the biggest increase in sales amongst all formats on its platform in the first half of the year. Unlike the RIAA’s numbers, which only count new product sales, Discogs counts both new and used.

While vinyl records were the most popular physical music format on Discogs, keep in mind that the medium is twice as old as the compact disc. We should expect there are at least twice as many of them out there to be traded and resold.

Even so, nearly forty years of compact discs adds up to a nearly unfathomable amount of music out there to be heard. Moreover, a decent percentage of it was never released in another format, and still isn’t available for streaming. That means there’s a treasure trove of undiscovered or to-be-rediscovered nuggets out there for the finding.

Some of those treasures might be in your attic, basement, storage unit, or – even better – your CD shelf.

And, maybe I’m not the only digital luddite. Only a couple of weeks after the “vinyl is surpassing CD” news, Billboard reported that new compact discs from Taylor Swift, Tool and even Post Malone are flying off the shelves. This apparently is causing labels to reconsider their physical media strategy, as stores beg for more product to sell, especially of new hit albums.

Is a “CD Store Day” far behind?

Need more convincing? Earlier this year I outlined “10 Reasons Why CDs Are Still Awesome (Especially for Radio)” and expanded on the topic on our podcast.

The post No, Vinyl Records Aren’t Outselling CDs – Do the Math appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We wrapped up our first truly focused Patreon campaign last week. Thanks to our many supporters, we more than doubled our base of patrons, bringing us to a grand total of 64. We are elated and humbled that so many readers and listeners joined on to help support our work.

The final tasks to finish our first ever ‘zine are underway. All 43 of you who are supporting us at the $5 tier or higher as of Aug. 1 will be receiving your copy later this month. We’ll keep you updated with posts to our Patreon page.

Now, you might recall that our goal was to reach 100 patrons by August 1. You’ll also note that we didn’t quite get there. It was an ambitious goal, but a true one. That really is the kind of regular support we need to in order to do the work we proposed: to document the history of Indymedia and LPFM on the occasion of these movements’ 20th anniversaries.

However, it’s work we still really want to accomplish. Moreover, we think there’s no sense is taking an “all or nothing” approach. 

Our plan, then, is to begin work on documenting the history of LPFM.  The objective is to have a first installment to share on our podcast and here on our website in January 2020, when the service celebrates its 20th birthday.

We’re scaling back from the grander narrative of linking in the independent media movements of the 90s – including community radio – that came together around the 1999 protests against the WTO in Seattle. But given that low-power FM has long been one of our principal areas of coverage, we think it’s a story that will benefit Radio Survivor readers and listeners.

We’ll also reveal more details of this effort as it comes along. 

In the meantime we want to say Thank You again! If you have any questions or comments please hit us up on social media or drop us a line at editors@radiosurvivor.com.

The post Thanks to All Our Supporters! appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Last week – coincident with the original Walkman’s 40th birthday – I saw all these articles reporting on this supposedly “world’s first” Bluetooth enabled portable Walkman-style cassette player/recorder, named IT’S OK (yes, the brand is in all caps). Reactions to this Kickstarter ranged from snarky to excited, but all the coverage struck me as a little too credulous.

Always hoping that someone is going to start making decent quality cassette decks or players again, every so often I search around on Amazon or Ebay to see what’s on offer. In the back of my head I thought I’d seen a cheap Bluetooth tape player before, for far less than the $75 intro price promised to Kickstarter supporters.

Turns out, my memory was correct. This Digitnow branded “cassette to MP3 converter” has been available on Amazon since August of 2018 for a price that fluctuates between $29 and $39. Over on Ebay they’re $39.99.

In addition to playing to your Bluetooth headphones, it’ll digitize your cassettes directly to a microSD card, or to your computer via USB. Two additional features missing from the IT’S OK. Now, I’ve never used the Digitnow player, so I can’t vouch for the quality of playback. But my guess is that it’s about as good as the cheap knock-off Walkman you might have bought at K-Mart in 1989, so caveat emptor. I also have serious doubts that the IT’S OK will be any better, even at nearly twice the price.

Already suspicious of the “feasibility study and first handmade prototypes” on the Kickstarter timeline, today I saw a video from YouTuber VWestlife wherein he identifies an extremely similar cassette player available on Alibaba for as little as $7 in quantity direct from China. VWestlife also points out that the IT’S OK player isn’t even in stereo, specifying “Classic Monaural Sound.”

He does note that since all the parts for the IT’S OK are readily available, the Kickstarter likely isn’t a scam. You’ll just get a flimsy mono cassette recorder/player worth maybe $20 in parts – or available from other sources at about $40 – for your $75. And you’ll have to wait until December to get it. Or you can wait until after the Kickstarter ends and get it for $88 (no kidding).

I’ll admit to being enticed when I first saw headlines about the device, but it didn’t take long for me to see that this Kickstarter is mostly hype, seizing on the Walkman’s nostalgia moment and slow news week to get some free press release journalism coverage.

I have no snark for anyone wanting a new cassette Walkman today, and wish that reputable brands like Sony and Panasonic still made them. If you’re in the market I’d first try to find a decent used one, or take a shot on any of the dozens of $20 ones scattered across online retailers and Ebay. (While you’re at it, you might as well get one with a radio.) Aside from the cognitive dissonance around the apparent anachronism of the IT’S OK player, I don’t really get the appeal of adding Bluetooth… especially in freakin’ mono.

But if you decide to bite and get one, please do let us know how it goes.

The post Don’t Waste Your Money on that Bluetooth Cassette Player Kickstarter appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radio Survivor celebrates 10 years on the internet and four years podcasting with our 200th episode. Matthew Lasar joins Jennifer Waits, Eric Klein and Paul Riismandel for this review of the last decade in radio that matters.

Matthew tells the Radio Survivor origin story that sprang forth from his I.F. Stone inspired research deep into the digital catacombs of the FCC database, unearthing comments that broadcast execs never imagined would be public – such as one who accused prominent media reformists of being “communists.”

Jennifer recalls how a literature review for a journal article on college radio revealed how little scholarly work existed on the topic, compelling her to document this important media form that Matthew says he has learned is, “the first public radio.” “The present is future history,” Jennifer observes. This prompts Paul to comment how we’ve begun to fulfill that promise, given that Radio Survivor now has dozens of citations in scholarly works.

On the way through these stories, everyone notes the changes in the broadcast and online media landscape since 2009, how some publications have come and gone, and offering reasons why Radio Survivor has managed to survive. It’s a discussion of interest to anyone who has tried to, or wants to, sustain a passion project fueled primarily by volunteer labor.

We’re making a ‘zine!

As we announce on this episode, in August we’ll be publishing our first ever print project, hand made in the spirit of great independent radio.

We’ll send issue #1 to every Patreon supporter who gives at the $5/month level or more. But you have to be signed up by August 1, 2019.

