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’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.

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.

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.

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.

Your broadcast station–LPFM, community, college–needs to have its programming on the internet, one way or another. Now.

Why? Because you risk missing a generation of listeners whose media intake is primarily online. YouTube is where they hang out the most, but online radio is also a destination. Where they’re moving away from is your AM or FM broadcast.

That’s the big takeaway from the 2017 Infinite Dial survey of American online listening habits conducted by Edison Research and Triton Digital.

The results are stark. 87% of young people aged 12 to 24 listen to online radio every month, yet only 50% say that AM/FM radio is important for keeping up with new music.

The number one way young people keep up with new music: YouTube. Amongst the 70% of people aged 12 – 24 who say it’s somewhat or very important to keep up with new music, 80% say YouTube is their first choice, followed closely by friends and family (77%), and then Spotify (59%) and Pandora (53%).

Radio is the fifth choice for those aged 12–24, compared to ranking third amongst all Americans who keep up with new music, ranking just behind friends and family at 68% and YouTube at 64%. So, even if YouTube isn’t beating radio with all ages, it’s neck-and-neck.

These results aren’t too different from last year’s report–which we discussed then on our podcast–yet the trend towards YouTube and internet listening only becomes clearer and clearer.

The point of this post is not to scare monger or to play Chicken Little. I’m also not claiming that young people don’t listen to broadcast radio or listen to your station. However, my own unscientific poll of college students I’ve talked to in the last five years tells me that if they listen to terrestrial radio they only really listen in the car. If they listen to radio at home or in the office they’re listening online.

Luckily for non-commercial broadcast stations, live online streaming is much less costly than it is for unaffiliated internet-only stations, which means a large percentage of college and community stations have active online streams. However, it’s understandable that the added cost and resources are still a challenge for many smaller stations and new LPFMs. This means that they have to delay being online for a while, or even indefinitely.

YouTube Is a Resource, Not a Rival

That’s why YouTube is a boon for non-comm stations, not a competitor. All that content on YouTube, it’s got to come from somewhere. Why not your station?

I’m not talking about posting your regular music shows played from CDs, records and MP3s. It probably isn’t worth the effort, and copyright challenges will complicate the effort.

Instead, take advantage of the music already happening at your station. Being artist-friendly is one of community and college radio’s greatest strengths. The planned or impromptu in-studio performance is a hallmark of great non-commercial radio. So when those happen, get them recorded and post them on YouTube, ASAP.

I have no illusion that a teenager looking for the newest Drake track is going to inadvertently discover your station this way. However, there are probably teenagers who follow bands in your community, or who play in those bands. If you have those artists live on air and post their performances on YouTube those young fans will look for and find those videos.

By no means is this a new idea. Radio Survivor contributor Ann Alquist made the argument for video in a post more than two years ago. She also pointed out that videos serve as marketing, and are something that grabs the attention of local funders and underwriters.

Make It Easy On Your Station

When we discussed this on our latest podcast, my co-host Eric Klein cautioned that it’s better to edit that audio together with the board feed, for better sound. The audiophile in me agrees wholeheartedly with that sentiment. But the part of me that wants your station on YouTube now doesn’t want that extra effort to get in the way of it happening in the first place. Plus, judging from many live videos I see on YouTube (not just of famous musicians) that have tens of thousands of hits, the quality of the performance matters more than the quality of the recording.

So, when a singer-songwriter sits down behind your mic to share a quick tune, take a moment to whip out a smart phone and shoot it on video. As soon as she’s finished, upload that sucker!

To me, this is a case where perfect threatens to be the enemy of finished. I’ve been part of too many prolonged discussions at stations where well-meaning staff members’ and volunteers’ nitpicking to make things better ultimately mean things don’t get done. Don’t let this happen to your station’s YouTube efforts.

Over time you can improve your videos. Wouldn’t it be great if a young video whiz checked out your channel to see her favorite local artists and decided she could do a better job, and then decided to volunteer? That’s how I’ve seen so many projects move forward in volunteer-driven radio – less than perfect execution often attracts that person who can make it one or two notches better.

Consider partnering with your local public access cable channel, or a high school, college or university that has a video production program.

To be clear: if your station isn’t able to live stream now, be sure to start a YouTube channel and upload all the musical moments that happen on or off-mic. If your station is streaming but not using YouTube, get to it.

Even if there isn’t much live music happening, upload short profiles or interviews with DJs talking about their favorite music, or even videos of your talk programming. Anything is better than nothing!

Make Your Mixes On-Demand with Mixcloud

Another option I want to point out is Mixcloud, which is a free service for posting and sharing DJ mixes. And what is your average music show, but a long DJ mix? Mixcloud only streams shows, so downloading isn’t allowed. But this is why it’s free for both your station and the listener. Mixcloud covers the royalties and the hosting; you just have to upload the shows.

Did I mention it’s free?