Plus, every new sign-up gets us closer to our goal of 100 Patreon supporters so that we have a foundation to do the work of documenting the upcoming 20th anniversaries of Indymedia and low-power FM.

See our ‘zine page to learn more, or go ahead and sign up now.

Show Notes:

• A Decade of Radio Surviving
• College Radio Watch: Ten Years of College Radio Coverage and More News
• Lasar’s Letter on the FCC: VNR executive files e-mail with FCC against “radically left wing” group
• The Official Website of I.F. Stone
• Spinning Indie
• mediageek
• Matthew’s books:
  • Pacifica Radio, the Rise of an Alternative Network
  • Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War
  • Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium
• Help Us Tell the History of Indymedia & LPFM
• RadioSurvivor’s Top Radio Shows – Paul’s #1: Free Speech Radio News
• A Sad Goodbye to Free Speech Radio News
• Garrett Wollman’s Radio Tower Quest
• History of the Grassroots Radio Conference
• Podcast #190: Radio Spectrum and Transmission Art
• Radio Survivor ‘Zine #1

The post Podcast #200 – How We Survived a Decade of Independent Publishing appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We wanted to find a special way to thank the readers and listeners who support us every month via our Patreon campaign. Something unique, hand-made and in the spirit of great college and community radio.

Why not make a ‘zine?

If you’ve never heard of a ‘zine, it’s an independently produced publication, often photocopied and hand-assembled. The history goes back to mimeographed science fiction fanzines published as far back as the 1930s. Adopted by punk and underground music fans in the 70s and 80s, the name was shortened to ‘zine to reflect a broadening in subject matter beyond just fandom. For more history, see this brief timeline.

For Radio Survivor ‘Zine #1 we’re writing and assembling pieces that we feel are fit for a more tactile format, breaking free of the strict layouts forced upon us by blog software. You won’t find these pieces on our website or anywhere else online. Here are more details:

• Radio Survivor Zine #1 will go to everyone who contributes $5 a month or more to our Patreon campaign.
  • You need to have completed at least one payment in order to get the ‘zine, but if you’ve signed up by Aug. 1 we’ll send the zine as soon as that first payment is made.
• The deadline to sign up is August 1, 2019
• We’ll send out the ‘zines in August 2019

Here is a sampling of the features in Radio Survivor Zine #1:

• “Wild Flowers and Radio Towers”
• “Radios I Have Known and Loved”
• Hand-drawn illustrations and cartoons
• more more more!

If you sign on as a Patron of Radio Survivor you’ll also be helping us reach our goal of the 100 supporters we need to do the work of documenting the 20th anniversaries of Indymedia and low-power FM.

Sign up now to reserve your copy of Radio Survivor ‘Zine #1!

The post We’re Making a ‘Zine for Our Supporters appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Ten years and 16 days ago we opened the doors on this website. On June 11, 2009 Matthew Lasar inaugurated Radio Survivor with this post: “Congress grills FCC, NAB on Low Power FM.” This was still about 18 months before the Local Community Radio Act was signed into law, opening up the most recent wave of LPFM stations and triggering the largest expansion of community radio in history. But the push for the LCRA really gained traction then, in 2009.

The eventual explosion of low-power FM stations in the US is one of the things Radio Survivor was founded to cover. And cover, we did, in weekly reports beginning December 5, 2013, when all the license applications had been submitted and we and other LPFM advocates began examining the groups who applied. We wrapped up weekly coverage, nearly 28 months later, on July 28, 2016. By that time the vast majority of licenses had been assigned, and there was less weekly action. Looking back at these dispatches, I think you’ll have a hard time finding a more thorough documentation of the flowering of any radio, or communications service.

What’s (a) Radio Survivor Anyway?

Reviewing this first year of publishing, I’m struck by the fact that we didn’t publish a prototypical “hello world” post or other raison d’être. Rather, we just got down to business, writing the stories about radio we wanted to exist and wanted to read.

We did publish an “about” page in which we declared, “[f]or us … radio is a cause. We’re Matthew Lasar, Paul Riismandel, and Jennifer Waits, and this is our news blog about radio’s present, past, and uncertain future.” Then, articulated a mission stating, in part,

As both fans and producers, we write about the problems and prospects of radio.

We embrace college radio stations in crisis. We defend radio pirates. And we care about the on-going survival of our favorite radio stations.

We are obsessed with the future of radio and are charmed by radio historians, radio dramatists, radio bloggers, and anyone else who cares about radio as deeply as we do.

At the close of 2009 we – at the time still just three Radio Survivors – joined forces to write about the 14 most important radio trends of the oughties decade illustrating that vision in practice. Why an un-round number like 14? “Well, ten was too few, and, uh, we ran out of steam at fourteen,” I wrote. Fair enough.

We nominated trends like “Pacifica radio democratizes itself,” “cash strapped schools turn their backs on college radio” and even podcasting – then only five years old – which only came in at number four.

Only in 2010 when a reader asked us to explain exactly “what is a Radio Survivor?” did we attempt more specific definitions. Matthew started with a little foundational history. “I first approached Paul Riismandel last Spring (2009) about creating what eventually became radiosurvivor.com because I was, and still am, concerned that discussion on the ‘Net about the state of radio has become marginal and fragmented… It has become fragmented because most of the big sites that report news about radio do so from the vantage point of a particular corner of the radio industry—streaming, terrestrial, podcasting—and almost always from the perspective of management.”

He went on to explain, “I wanted something more than that. Radiosurvivor.com’s mission, as I see it, is to stimulate dialogue about radio from a listener perspective. It is the listener, who does not have a monetary or employment investment in some corner of the status quo, who is in the best position to discuss the future of radio.”

Jennifer started off noting, “when I was invited to join Radio Survivor, the blog had already been named. So, my interpretation about the meaning has more to do with my personal feelings about radio and connections with radio than with the official origin of the name[.]”

“I am also a radio survivor,” she admitted. “Having been a college radio DJ off and on since 1986, it’s hard to believe that I’m still passionate about doing radio (through all of its ups and downs) 24 years after my first stint behind the mic…

“So, I’m devoted to the survival of radio, think radio is a survivor, and have made it my mission to evangelize radio as much as I can in order to remind people that it still has the power to be an incredible force.”

I opined, “ A Radio Survivor (the person) is someone who continues to believe in the medium. A Radio Survivor is not a luddite clinging to her transistor radio while eschewing iPhones and netbooks, nor is he a retro fetishist stuck in the past. Rather, a Radio Survivor recognizes the simple power inherent in broadcast audio, which can be done inexpensively and bring people together in a community.” (Remember netbooks?)

Moreover, “[r]adio, as a medium, has a great chance to survive because of the internet, iPods and mobile phones, not in spite of them.” I think the tremendous growth in podcasting and streaming audio services in the intervening years evidences this prediction well.

Radio Surviving in Praxis, on the Radio

Eric Klein joined our gang in 2015, helping to launch the podcast – and now syndicated radio show – on the occasion of our sixth anniversary, in June 2015. He’d actually contributed a piece a few years earlier, but it would be another eighteen months before he and I would meet and start cooking up plans.