Mixcloud isn’t nearly as well known as YouTube or the major online radio platforms, whether Spotify or iHeartRadio, so fewer people browse it. Yet the folks who do are true music lovers. Plus, just like YouTube videos, you can embed them on your station’s website.

I can’t emphasize it enough – the key is to just get started. Whether it’s posting a few shows to Mixcloud or videoing your first in-studio performance for YouTube.

Inspiration

For some inspiration, here are some college and community radio YouTube and Mixcloud channels to check out:

YouTube

The Lounge from WKNC at North Carolina State University

KCR at San Diego State University shares news and other highlights.

Community Radio WEFT in Champaign, IL partners with local public access TV channel UPTV for WEFT Sessions in-studio performances.

Community Radio WMNF posts performances from Live Music Showcase

MixCloud

WERW Real College Radio at Syracuse University

KBGA at the University of Montana

Limerick City (Ireland) Community Radio

KVWV-LP Community Radio, Bellingham, WA

The post Station not on the Internet? You’re Losing Young Listeners, Big Time appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Mea culpa. When one sets out to launch an ambitious critique of community radio programming mistakes will be made, and I made them. This is a necessary aspect of testing ideas, as is coming back to revise, tweak and clarify.

I am very grateful for the comments, feedback and criticism of my last two posts, “Trapped in the Grid,” and “Public Service vs. Public Access – Community Radio’s Hidden Tension.” The comments came in by social media, email and private conversations, revealing many of the fissures and omissions in my analysis and proposals. I attempted to address some of this in episode #74 of our podcast, and here I’ll attempt to fill in the cracks some more.

Before I dive in I want to be sure every reader knows that we readily solicit and accept your responses on this (or any) topic. We want Radio Survivor to be a platform for discussion and sharing, not just a pulpit. Note that we do hew to a few editorial standards (for instance, we abhor ad hominem attacks) and may suggest some copyedits, however our intention is to highlight your thoughts and concerns on an equal footing with our own. Please email your proposals or posts to: editors(at)radiosurvivor.com.

Not All Stations (but Still Too Many)

First off, I aimed too broadly and failed to make a critical distinction up front. I do not mean to say or imply that every community radio station with an eclectic grid schedule is doomed. There are many stations so programmed that are surviving and thriving, and I am not a soothsayer nor a time-traveler from the year 2021.

Sincerely, if you and your station are happy with the size of your audience and the level of community support, and your station is financially sustainable, then I have no desire to tell you to change your schedule. I have no doubt that there are listeners who don’t just tolerate an eclectic schedule, but love it (I’m one of them). If every realistic indicator you have shows that your listeners like or love your grid, or that at least it poses no significant barriers for maintaining and growing your audience, then there’s no problem.

Yet, the unfortunate truth is that many community radio stations are struggling. There are any number of symptoms. Pledge drive revenues remain flat or are declining, even as costs continue to rise. Volunteer morale is on the wane, or it’s become more difficult to recruit air staff and keep parts of the schedule filled. There’s a creeping awareness that some programming has grown stagnant or the number of overall supporters is down.

Even if a station is mostly stable, it may have difficulty growing and evolving. There’s enough resource to maintain the status quo, but not enough to embrace new technology and platforms, like podcasting, add paid staff or

Your Community Is Your Audience, and Your Base of Support

The root cause underlying all these symptoms is audience: not serving a sufficient number of listeners, which in turn leads to an insufficient number of donors. A bigger audience means a bigger donor base, which results in more revenue.

Look, this is something everyone in community radio recognizes, and yet I suspect that some readers’ chests begin to tighten when I put it so plainly.

I get it.

Community radio is founded as an alternative to the commercial system which values audience size and targetable demographics above all. Linking audience size to donation revenue seems precariously close to the edge of a slippery slope that rushes headlong into prioritizing the tastes and desires of affluent listeners at the expense of the underserved.

Yet, who starts a community radio station with the desire NOT to have listeners? It sounds absurd when put that way. However, that’s the opposite side of that slippery slope, the one you descend into when building and serving audiences stop being a priority.

Many folks will argue that they don’t want their community radio station to appeal to everyone, and that programming for too wide of an audience is a fool’s errand because it means competing with commercial and public radio on their terms. I agree, but only so long as you actually know who your station is for.

Finding Your Community, and Your Audience

My argument is not that stations should target and attempt to appeal to biggest possible listenership. Rather, stations should make every attempt to know who the audience should be, and then work hard to serve that audience well. My guess is that if your station is suffering at all, then it’s a strong warning sign that you’re not actually serving everyone you intend to serve, or perhaps not doing it effectively.

Certainly many stations–if not most–have a general conception of their audience. Common descriptions hit on the idea of serving underserved audiences and featuring unheard voices. This is a great starting point, but not specific enough.

Your community is full of real people, with specific identities, information needs, cultural affinities and desires. A community station’s job is to identify and name the groups and smaller communities that need to be served.

It’s important to begin this assessment without first looking at your program schedule. Don’t just pick shows from the grid and then map them onto known or supposed listeners. Instead, consider all the people you hope to serve (whether or not you think you’re serving them now).

Next, ask: Are these people, groups and communities connected to your station in some way, and is there any communication? Could you ask them if your stations serves their needs adequately? If so, how? If not, why not?

This assessment needs to be honest and unflinching. No station is perfect, finding gaps is inevitable, and there’s no shame in failing to fully attain the lofty goals community radio aspires to. The real test is making realistic and sincere plans and efforts to improve that service, therefore growing your audience and donor base. It’s a win-win.

A Comfortable Tension and a Happy Medium

As I argued in my second post, I believe one of the most effective ways to serve a wide swath of your desired audience is to adopt a public service model for parts of your broadcast schedule. Those strips–which should be drive-time in most places–should not be atomized slots granted to individual programmers, but programming blocks that are consistent and predictable from day to day.

While I used NPR’s “All Things Considered” as an example for a magazine-type format that would work well in this strip, I recognize that it wasn’t the best one. Some folks object to using public radio as a model, worried that it leads to something that is too homogenized, too polite and too filtered. I understand that concern. ATC also sets a high bar with regard to production value–that show’s paid staff alone could probably run a dozen community stations.

I also want to emphasize that the programming strip does not have to be news, talk or public affairs. Indeed, some community stations have little or no talk programming, or reserve talk for weekends. If that’s working for your station, then I don’t want to convince you to change up your drive-time from music to news.

What goes in that public service strip should be based upon the needs of your community based upon realistic and thorough assessments. It should be programmed based on what the community needs, not only based upon the proposals you get. Music can be utterly appropriate for your drive-time public service strip, provided the genres and mix truly fill a critical niche and are presented in a way that is consistent from day to day so that listeners can learn to trust and rely upon it.

Let me also make clear that I’m not arguing that a community station needs to flip entirely to a single type of programming or genre of music 24/7. The key is to find a balance between public service and public access. While drive-time may take up about 6 hours of the schedule (roughly 6 – 9 AM and 4 – 7 PM), it still leaves 18 hours a day on weekdays for other approaches. That’s the happy medium.

Illustrating the Magazine

If your station programs public affairs programming in the morning or early evening hours then I still advocate for a magazine format. Based upon the feedback I received, it’s clear that I need to be more specific, since for many people the idea of a magazine format show understandably conjures up a program made up of many highly produced segments. It sounds like something that requires much more labor per hour than what many stations can pull off. Luckily, it’s not quite what I mean.

The most important quality of a good drive-time magazine are a good host who can ably read headlines, weather and announcements, but especially conduct interviews. Guests are a critical component that add variety and diversity without adding a ton of production work.

If a station has the capacity to produce reported segments, then definitely add them in. Or maybe that’s something to work towards. But I don’t think that production capacity is a prerequisite to start on this path.

Fortunately, there are reliable sources for individual reported news packages that are ready for a community station’s daily magazine. Free Speech Radio News is one great source. The Public Radio Exchange and Pacifica’s Audioport are two valuable marketplaces for finding additional segments ready to drop in.

As my colleague Jennifer pointed out on the podcast, other shows on your station are also a rich and untapped resource. Ask hosts and producers to contribute interviews or other segments from their own shows that can be highlighted in the daily magazine. These could be news reports, discussions of important local issues, or even live appearances by local musicians. If you think about the typical magazine show on public radio, even if it’s news heavy, there are also arts and culture pieces to mix things up. There’s no reason these can’t feature in your daily magazine.

The best part of featuring segments from other shows on your station is that it gives them additional exposure, potentially building more audience for them.

Keep in mind that the magazine is also that time to feature voices and communities who need airtime, and who your audience needs to hear from. Invite on leaders from these communities along with average folks with something to share. Whether it’s a quick phone call or an interview recorded at their convenience, a magazine show gives you the flexibility to meet many people where they are, rather than requiring that they be able to conform to your schedule or the rigors of producing and hosting their own shows.

The whole point is to be sure your station serves the underserved, and highlights those voices in a way that is most listenable and accessible for the largest audience–which includes people in those underserved communities. And don’t doubt for a minute that if you highlight a person on one episode that she won’t tell all her friends and family to tune in. Not every single person will become a regular listener, but some will.

Continue the Conversation

This is just one proposal for how a station can program a consistent and reliable drive-time public service block. Intentionally, it’s flexible and open.

More important to me is the principle that stations prioritize this public service at the times when there’s the greatest potential listening audience.

This is not an original idea, and I’m quite certain there are many community stations already doing something like this. I’d love to hear these stories and the lessons learned from doing this programming.

Let’s continue the conversation. Already my thinking has been informed and challenged by the comments, feedbacks and critiques from passionate community radio folks. Together we’ll evolve the thinking much faster and better than any one of us alone. Leave a comment here, comment on our Facebook page, tweet at us, or send an email.