Next we’re set to release episode 200 of the show, which I’m willing to claim as an accomplishment. That’s because, by at least one count, 75% of all podcasts ever launched are no longer in production, and only half of the podcasts started from 2016 to 2018 were still going by August of the latter year.

An Occasional Struggle To Survive

Speaking only for myself, I must admit to ups and downs with this effort. Scanning back through my output there are definitely periods of greater and lesser activity. Having been a mostly-consistent blogger for nineteen years, beginning with my original blog mediageek, sometimes you grow weary of the grind, run out of ideas or tire of writing for free. (Yes, we do accept financial contributions from generous readers and listeners, but this money primarily defrays costs associated with hosting, distribution and equipment for the site and podcast, rather than paying us as writers.)

When we first started out, I think we really hoped Radio Survivor would generate more income. We ran banner ads at the start, and on some banner days when we hit the zeitgeist just right – like with Jennifer’s annual “Alice’s Restaurant” posts – we would see bursts of hits and brief bumps in earnings. However, the unavoidable reality is that our’s is a niche topic, unlikely to go viral. On top of that, the rates for digital advertising dropped precipitously since 2009, with each page view and click becoming ever less valuable every year. Half a decade in ads still covered our barest of costs, but the ads themselves sometimes were pretty shitty.

That’s why we launched our Patreon campaign in 2015, with our first goal to replace the income from banner ads. I am happy to say that we hit that milestone quickly and have been able to stay above that mark ever since.

We’re not rock stars, nor YouTube stars, on Patreon, but it’s reassuring that there’s a community of supporters willing to help make sure we don’t have to go out-of-pocket, or into debt, to keep this operation online.

Why We’re Still Surviving

Out of necessity, my expectations and investment have changed and evolved over the years. But one of the constants for me has been my fellow Radio Survivors, Eric, Jennifer and Matthew. They’re reason number one why I may have taken a break, but never bailed.

The fact that we have worked together, functioning pretty much as a collective, all these years, with nary a dispute or dust-up, is wondrous. I am grateful for their tolerance, understanding and forbearance, which I have attempted to return in kind. More importantly, I’m thankful for their friendship and kinship in all things radio. It’s rare to find this kind of collaboration with any kind of endeavor.

The other constant is the community that’s grown up around Radio Survivor: listeners, readers and all manner of supporters. We have found comrades around the globe, and we’ve visited many of them. I feel enormously lucky for the opportunity to speak with people on two dozen FM stations across North America, and across the Atlantic in Ireland.

As I tweeted the other day, receiving thoughtful, heartfelt emails and missives from this community really makes it all worthwhile. Every one is “worth many thousands many hits or downloads,” I wrote.

This is a gospel we often preach on the radio show, but I’ll admit it’s sometimes difficult to walk that talk. Today’s online world seems driven by racking up hits, and looking at our stats is sometimes an unwelcome indicator of how small this endeavor is. That’s when I remind myself that the connections are more important than the clicks, that before web counters, Facebook likes and YouTube play stats, when I was a late night community radio DJ, I’d have been thrilled to get a few calls a night, having no clue if I had 25 or 25,000 listeners.

The focus on connection and community, not mass and scale, is the spirit of Radio Survivor, to me.

Still Radio Surviving

If you had asked me in June 2009 if I’d still be writing for Radio Survivor ten years on, I’m not sure what my answer would have been. The truth is that Matthew had asked me to collaborate on a site at least one time before. Yet, despite my deep admiration for his work, I demurred, citing a plate already overfilled with obligations. But when he asked a second time, it was clear to me that two of us would be more effective than one.

When I agreed to join forces, he also suggested that we should at least find a third. I had only recently made Jennifer’s acquaintance after she toured the college radio station I advised. I didn’t actually meet her on the visit, but the students told me about it. So I looked up her website, got in touch and later interviewed her on my radio show.

I just knew Jennifer was a kindred soul, and I’m still thrilled to this day that she was willing to join in the effort we call Radio Survivor. The consistency and constancy of her work and passion has formed its strongest foundation. Then, Eric joining in 2015 only made the whole structure even more sound.

Again, pondering what I would have predicted ten years ago, I have to conclude that it’s irrelevant. We’re still here today, writing and recording words about radio, in all its permutations.

I am still a terrible fortune teller, so I won’t predict if Radio Survivor will celebrate a 20th anniversary. I wish and intend to remain friends with Eric, Jennifer and Matthew, and I’d hate to lose the root of our collaboration and relationship. I also desire to remain in love with radio and the people who also love radio.

I hope you’ll stay tuned to see what happens next week, next year, and next decade.

The post A Decade of Radio Surviving appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Removing “ums” from an interview is a foundational skill of podcast and radio editing, right up there alongside finding the right place to start the show and boosting the volume when it’s too quiet. But not all “ums” are equal.

The um as a stand-in for another word:

I’ve heard “ums” in audio used intentionally and absentmindedly as the words “or” in a list and as the word “I” at the beginning of an answer. These examples are times when “um” is a word. Cutting these out would unbalance the sentence and make the speaker sound strange.

The emotional um:

I swear that I might have lost a paying gig trying to explain this to a client, but there are times where all of the emotional weight of a voice is expressed in an “um,” and removing the word would be like telling a sad person to smile so they stop bringing everyone down. This particular “um” came at the heart of a pregnant pause when the speaker had just referenced their dead father.

Um, the next part is really important:

When a well spoken person who is comfortable talking into the mic says “um” for the first time in an interview that’s when I sit up and take notice. They are using that word to build tension and drama and they know what they are doing. Don’t second guess their skills, leave that “um” alone.

…

• I wrote more about editing audio in a previous post:

The post Three reasons not to edit out the ums appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Nearly a decade ago I reflected on The Professor’s quest to find a decent way to record airchecks, especially from the interference-prone AM and shortwave bands. As a side note, in the intervening 10 years that wish has been granted, with the proliferation of small portable radios with MP3 recording features, like the Tivdio V–115, which I reviewed last year.

I also identified with his adventures in taming all sorts of electromagnetic and RF interference mucking up radio reception in his apartment. In the hands of a lesser scribe this could be a tedious tale. But as he relayed in his entertaining last Radio Kitchen post, after much troubleshooting, he discovered an overlooked source only when they took their leave.

While I was a fan of The Professor’s writing – and pined away for his blog to return for the last seven years – Thomas actually knew him, calling him his “radio arts mentor” in a touching eulogy.

Thomas also reminds me that The Professor had his own show on WFMU, “The Audio Kitchen,” in which he “[served] up an hour of homemade recordings freshly liberated from thrift stores and junk shops, as well as some amateur audio spirited away from the closets and computers of their creators.” Archives are still available at the station’s website.