Feature image credit: flickr / Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The post Not All Stations (but Perhaps Too Many) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Jennifer Waits brings us the voices of three programmers at a mysterious and chaotic community station with deep connections to the Los Angeles art scene. KCHUNG is an unlicensed part 15 AM radio station with about 40 station managers and extremely eclectic programming.

Paul Riismandel wrote a series of articles, offering strongly worded advice for struggling community radio stations. He lays out his arguments in detail on the podcast and discusses the ideas and issues with his co-hosts. Read what all the fuss is about in the show notes links below.

Contributions from listeners and readers like you allow us not to rely on click-bait ads. We greatly appreciate the 36 people who support Radio Survivor with a monthly contribution to our Patreon campaign, but more contributions are needed to keep this project sustainable and grow what we do. Even a monthly pledge of $1 makes a big difference. Please contribute at http://patreon.com/radio-survivor

Show Notes

• KCHUNG
• LA’s KCHUNG Radio Demonstrates the Power of Part 15 Broadcasting from 2014
• “Riffin” a KCHUNG talk show hosted by Max Maslansky
• Trapped in the Grid: Why Community Radio Risks Irrelevance
• Public Access vs. Public Service – Addressing the Biggest Hidden Tension in Community Radio

Editor’s note: This episode was originally titled “Radio Anarchy vs Order” but then we decided that it was a bit misleading. Learn why on episode #75.

The post Podcast #74 – Station or Static? KCHUNG Is L.A.’s Underground Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

One of the greatest tensions for community radio stations lies in the spectrum between public access and public service. Although this conflict may not be explicitly discussed, it implicitly affects every single programming decision.

It’s time for this tension to be made explicit, and for stations to actively grapple with how to balance a focus on serving communities the information they need, with the desire to provide open access to the airwaves. I believe this is a vital for refreshing community radio’s significance, building listenership, and addressing the problems I outlined in my last blog post.

To recap, I argued that the eclectic schedule grid–even if it has some predictable programming strips in some dayparts–poses a learning curve that many listeners will never take on, if they even know about your station. Instead, it is easier and more expedient to use alternatives like Pandora, Spotifty, YouTube, podcasts and other freely available on-demand media. Young people, who are “digital natives” rather than “radio natives,” are the group community radio most risks losing, leading to rapid declines in listenership from here on out.

Tackling the public service question, however, will help your station figure out what needs to be done to remain or become relevant to the listeners and communities you want to serve.

Defining ‘Public Service’

First let’s define what I mean. Public radio–news/talk in particular–is the clearest example of public service radio. It’s designed to deliver news and information programming to listeners at times when they want it and can listen. It’s not an accident that NPR and member stations expend the most resources on drive time anchors “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” A significant majority of listeners are in their cars or transitioning into or out of work and ready to find out what’s going on in the world.

Other shows will be programmed in between, often featuring more long-form discussion and interview, sometimes less “hard news,” assuming that listeners’ needs change through the day. These days, public radio programming strategy is rigorously tested with ratings, pledge drive revenues, focus groups and surveys.

Shows that don’t perform are replaced, even over the vociferous objections of small groups of listeners. Public stations can pull this off because they’re entirely professionalized. On-air public radio jobs are desirable, and programmers serve at the pleasure of the management. If your show gets cancelled, it’s tough luck for you. The airtime never belongs to staff–it belongs to the station and management.

On the plus side, this means public radio has developed into a very reliable news and information service. If something newsworthy is happening listeners can easily rely on their local public station to inform them.

On the minus side, as I recently noted, programming is highly mediated and edited. Very few people are allowed significant time to speak for themselves. And while public radio is not nearly as soundbite driven as television, the tendency is towards concision and having professional journalists relay most information. Inevitably, this means voices are left out, and the spectrum of acceptable discourse is narrowed.

Defining ‘Public Access’

Public access is what a large percentage of community radio schedules feature. Shows are typically programmed by one DJ or a small team who proposed a particular idea, genre or format and were then “granted” a time slot (and “granting” airtime is both problematic and pernicious), often for an indefinite length of time. This is the foundation for the infamous patchwork schedule, and why in some cases a hardcore punk show might follow a folk show, making for a jarring listening experience for all but the most dedicated listeners.

Most stations have a well-honed system for evaluating show proposals and determining if and when they get on air. Though the process varies, there are some consistent factors. One frequently important factor–even the most important at some stations–has to do with judging the experience and reliability of the volunteer proposing the show, and her availability. An obvious factor is the quality of the proposal, often based upon criteria like how unique it is compared to other stations, and more ineffable aesthetic judgements. One of the last considerations–if explicitly considered at all–is: who is the audience, will the show serve them, and will they be able to listen?

I call this public access programming because it emphasizes giving people a shot at being on the radio, focusing on voices, ideas and programming that otherwise wouldn’t be on air. It’s a hallmark of community radio, and valuable.

The problem is that it tends to pay much less or very little attention to the needs of audiences. In fact, a pervasive assumption is that public access is tantamount public service, that the public needs to be exposed to these programs, and that’s it. While I agree that public access is important, this equation is only partially true.