First reading The Professor’s “Adventures in Amplitude Modulation” posts some 14 years ago (and four years before Radio Survivor began) I knew I’d found a kindred spirit, the likes of whom I likely would never have encountered offline. Such was the rush of connecting to people with shared niche interests in those earlyish internet days, before social media and always-online smartphones, and before we took such niches for granted. It’s a testament to his spirit that my memories are so strong all these years later, despite never having met him. I’m sad to learn he’s gone, but glad to know that The SWLing post intends to keep some of his legacy alive.

The post R.I.P. Radio Adventurer ‘The Professor’ appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Quite a lot of shade is getting thrown at CDs in the press these days. The LA Times reports, “The compact disc era may finally be entering its hospice stage,” while Rolling Stone declares, “CDs Are Dying Three Times as Fast as Vinyl Is Growing.” Putting aside the misleading equivocation of the RS calculation – CDs still outsell records by a generous margin – it’s clear that vinyl and even cassettes are hipper than the poor old compact disc.

No doubt, I love my vinyl, have a hard drive full of digital files and listen to online streams. But CDs still have a lot to offer. This is just as true for personal listening as it is for radio stations. Well, at least for community and college radio stations where DJs pick their music rather than just piloting an automation system or selecting from a tiny approved digital catalog.

So, before you toss your shiny silver discs into the dumpster or drop them off at the Goodwill, I want to urge you give them another look and listen.

Here are 10 reasons why CDs are still pretty awesome:

1. Used CDs Are a Bargain Right Now

This past weekend I paid a visit to the enormous Amoeba music store in Hollywood. There you can find racks upon racks of discounted CDs for $5 or less. Looking for some classic rock like Led Zeppelin III? It’ll set you back $30 on vinyl. On CD? I saw it for just three smackeroos. And it’s not just classic rock. If you’re looking for just about any popular album from the last fifty years, you’ll probably find it cheaper on CD than just about any other format, period.

You don’t even have to make the pilgrimage to Amoeba. Just check out your local record shop, thrift store or garage sale. Folks are nearly just giving CDs away. And that’s your potential gain.

2. You Probably Own a Bunch of CDs Already

They might be in the back of a closet or in a storage unit, but if you’re over the age of 30 there’s a good chance you already own a bunch of CDs that you might not be playing. Go unpack them and it’s like getting free music! Even if you don’t, chances are your parents, siblings, friends or other relatives have some CDs they’d be just as happy to give away, thinking that streams and downloads are somehow superior.

If you’re a college or community radio DJ, it’s likely your station has many hundreds or thousands of CDs.

3. There Are Tons of Out-of-Print Albums Only on CD

During the compact disc’s two decade heyday – from about 1983 to 2003, when the iTunes store went online – millions of albums were released on CD. By about 1993 record companies seriously scaled back which albums were on vinyl or cassette. By the turn of the century only a small percentage saw an analog release, or had tiny analog releases, while digital-only distribution had yet to take off. That means thousands of albums recorded during that time were pretty much only available on CD. Although many have been re-released for streaming and digital download, there are still countless out-of-print albums for which compact disc is the only way to hear them (outside of extra-legal file sharing).

This category isn’t just limited to obscurities. Even some critically acclaimed and classic albums remain unavailable except in the original CD release.

4. CDs Are Yours Forever

Sure, you can lose a CD or scratch beyond playability. But otherwise the music on that CD is yours forever. Even if Taylor Swift and Neil Young collectively decide they’re pulling all their music from Spotify, you can still hear their albums if you bought the CD.

5. A Broken CD Only Ruins One Album

CDs are more durable than vinyl or cassettes. And, although we were promised “perfect sound forever” when CDs first debuted in the 80s, we all know they can get scratched beyond playability. Still, one messed up CD ruins just one album. What happens when your USB thumb drive or hard drive full of MP3s crashes? Hundreds or thousands disappear. Regular backups and cloud storage help to prevent these disasters, but at a cost that adds up much faster than the price of a new CD.

6. You Can Sell Your CDs

Thanks to the “first sale doctrine” in copyright law, when you own a CD (or vinyl LP, cassette, book, or most physical media), you have the right to lend, sell or give away that album. The same is not true of an MP3 or digital download. Selling that file you “bought” (more like “licensed”) from iTunes or Amazon is actually called “piracy.” Of course you can copy it all you like, but good luck hocking it when you’re tired of that album (or need to pay the rent).

7. CDs Sound Great on the Radio

While the pops and crackle of vinyl have a certain charm, I defy most radio contemporary listeners to sit through hours of poorly maintained records played on misaligned community radio turntables. There’s a reason why stations rapidly adopted CDs in the 1990s, they’re easy to use and sound good on air. They also sound better than lot of digital files.

I hear plenty of poorly compressed MP3s that only get worse after put through broadcast audio processors. Streams from YouTube can border on unlistenable, taking on a gurgling shimmery underwater tonality. The situation degrades over a station’s webcast, wherein these already lossy files get encoded yet another time and further degraded. It’s true that digital files don’t have to be terrible, but it takes some care and attention to detail to ensure. CDs, by comparison, just work, and usually sound great.

8. Good CD Players Are Cheaper than Good Turntables

Although there’s been a renaissance in decent quality, relatively inexpensive turntables in the last decade, $250 is still pretty much the lowest reasonable entry point for anything durable. However, right now you can buy a pretty nice brand new Teac CD player for less than $150. And there are even decent CD boomboxes out there for well under a c-note, like this Sony. Moreover, if you’re willing to go used, these days thrift stores are filled to the brim with players for less than the cost of dinner out. Plus, even a bargain basement CD player will never ruin your CDs like a cheap record player will chew up your vinyl.

9. Blu-Ray and DVD Players also Play CDs

Even if you don’t have a plain old CD player, there’s a good chance you have a device that will play CDs, since DVD and Blu-Ray players all support the format. On top of that, because of demand these video disc players can be had cheaper than single-purpose CD players. A perfectly adequate Sony Blu-Ray can be had for under 80 bucks, while a nice Sony DVD player comes in for less than that cheapo suitcase record player at Target.

10. It’s Easy to Rip CDs to Your Computer and Smartphone

Though you can still buy some off-brand CD walkmen, you still won’t see me walking around with one. Like most folks, I listen to music on my smartphone while on the go. But that doesn’t mean I have to rely on streaming or digital music stores. CDs are a snap to rip on your computer, using free built-in software on both Windows and Macs. It’s true that most new laptops don’t come with CD drives anymore, a brand-name USB drive that reads and writes both CDs and DVDs sets you back less than 35 clams.

If somehow the files you ripped get lost or corrupted, just go back and re-rip your CD. Easy peasy.

For those who like to make and record music, here’s a bonus reason:

11. CD-Rs are Cheaper To Make than Cassettes (or Records)

Want to record and distribute your own music? It’s cheaper and easier to do it on CD than cassette or vinyl.

Of course you can completely D.I.Y. both cassettes and CDs. A spindle of 100 CD-Rs will only run you about 17 bucks, and can still be had at your local discount or office supply store. Finding blank tapes is tougher, though cassette stalwart National Audio Company will sell you 100 fresh C60 blanks for $90 – more than 5x the cost of CD-Rs.

Once you have those tapes, then you’ve got to dub them. Using a double-deck that’ll go no faster than double real-time. Better make a weekend of it.

Using just an inexpensive CD burner you’ll probably finish a full CD in just a few minutes. It’ll take just an evening to make enough to sell at a show.

And if you want to go the way of pro duplication, there’s probably still a company that makes CDs nearby. Even if you send it out, you can get 100 CDs made and printed, in custom jackets for under $200, and get them in just a couple of weeks. Cassettes? Budget more like $300 or more. And vinyl? Think more like two grand, and waiting for months.

I guess that’s why I still see stacks of new shrinkwrapped CDs in cardboard slipcases at local bands’ merch tables. Cost and convenience still outweighs hip, even in indie rock.

The post 10 Reasons Why CDs Are Still Awesome (Especially for Radio) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Jennifer takes beautiful photos on her radio station tours, and we thought it would be great to find new ways of sharing them. We also want to do more to engage with and say “thank you” to our supporters on Patreon.

So we created our first sheet of digital postcards. The first edition has four cards on one sheet, in high-resolution ready to print PDF, formatted for Avery 8383 ink jet glossy postcards, or just about any US letter-size paper or stock. They’re even set up for duplex printing, with everything you need on the back side to mail (except postage — you’ll need to add that).

We’ll be creating new sets of cards periodically, and every current Patreon supporter will get access to each new set.

We’ll also be adding more Patreon-exclusive content, including bonus episodes of the podcast (like this bonus “after dark” episode for last week’s show).

These bonuses are available to everyone who supports us beginning at just $1 a month. That may not sound like much, but every dollar counts, and it sure adds up when more of our thousands of regular readers and listeners contribute.

Please help keep Radio Survivor going, and to get stronger by contributing today.

Go to our Patreon page to get started.

The post Retro Vacation Postcards from Radio Station Tours appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This past weekend I accompanied my wife for a short trip to Oregon’s Illinois Valley where she facilitated a Conversation Project for Oregon Humanities. Of course I tuned around the FM dial in search of something interesting and local. Quickly I stumbled upon KXJC-LP at 105.7 FM broadcasting from Cave Junction, an eclectic and artsy small town that, as the name implies, is the gateway to the Oregon Caves National Monument.

Saturday morning I heard two young women introduce a segment called “Ladyline,” and begin a discussion about environmental protection. Reading from a well written script, they sounded animated, convincing and very smooth. Looking at the station’s website I learned that it was part of the “Empower Hour,” which is a “teen-powered” show.

Later, during music programming, I heard the DJ read a PSA for the very conversation that my wife was leading later than afternoon. Now that’s the power of truly live, local radio, I thought to myself. Where else on the radio dial would we have heard that?

The post Listening Notes: KXCJ-LP in Cave Junction, Oregon appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Paul, Jennifer, and I did a fun podcast at my house the other day in which we discussed what I have coined the post-“Radio is Dead” era. Basically the wags, wonks, and wise guys of the Internet have given up declaring that radio is deceased, but nobody quite knows what to think about it now. In the immortal words of the famously and unexpectedly defeated Thomas Dewey in the presidential election of 1948, “If I am alive, what am I doing here? And if I’m dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?”

So here goes: my random thoughts on our post-postmortum radio landscape.

Thought Number One: Radio can no longer be defined by any single transmission medium.

Once upon a time when we thought about radio we associated it with AM/FM. But in retrospect, that 20th-century way of doing and understanding radio may have been anomalous. As I argued in my book Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium, through the centuries we have read print in many different forms: books, newspaper articles, scrolls, teletype, LED freeway signs, just to cite a few examples. Why did we think that we would always listen to broadcast sound via AM/FM and no other format? In our time, radio is no longer defined by the technology that transmits it. Which takes us into . . .

Thought Number Two: Radio is better understood as an idea instead of a technology.

This was probably always true, but it feels like an especially useful concept now. In the absence of a technological unifier for radio’s identity, some fundamental understanding of the medium seems more urgent. Here’s my definition. Radio is any form of audio transmission that seeks an audience. It is the one-to-many aspect of radio that makes it fundamentally different from telephony. But what is an “audience,” you ask? Well . . .

Thought Number Three: The best radio audiences are conscious of themselves

Of course it is nice to have lots of listeners out there in Internet-land. But the most powerful and empowering audiences are self-aware. They know that they exist, that they are collectively groking the information and culture they receive from their radio source. This self-awareness gives any radio program in question much more power and authority than it might enjoy based solely on the quality of its content. The program and its audience become something moving together in real-time through time and history. Except in the post-“Radio Is Dead” world, real-time has changed.

Thought Number Four: Real-Time is now On-Demand Time

As radio moves further away from an AM/FM centered vision of broadcasting, it has become more focused on on-demand rather than real-time delivery. Once upon a time (to be redundant), I lived in a world in which if you did not turn on your radio or television set at an immediate, specific moment, you missed a program, possibly forever. Now you don’t, because it is saved in the networks’ box, or your box, or both. But increasingly we hasten to tune into on-demand content, even if we can get it later. This is especially true with podcasts. So in the post-“Radio-is-Dead” era any moment of real-time is in fact an array of the hours and days it takes for most of the audience to eat up the audio package. Real-time is still real, but it’s stretched out over, well, time; specifically: a duration of on-demand time.

Thought Number Five: Television finds itself in the we’re-all-in-it together landscape with which radio has always worked.

Some of the experts disagree with me on this, but I think that radio has always been far more enmeshed with other media technologies than television. Most cars have radios, but not TV sets (thank goodness). HiFi stereos quickly incorporated FM into their systems, but television not so much. Indeed, the slow development of FM in the USA can be attributed in part to RCA’s desire to first pair up the technology to TV. In the 1980s, most boomboxes sported radio receivers; only a fraction offered video. And of course we all remember clock radios. We may even still have one around.

Today, however, it’s a new game. “Television” has been transformed into movies, TV shows, and YouTubes everywhere: on your mobile, on your tablet, on your laptop, or in the back seat of your taxi. TV has joined radio as a multi-platform technology so ubiquitous that it too has lost some of its centrality. Even the hallowed HDTV shares its screen with the gaming console. TV is now just another app, which radio has been used to being since long before the arrival of Netscape in the mid-1990s. Because TV has moved down a notch in the media techno-ecological landscape, radio no longer resembles its country cousin.