Leaning Towards Public Service

Few community stations operate on a pure public access model. The existence of strip programming and public affairs programming argue that a public service model is at work.

When a station chooses to air syndicated news programs like “Democracy Now!,” the management is likely acting out of a perceived need. The scheduling of these shows is more like how public stations program “All Things Considered.”

Though logistical details probably play a stronger role in community radio, if you look at a sampling of program grids you’ll mostly see “Democracy Now!” scheduled during AM or PM drivetime, or over the noon hour, times when it’s presumed (with reason) that more people can listen to the radio. This show, which is broadcast live from New York at 8 AM Eastern, will be tape delayed to fit time zones when it otherwise would be on very early in the morning when fewer would hear it.

Stations will often program other news and public affairs shows in a block around a show like “Democracy Now!” under the fair assumption that listeners tuning into that anchor show will want to hear more similar programming. Again, this choice tends to emphasize service over access.

Yet, once we consider locally produced talk shows, things start to bend more towards public access, as the specific shows programmed in a news block may be chosen based more upon the availability of certain hosts rather than based on how their topics do or don’t make sense to the listener.

Because topics and quality of these local shows may vary widely, so does the ability of the station to hold on to listeners after DN ends, which impacts how well a station serves listeners.

Bridging the Divide

The way out, then, is for stations to prioritize public service for specific portions of the schedule and certain types of programming. News and public affairs blocks are an obvious first place, but I don’t want to argue that music programming does not constitute public service and shouldn’t be considered.

The single most important aspect of public service airtime is that it is explicitly the domain of the station and its program director or committee. That is, airtime is not “granted” to individual programmers who can then hold it like real estate until they get bored, move away or die.

Public service airtime is not programmed based upon submitted proposals and the convenience of programmers. Instead this airtime should be programmed based upon a clear-eyed assessment of what your community needs, and who can listen at that time.

Because it’s peak listening time in most markets, making morning and evening drive time public service is a logical move. It’s also easier to implement, since there’s probably already syndicated or magazine-style news programming slotted in, and therefore fewer volunteer programmers who are directly affected.

Brass Tacks

While I strongly urge stations to make this transition, I also advise to do so carefully and respectfully. Making huge schedule changes or throwing programmers off the air usually results in turmoil that can undermine your intent.

The first step is to agree upon some programming goals before you ever touch the schedule. What are some communities that would benefit from airtime? Who are some voices that should be added to the mix? Who are some community leaders and allies who can help us answer these questions?

It’s important to get out of the mindset of setting up discrete shows for specific communities or interests during this block. Let’s say that you determine that the Latino community should be heard from more. While it is important that listeners within that community hear these voices, consider that it’s also important for people across many communities to hear them, too. Instead of creating a weekly Latino hour that resides in drive time, think about Latino voices can be integrated more regularly and holistically into your drive time programming.

There are two downsides to creating these kinds of special interest shows in your public service strip. First, it requires that members of a particular community or group commit to being available to produce the show every week at the same time. This is a particular challenge if you hope to bring in community leaders or other active folks who likely are already overcommitted. They may be able too spare time every week or two for an interview, but not a full half-hour or more.

The second challenge is that a special interest shows signals who it is for, and who it isn’t for. Of course we’d like to think all of our listeners are open minded and curious about cultures and experiences different from their own. The reality is that many will simply tune out when it seems like a program isn’t for them. Moreover, sequestering programming focused on a particular community to a single hour or two means you won’t be serving listeners from that community who can’t listen at that one time.

Embrace the Magazine

My strongest advice is to transition this public service strip away from atomic special interest shows and towards a more dynamic magazine format, not unlike “All Things Considered.” This gives you the flexibility to schedule interviews, segments and packages based upon when guests are available and when news happens.

The upside for your audience is a more consistent listening experience. Just like “All Things Considered” features reported packages, headline news and interviews, your listeners will learn to expect something similar from your station during drive time, except with a broader, more critical community radio take on it.

The task for your station is to find and develop talent who can produce the show. You’ll need hosts and producers who are willing to commit to a show that isn’t strictly theirs. This won’t happen overnight, which is another reason why it doesn’t make sense to turn over your programming all at once.

Take an opportunity to work with the programmers who are on the air during your new public service strip. Some may be open to these changes, so focus energy on working with them. If you have programmers who are less open to feedback or change, let them be for the moment. You’ll have a much stronger case later if you start to develop a few solid hours of magazine programming a week.

If resources permit, strongly consider creating paid positions to create and host this show. While paid hosts are often anathema in community radio, hosts of your drive time magazine aren’t like your other hosts. They’ll be held to a level of consistency and, dare I say, professionalism, that volunteer hosts aren’t.

More importantly, economic disparities are an easily overlooked reason why certain voices are underrepresented on community radio. Simply put, not everyone has the time to volunteer to make radio. From needing childcare to having jobs with frequently changing schedules, there are many people who can’t make the necessary commitment. However, if you can pay them a fair wage, or provide assistance with things like transportation or child care, they may be able to prioritize making radio.

It’s easy to assume you need to run out and hire a full time news director or producer. Go ahead, if your station has that kind of resource. More likely, you’ll need to build up to that point. So consider making some strategic part-time hires, emphasizing times and areas where you need the most help. Look to local community agencies to see if there are work or service partnerships out there, and talk to supporters in the business community who might be willing to underwrite an opportunity for people who otherwise might not be on air.

It’s Not All or Nothing

Hiring programmers and hosts is only one approach, and isn’t a necessary pre-requisite for creating public service strips of programming. The key is that this programming should be driven by community needs, who should be heard from, and the programming that will most benefit your community.

It’s also vital to take a slow approach to build a strong team of programmers and host, as well as the agreement from your volunteers and programmers that this is a productive and worthwhile change. The payoff is creating consistency through the most listened part of day that will keep listeners tuned in, while also increasing your overall service to the community. This should lead to a bigger audience and more support for your station.

I do want to emphasize that I think these public service strips can and should live alongside traditional public access program blocks, which will likely still form the majority of your weekly schedule. I still love eclecticism in radio, and so do many of your listeners. However, there is a declining number of stations that can expect all the people who might be listeners to embrace the patchwork schedule.

Luckily eclecticism and predictability can take up residence on the same station.

What do you think? How realistic is this proposal? If you’re starting a new LPFM can you create your public service strip at the very beginning? Let us know in the comments.

The post Public Access vs. Public Service – Addressing the Biggest Hidden Tension in Community Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This is a transitional time for community radio, unprecedented in the medium’s more than 60-year history in the U.S. Thousands of new LPFM stations are going on the air bringing service to communities that never had community radio, or adding new services to supplement existing community stations.

At the same time many community stations risk becoming irrelevant, more so than ever before. This would be a tragedy, and one that can be averted if station programmers and management are willing to question some age-old assumptions and take a fresh look at their schedules.

We’re in the middle of a tectonic shift in how people use mass media. The internet delivers audio, video and text to people almost everywhere. Yes, radio is still used weekly by more than 90% of Americans, but how it’s used, and who uses the medium has changed more rapidly than most community stations’ ability to keep up.

Stations cannot take their value for granted. People in your community do not use media like they did 20 years ago. In particularly, young people do not use radio in the same way, if they use radio at all.

Trapped in the Grid

Take a look at a typical community radio station’s schedule grid and you can’t help but think little has changed since 1996 (or even 1976). What you’ll probably see is a patchwork of shows of varying formats and genres. Many stations lend some predictability to the schedule by laying out strips of similar programming, typically on weekdays, reserving, say, 5 to 7 PM for news and talk programming. Even so, the apparent coherence of these programming strips may belie the fact that programming will vary widely depending on the DJ or producer who has that slot on any given day.

Don’t get me wrong, eclecticism and heterogeneity rank amongst community radio’s great qualities, differentiating it from strictly formatted commercial stations. But this kind of schedule has always been an Achilles’ heel, too. That’s because the average person doesn’t know how to listen to community radio.

A Listener’s Learning Curve

The average listener is raised on single-format radio, simply because that’s what 90% of the dial sounds like. Scan the dial just about anywhere in the U.S. in you’ll learn that you can rely on one station for country music, another for soft rock and yet another for public radio talk. It’s so knit into the fabric of the medium that when someone hears Led Zeppelin blaring from 95.9 FM, they immediately assume that’s where they can return to hear more dinosaurs of hard rock. They don’t tune back in to hear Dwight Yoakum or Mozart.

Of course an eclectic schedule is not a difficult concept to grasp. Despite the trend on cable towards more homogenous channels, a single TV network affiliate still programs talk, news, comedy, drama and sports on one channel, and viewers have no problem navigating it. But it’s always been that way–the model has has been around since the dawn of television, and so viewers of all ages grew up learning to use it.

I’m not arguing that it’s a bad thing to ask your listeners to expend a little effort to get the most out of your station. The problem is that there is less incentive for them to do so than 20 years ago.

In the mid-90s if you wanted to explore music from the continent of Africa it either required a trip to the public library, blindly buying some CDs, or checking out a community radio station. Taking economics and effort into account, the community station might have been the path of least resistance–it cost nothing, you didn’t have to leave home, and a knowledgable DJ would be your guide.

Today that music is just a click away in Pandora, Spotify, Youtube, or any number of dedicated internet radio streams. Certainly, that expert community radio DJ probably picks better tunes and will give listeners much more information and context than a Pandora stream. But that hardly matters if the listener never even looks for a community station.

Or maybe she does, but every time she tunes in she hears talk programming. So, let’s say that our listener checks out the station’s website to see when she can find some African music and sees the show airs Saturdays at 3 PM. Only that’s the time when she has other obligations and can’t listen to the radio. Game over. It’s much more expedient to just fire up that Pandora stream.

Now imagine that our listener is more like 18 or 21 years old. Would it even occur to her that she should turn on the radio to find something other than the usual?

The Dream of the 90s, Faded

Certainly these barriers existed in the mid-90s, too. Except there were far fewer alternatives. Back then I knew many people who were like me. When they went to a new town one of the first things they did was scan the radio dial looking for something good, unique or out-of-the-ordinary. Special attention was paid to the left end of the dial, understanding that’s where you might find that special college or community station. These days, it’s the rare young person who tells me he does this–rarer, I’ll argue, than a 20-something in 1996.

The conundrum this poses for community radio is declining audience, as would-be listeners choose other platforms and young listeners never develop the habit. This means many listeners who really benefit from community radio will miss out.

This is not mere inconvenience, but a tragedy waiting to happen, as we wait for the mainstream media to fall in line to further soften and normalize the racist, xenophobic and misogynist policies of our president-elect and his administration. Community radio cannot be an effective corrective and beacon for humanist values if the people who need to hear the message don’t know to tune in.

What to do?

So what’s the solution? Destroy the programming grid and start from scratch? Take a card from commercial and public radio’s deck and homogenize as much as possible?

No, I think there’s another way. A way in which community radio can retain it’s diversity and eclecticism, while also becoming more accessible to more people who need to hear it. I’ll make that proposal in my next post.

The post Trapped in the Grid: Why Community Radio Risks Irrelevance appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’m so excited that hundreds of new LPFM community radio stations are going on the air right now. First, because it represents massive growth in the number and diversity of broadcast voices. Second, because it’s an unprecedented opportunity for experimenting with what it means to be a community radio station.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with people from at least two dozen new stations that are on the air or are nearing launch. If they ask for my advice, there is one tip that is always at the top of my list: don’t let your DJs own their time slots.

When you’ve got a new station to get off the ground, and 168 hours of air time to fill, this concern is understandably at the bottom of the pile, if it’s even a concern at all. I get it. You need to entice good programmers on the air, and hope they’ll stay around a while. Worrying about them turning into effective squatters doesn’t seem like a big deal.

However, it will be big deal, and probably sooner than you think.

In my 20+ years of noncommercial radio, one of the most frequent problems I hear about is the drain on energy and resources caused by DJs and programmers who seem to be phoning it in, have stopped growing and evolving their shows, and maybe on top of that are no longer constructive contributors to the station as a whole.

Of course, the obvious question is: why not kick them off the air? The usual answer is: it’s not that simple.

A Pernicious Culture of Ownership

Although every station is different, and policies vary from place to place, the underlying reason why stations can’t rid themselves of unproductive programmers is because there is a culture of time ownership. While a sense of shared ownership over the station can be a good thing, the sense that one owns her own slot of time on the schedule tends to be detrimental.

That’s because it encourages DJs to be conservative, as in conserving their space on the air, ready to defend it. This results in resistance or even downright hostility in shifts to the program schedule that are intended to adapt to changes in the listening habits or other factors.

Owning one’s airtime is counterproductive because it also provides a ready defense against constructive criticism or suggestions for improving a program. It’s like a neighbor telling you that your house would look nicer if you pained over the neon purple shutters. If it’s your house, and there’s no ordinance or condo association that intervenes, you can tell the neighbor to go pound sand.

That’s what happens with one DJ. But a schedule is made up of many people, whose cooperation is necessary to have a station that listeners actually want to hear. So, if many DJs or programmers exploit this aspect of ownership, you end up with stations with patchwork schedules that don’t make sense to listeners, schedules that look and sound 20 years old, or both.

Luckily, not every DJ or programmer adopts this attitude. However, just a few can create enough friction to slow down or completely halt any sort of innovation at just about any station.

More perniciously, if a few DJs believe they own their slots, then it’s likely that’s become the culture of your station. That means even the ones who might be more open to compromise and change will nevertheless be willing to defend your more recalcitrant programmers based upon that enshrined principle. That how efforts to deal with one problem programmer turn into a station-wide brouhaha.

Create a Culture of Cooperation, Accountability & Receptivity

So, what to do?

Well, for established stations facing this problem, it’s never easy. That’s because changing rules and changing culture requires cooperation and some kind of rough consensus amongst all stakeholders–a slow process when you have dozens of DJs or programmers.

New stations, however, have an enormous advantage: there is very little to change. Now is the time to build both the structure and culture that does not give DJs ownership over their time slots. Note, I say structure and culture. Yes, you’ll probably need rules in place that limit a DJs ability to remain in one time slot in perpetuity, along with fair and equitable procedures for evaluating shows and volunteer performance so that DJs are accountable. But these rules won’t mean anything if they can’t actually be carried out. I’ve seen plenty of stations try to legislate themselves out of this problem, only to find that enforcing the new rules only creates even more friction and disharmony.