So congratulations on your post-Death status, radio. Who knows where all this is going? I certainly don’t. In the meantime, nothing reminds me of radio’s present transitional status more than a funny little poem by Ogden Nash:

At midnight in the museum hall,
The fossils gathered for a ball,
There were no drums or saxophones,
But just the clatter of their bones,
Rolling, rattling carefree circus,
Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas,
Pterodactyls and brontosauruses
Sang ghostly prehistoric choruses,
Amid the mastodonic wassail
I caught the eye of one small fossil,
‘Cheer up sad world,’ he said and winked,
‘It’s kind of fun to be extinct’.

The post Rough notes: thoughts on the post-“Radio is Dead” era appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Let’s celebrate the oldest electronic medium today. Radio provides entertainment, news, information and companionship to millions of people every day in the U.S., and billions around the world. When your power goes out or your smartphone dies, you just need a couple of batteries and a radio (or just a wind-up radio) to keep in touch with the world.

Back in the 1990s, it’s believed that the date of August 20 was chosen for National Radio Day because it’s the day in 1920 that WWJ in Detroit (then known as 8MK) first went on the air. The station still broadcasts today.

So, today take a moment to spin the dial and check out some new stations, or spin the virtual dial and check out streaming stations around the country. Give your favorite station or DJ a call and say, “thanks.” However you celebrate National Radio Day, know that there are millions joining you.

The post Happy National Radio Day 2018! appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It is long past time when a community or college radio DJ or programmer can simply show up to do their show and expect to have an audience. Everyone who has a radio show bears the responsibility to build an audience for that show, and their station.

Audience building is a challenge for every radio station today (terrestrial or online), not just community radio. That’s because there are so many other entertainment and information platforms competing for attention, and radio isn’t the default it used to be. Commercial and big public radio stations attack this problem, in part, by buying billboards, digital and television ads, and by choosing strict formats aimed at very specific demographics.

Most community and college stations can’t afford to buy all of these ads, and (understandably) don’t want to adopt strict formats. Moreover, these techniques may still not work well enough to be worth it.

Yet community and college stations have one major advantage: dozens of volunteer programmers. In a world where most individuals have personal networks of dozens to thousands of people – both online and IRL – this means your station has a far larger network of potential listeners than you might realize.

Network Effects Solve for Eclecticism

This idea became clear to me towards the end of this week’s episode of the Radio Survivor podcast and radio show. Matthew Lasar, Eric Klein and I were having a discussion about radio formats, which led to an assessment of the eclectic formats found on many community and college radio stations. As I’ve argued before, these formats can be challenging for listeners who are more accustomed to the commercial and public radio models, where each station primarily features just one kind of programming or music. In turn this can make it difficult for some stations to build and maintain an audience.

However, I think this challenge can be offset when DJs and programmers take more responsibility for publicity and audience building. This is because programmers should have expertise in what they present, which also means they should be connected to the communities that share the same interest, or know how to connect.

Many stations have staff or committees that do publicity. This may entail creating and distributing promotional materials like flyers and stickers, advertising in local publications, tabling community events, or booking station events like concerts or lectures.

All of these are form the vital foundation of a station-wide promotional strategy. But they are also very broad and unfocused. While you build awareness for the station, you still are probably not reaching all the people who might enjoy specific programs.

Of course, with an eclectic format that might feature dozens of musical genres of special interests, expecting a staff person or volunteer committee to target all these smaller constituencies is unrealistic. That’s why the responsibility falls squarely on each and every programmer.

Making the Connections

Say, for instance, you DJ a heavy metal show at 10 PM on Thursdays. On Wednesdays at that time your station has electronic music, and on Tuesdays there’s experimental and new music. How will a metal fan, who might be interested in hearing your show, know it’s there? Especially when they might tune in Tuesday and conclude that the station just plays strange classical music, never occurring to them that there’s something different every night of the week.

Well, there’s one sure-fire way for that listener to know: you tell them.

For that metal show, maybe there’s a record store or venue that features a lot of metal. Make a flyer specifically for your show (and other metal shows on your station if there’s more than one) and ask to hang it up there. Even better, talk to the staff and see if they’d be willing to hand them out.

Make friends with the local metal bands and invite them to have their music played on air, or come by for a live interview or performance. They’re likely really plugged into the local metal scene, so recruit them to be part of your street team, and reward their efforts. That’s community building 101.

The internet and social media make this easier than it ever was before. Create a social media presence for your show on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or Snapchat. You don’t have to do them all. Just pick one or two and keep up with it. Follow local groups, businesses or prominent people in your scene, and don’t be afraid to reach out if you do something of interest. The only cost is a little of your time.

Since not every interested listener is able to tune in when your show is on, find a way to archive episodes online for on-demand listening. Radio Free America offers this as a free service to college and community stations (hear more about it on episode #125 of our radio show). So it’s something that you should take advantage of if your station participates, or it’s something you should recommend to management if your station doesn’t.

Mixcloud is a free service where you can share both music and talk shows (learn more on episode #95). You just need to record your show and upload an MP3. Just make sure to put these links on all your social accounts and promo materials.

The same tactics go for any genre or special interest show.

Tell ‘Em the Old Timer Sent Ya

From the late 80s through the early 2000s one of the most popular shows on the station I volunteered at, WEFT Community Radio in Champaign, IL, was “The Old Timer’s Country Music Jamboree.” It was hosted every Saturday evening by a gregarious DJ channeling the charms of old fashioned local country stations.

While the show was indeed unique and very entertaining, there’s no doubt in my mind that much of its popularity was due to the Old Timer’s relentless promotion. I’m pretty sure he carried business cards or 8×10 headshot everywhere he went. If you met him, there was no way you’d walk away not knowing about his radio show, and taking a card with you.

In fact, I first learned about him when I visited the university before moving to town. I had a meeting with a professor who had the Old Timer’s headshot on his office door. The prof was from Italy and was charmed by the utter Americanness of this man and his show.

The Old Timer loved listener calls, and every week challenged his audience to tally up more calls than the week before, saying hello by name to very single one on-air. For a while he even ran his own taxi service, with the “Old Timer Taxi” emblazoned on his minivan, functioning as a roving billboard.

Over the course of nearly two decades, he became a local celebrity of sorts. If you weren’t lucky enough to meet the Old Timer personally, there’s a good chance that someone would tell you about him and his show. That was priceless publicity.

Though the Old Timer passed on about a decade ago, he lives on in my memory, and the memories of thousands of people who passed through this Central Illinois college town. Even though Facebook was created during his lifetime, all this was accomplished without the aid of the internet or social media. So, take a few cards from the Old Timer’s deck.

No Excuses

There should be no excuses that this can’t be done. If a programmer says there isn’t a local community of interest that pertains to their program, then it begs the question: why does it deserve airtime? Who does it serve if there are no listeners?

Especially when a station recruits new programmers, doing this kind of publicity should be an expectation. I also recommend making it part of the training program. When you make this expectation clear up front and combine it with tips and inspiration you greatly increase the likelihood of follow-through.

Everyone’s a DJ – So Recruit Them!

Stations can also turn this idea on its head by recruiting creative and active people in specific communities to become programmers. Many bars, restaurants, cafés and other venues often have live DJs playing specific genres. Reach out to the DJs who have regular gigs and who play music compatible with your station’s mission. They’ll probably be delighted to get the invite, because a radio show lets them reach out beyond the few dozen people who can see them live.

Your station benefits by tapping into this audience, which is highly motivated by virtue of the fact that they turn out to a live event. Make sure to ask the DJ to promote their radio show at gigs. They’ll also spread the word in their social media network, and help recruit more talent for your station along the way.

Here in Portland, OR I see how two of our newer community stations have built audiences this way. I’m always seeing flyers or announcements on social media for DJ nights hosted by XRAY.fm and Freeform Portland DJs. I also see ones hosted by DJs from our long-standing community station, KBOO. I know for a fact that some of these DJs were playing out before any of them had a radio show.

Training and Inspiration

Even if your station’s roster of on-air staff is very stable, with little turnover, there’s no reason not to socialize the idea around your station. It’s likely that you have at least few – if not more – programmers already doing some great publicity for their shows. Ask them to do workshops, or share tips and tricks with the rest of your programmers.

Though these ideas seem pretty straightforward – if not downright obvious – sometimes we all need a prompt and some encouragement to start doing something new.

Growing Vital Networks Large and Small

Not every programmer will be as successful at building their audience network, and that’s OK. Some people are naturally more comfortable networking, more gregarious, and enjoy doing this work than others. But everyone should be encouraged to try.

Networks of all sizes are valuable, and a programmer shouldn’t be judged based on the size of theirs. A small network might be full of superfans who listen and donate (and spread the word) disproportionately.

Small communities of interest need and deserve service from community and college radio. But if they don’t know about the programs intended to serve them, then the loop is broken. It’s reasonable, and necessary, to expect your programmers to close that loop.

The post Every Community Radio Programmer Must Be a Publicist appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Editor’s Note: Common Frequency is one of three LPFM advocacy groups that on May 16 filed informal objections with the FCC against 998 FM translator applications. CF’s technical director Todd Urick was a guest on episode #144 of our podcast to explain some of the reasoning behind this controversial action. He follows up with this guest editorial. -P.R.

When three LPFM advocacy groups recently filed 998 objections against pending translator applications, proponents on both sides had divided opinions. However, the petition was not intended to be a foray on individual translator applicants. It was a needed pause interjected into a spectrum mob-haul where hundreds of applications were fast-tracked to seal an uncertain fate for the FM band.

The Local Community Radio Act (LCRA) Section 5 is a Congressional mandate directing the FCC to assure LPFM and translator spectrum availability, “based upon the needs of the community.” Yet, in virtually every market, translator deployment has grossly surpassed LPFM coverage. For instance, in terms of coverage area, in Atlanta translators cover twenty times more area than LFPMs. In San Antonio it’s 16.3x, Raleigh-Durham is 24.1x and Scranton, PA is 39x.

What happened to balanced usage based upon community input? It is not difficult to assess what is happening here. Take for example 250-watt/1196 m HAAT translator K288GY. Repeating KUDD HD-2, it effectively creates a new station that has equivalent coverage to a full-powered Class C2 (50 kW) FM station for Salt Lake City, comparable to 65 LPFM stations. But there are repercussions from squeezing blood from a turnip.

Translator proposals are permitted to accept incoming interference. In the past this option was conservatively negotiated. But engineering best-practice has been disregarded with most new translator applications. It’s a race to direct the consultant engineer to grab any channel that works “on-paper.”

An example from Portland, OR includes a 2-watt directionally-proposed translator shoehorned in between two minimally-spaced co-channel LPFMs, amidst additional co-channel full power interference. Upon propagation modeling, the effective interference-free coverage reaches 64 persons, and the rest is an interference slurry of four stations. One San Francisco applicant proposes pointing a highly directional antenna into the Pacific Ocean at the expense of short-spacing multiple co-channel LPFMs.

A Camas, WA LPFM – surrounded on both sides by full-power stations and with no viable channels to move to – is also wedged in, between two translators that have equivalent coverages of Class A (6 kW) full power stations, in additional to co-channel interference. Two non-commercial educational (NCE) Christian network licensees profit from leasing these translators to commercial HD2-fed licensees to create two new commercial stations.

In Sacramento, a LPFM had to go silent shortly after start-up because it was inundated with copious (60dBu) incoming co-channel fill-in translator interference. Another Sacramento LPFM was rendered unviable via newly-introduced first adjacent HD radio interference.

There are many other LPFM operators that need to modify their sites but are locked to one utilizable spot due to new translator “short-spacing.” Many new translators have employed tight directional antennas to propose wrapping around LPFM primary (60 dBu) coverage areas, allowing the translator to commandeer 75% of the city coverage, relegating the LPFM to a sliver of coverage. Recourse for these LPFMs will get worse under the FCC’s proposed liberalized translator remediation rules.

The industry hobbled LPFM with the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act of 2000 (RBPA), and again lobbied against the service prior to the passage of the LCRA. The industry originally deep-sixed community ascertainment through the deregulation of radio, disabled localism via the elimination of the local content requirement, then decimated ownership caps via the Telecommunications Act of 1996, followed by the rescinding of the main studio requirement. This all served to minimize any public interest requirement so it could bolster profits, consolidate, then bankrupt themselves.

With LPFM advocates now drawing attention to the LCRA being neglected by the FCC, select industry advocates posit that these objectors are now not playing nicely. Wait, what? Who’s been the victim here?

Public interest advocates have a communications challenge within a system that is predicated on pay-to-play. Today’s growth of LPFM as brought on by the LCRA was the product of community radio spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to gain that to Congress, on order to reverse the technically-erroneous RBPA rules. How do listeners and community radio participate in the conversation without full-time lawyers, lobbyists, and money?

It is not going to happen by submitting novel proposals and writing thousands of letters to the FCC. LPFM subjugation and LCRA Section 5 abandonment has been so pervasive it is unclear how or where to pick up the conversation. Filed objections are an only recourse in a broadcast regime with a withered public interest component.

Translators were never meant to create new HD2-fed “full power station” equivalents playing MP3 playlists to pad corporate radio incomes at the expense of new local community radio. That privilege was bought from the FCC.

I sympathize with independently-owned AM broadcasters. But there should be some empathy concerning LPFMs facing a similar predicament AM broadcasters are trying to escape from. The central quandary is, how does the FCC assess the “the needs of the community” when it had exited the business of public interest arbitration years ago. Surveys? A point system?

FM stakeholders need to converge on discussion over managing resources fairly, anchored to engineering reality. But how does that happen within a system where the people who pay the most make the spectrum laws?

Radio Survivor invites written and audio editorial submissions on all topics pertinent to community media. Inquire by email to editors@radiosurvivor.com

The post LPFM Advocate: 998 Translator Objections Create ‘a Needed Pause’ appeared first on Radio Survivor.