The culture part is about practicing what you preach. It means educating DJs about expectations, their rights, and and their obligations to the station. It also means that everyone should follow the rules equally. For this to work, it’s vitally important for prominent members of staff–like managers, program directors, founders or long-standing volunteers–to not only follow the rules and set an example, but to do so willingly and vocally. A couple years down the line new volunteers will pick up on the fact that some DJs or programmers don’t seem to have to yield as often as others, and they’ll conclude that the rules don’t apply to everyone, and that their goal should be to join the cool kids and enjoy their privileges.

This is a place where I think community radio can learn from college radio. Student-run stations have regular turnover and changes in schedule as a natural outcome of college life. Every semester or quarter students have new schedules which often means they need to find new time slots. Commensurately, most college stations revise their schedules on the same basis, and often require DJs to reapply or rejustify their shows before they get scheduled. This is both a humane and effective way of keeping a schedule from becoming too calcified.

One frequently argument I hear against this approach is the worry that the schedule becomes too changeable, upsetting listeners and degrading any sense of continuity. This is an understandable concern, though my experience is that arguments about continuity tend to be vasty overstated. While nearly any schedule change can bring in listener complaints, there’s a human tendency to overestimate how much these complaints represent the listenership at large. In most cases listeners tend to get with the program pretty quickly.

Furthermore, with volunteer DJs and programmers turnover is inevitable as people’s lives change. Listeners manage to deal with these changes. So, why are changes brought on by smart management of your schedule and staff any different?

More importantly, there are many ways to design a program schedule so that the turnover of individual DJs is not so significant. In fact, I think any community station wants to make a significant portion of its daytime schedule reasonably predictable in terms of genre, tone, style or some other factor. Yes, every DJ should bring something unique and valuable, but that really should mean every DJ, not just some anointed ones. Making a consistently listenable schedule will let your station and your listeners better deal with inevitable and necessary turnover in on-air staff.

Understandably, it’s no fun to effectively fire DJs or take them off the air. But, on the flip side, if you don’t, then what you communicate to the rest of your on-air staff is that qualities like longevity, obstinence and conservativeness are actually more important than cooperation, receptivity, accountability and willingness to change.

Please understand – this is not a problem that is easy fix when it actually becomes a big problem. It’s a problem to fix right now, when you’re putting your first programmers and DJs on the air. The culture you create today is the culture you’ll have five or ten years from now. Educate, cultivate and enshrine the values you want now, and you’ll increase the chance you’ll have cooperative and forward-thinking DJs down the line.

Has your station dealt with this problem? Have any recommendations or innovative solutions to share? Let us know in the forums.

The post New LPFMs: Don’t Let DJs Own Their Time Slots; Be Ready to Fire the Bad Ones appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Michael Gaines contacted us after doing some research about the potential for very low power FM radio–something under 100 watts, but higher than the milliwatts permissible for unlicensed Part 15 transmissions. After an email exchange on the topic–which revealed we both worked at the same college radio station in New Jersey–I encouraged Michael to share his thoughts with Radio Survivor readers in this post. -Paul Riismandel

by Michael Gaines

Radio can be magical. Growing up in the 70s and 80s with New York radio both on AM and FM, the radio was filled with so much amazing programming: music, comedy, radio dramas, and sports. In the days of only a handful of channels on TV, radio filled in the gaps. I loved radio so much that when I got to college, I became a DJ at my college radio station WTSR at The College of New Jersey (then, Trenton State College). Being a DJ was an amazing experience, one that I’ve never been able to duplicate, even after ten years of podcasting.

After the shift to the digital realm, I found my interest in radio waned for a long time. I would listen to it every day in the car, but that was the extent of it. There’s so much entertainment on the internet that I had forgotten about radio. A few years ago, the DJ bug started to bite again and I started looking into what it would take to put together an internet radio station. After a time I wondered if it was even possible to create a low-power station in town. Radio seemed to be owned by the big corporations, but could a town have its own voice?

I started with FM simply because the audio quality is undeniably better and the band is much more popular than AM. Starting a station from scratch was close to impossible for me, but I found LPFM which is a class of service which is designed to bring radio to communities by using low power. I thought this was great for what I wanted to do, but I learned that the application window closed, and probably won’t reopen anytime soon.

If the window were to open again, I’d definitely apply, but I’d request enough power to cover a small distance – maybe a mile or two. LPFM allows stations to go up to 100 watts, but that’s more than I’d want, both in distance and responsibility at this point.

Jumping into an LPFM station may be intimidating for some people and may be too much to handle when you’re first getting started. There should be a way to serve a town without having to wait many years for the application window to open again.

My town isn’t very large, about a mile across and a mile and a half long. Optimally, I’m looking at setting something up with a 4000–4500 foot broadcast radius, but how do you do that legally? And with the LPFM application window closed, how do you do that before 10–15 years have passed?

My research brought me to the FCC’s Part 15 rules, which are designed for unlicensed, short-range transmissions. The rules are strict about how far a Part 15 FM signal can go–a maximum of 250uV measured at 3 meters from the transmitter. (Note that Part 