If you use Facebook, we invite you to join our new group to discuss, learn and share information, thoughts and ideas about community media.

Given recent controversies about Facebook’s management of user data you might wonder why we chose Facebook, and why we don’t host the community on our own website. Please let me explain.

Our commenting and forum systems became a liability

We want there to be a community for our readers and listeners, and to some extent that used to happen here on our website, through our commenting system. We also used to host discussion forums. Unfortunately both of these systems became too difficult and time consuming to maintain. And in the end, they compromised the stability of our site.

While we did receive some participation in both systems, the number of useful comments was far outweighed by a deluge of comment spam from bots and break-in attempts. Despite our efforts to employ industry-standard anti-bot and anti-spam measures, the game of cat-and-mouse was sometimes overwhelming.

Towards the end of 2017 to the beginning of 2018 we experienced so many attempts to spam and break in to our site that it compromised our ability to be online and available. That’s what finally led to the choice to disable user registration and comments.

It sucks that a few bad actors forced us to make this change. However, we’re far from alone, as these sorts of attacks are pervasive on the internet. Radio Survivor is one of thousands of independent websites that have needed to take these steps.

Luckily, we have Facebook. And, already, many of our readers and listeners use it, liking and commenting on our articles. It makes sense, then, to meet people where they are.

What about other commenting or community options on the site?

We have investigated and experimented with several third-party commenting systems (like Disqus) but have been unable to get them to work satisfactorily. Others require payment or subscriptions, and it is unclear if using them would be worth the cost, since our site generates only enough revenue to cover basic costs like domain registration and hosting.

What about other social networks or online communities?

We are open to having communities elsewhere online, although the questions of how easy they are to set up, how accessible they are, and how much time and labor they will take to maintain need to be addressed.

If you have suggestions please feel free to drop us a line.

We look forward to talking with you in our Facebook group.

The post Join the Radio Survivor Facebook Community appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We recently had Brooklyn pirate radio watcher (and listener) David Goren on episode #133 of podcast and radio show, talking about his efforts to document this vibrant scene. He also told us about an earlier pirate pioneer from the borough, WBAD, which broadcast underground hip-hop to a loyal audience from 1995 to 1998.

He produced a radio documentary about WBAD which is now available in Lost Tapes series from public radio station KCRW, titled “Outlaws of the Airwaves: The Rise of Pirate Radio Station WBAD.” In it you’ll hear from the man who started the station, a UPS driver by day, DJ by night, as well as other principals of the station. You’ll also learn how publicity can be a dangerous double-edged sword for an unlicensed station. It’s a fascinating look back at the power of radio in the time just before consolidation and the internet would challenge the medium’s supremacy, and before inexpensive technology would make illicit broadcasting nearly as easy as installing a wi-fi router.

The post The Rise and Fall of Brooklyn Hip-Hop Pirate WBAD appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This Thursday, November 16, the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on an order on reconsideration that will radically alter the media ownership regulations that are enforced by the agency.

The changes are substantial and include:

• The elimination of the Newspaper/Broadcast Cross-Ownership Rule
• The elimination of the Radio/Television Cross-Ownership Rule
• A revision to the Local Television Ownership Rule that eliminates the Eight-Voices Test and will incorporate a case-by-case review option in the Top-Four Prohibition.
• The elimination of the attribution rule for television Joint Service Agreements (JSAs)

Notably, these changes do not include a revision to the local radio ownership rule, and do not directly address the mandate of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to develop a viable minority ownership policy. Although the agency is relabeling an earlier minority ownership program, now calling it an “incubator,” it is not implementing a specific proposal or set of rules

Now, put simply, the agency has had what I have coined as the “Legacy of Failure” on media ownership policy for one important reason above all: There is no empirical evidence to support the agency’s decision-making on media ownership. This simple lack of a relationship between policy goals and evidence that those goals are being met was the primary reason the FCC’s earlier ownership rulemakings have been blocked by the Third Circuit Court (more on that in a bit).

The evidence matter is not a trivial one. The agency’s decisions on media ownership have radically altered the media landscape, reducing diversity of ownership and of viewpoints, led to wholesale reductions in locally produced media content, and in one of the great ironies of competition-based regulation, raised advertising rates. The primary reason the FCC can’t find the evidence it needs to justify its policies is that the media ownership regime—launched by Congress with the 1996 Telecommunications Act and dutifully carried about by the agency—is not creating the diversity, localism or even the competition the agency has touted for 20 years.

The changes that are about to be voted on are justified, at least in part, by the failings the FCC has created with previous merger adjudications and ownership policy. The FCC cites, “the decline of radio’s role in providing local news and information,” as a justification for the rule changes it now seeks to make. That decline, in what was once radio’s bread and butter, can be directly tied to the agency’s decision making, the mergers it approved and the rise of radio giants (like Clear Channel, now iHeartRadio) in the early 2000’s.

But more importantly, these changes, and the timing of them, transparently appear to be tied directly to smoothing out the complicated process for approval of the Sinclair-Tribune merger. There’s no other realistic explanation for the rules that are being changed while others are being retained.

A Brief Tour of Fail

To understand why I call this a “Legacy of Failure,” some history is in order. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act included substantial revisions to the FCC’s ownership rules for broadcast stations. Congress raised the ownership limits in a mandate to the FCC in an effort to promote competition. These changes led to a massive round of consolidation, especially in radio.

Included with the mandate was a requirement that the agency periodically review its ownership rules. This requirement was on a two-year (biennial) cycle that was later expanded to a four-year (quadraennial) review. As part of this mandate the FCC reviewed ownership in 1998 and in 2000. Then as part of the 2002 review, in 2003 the agency released a new set of ownership guidelines called the Diversity Index. Several legal challenges were filed to the decision, and those challenges were consolidated into Prometheus Radio Project v FCC, heard by the Third Circuit, which released its decision in 2004.

The decision was a harsh rebuttal of the FCC’s decision-making and lack of evidence, and represented a substantial set-back for the agency. The agency launched another mandated review proceeding in 2010. Then, after limited output, and the remand contained in the 2011 Prometheus decision, the agency extended the 2010 review into the review it was required to undertake in 2014. Resolution seemed impossible. Then, after much delay and very little action by the agency, in April of 2016, the Third Circuit heard oral arguments again, and quickly issued an order to the FCC to resolve the impasse, and in August of 2016 the agency released an order concluding the 2010 and 2014 reviews, as well as the associated proceeding dealing with minority ownership policy

Failure into Failade?

I’ve heard of trying again after you fail. I’ve never heard of turning a failure—the consolidation-driven “decline of radio”—into the reason for more failures. But after so many failures, the agency has found a way to turn lemons (or something the same color as lemons) into lemonade!

So stay tuned… the agency’s “Legacy of Failure” is about to get more legendary.

Christopher Terry addressed the Sinclair-Tribune merger and the proposed ownership rule changes on two recent episodes of our radio show: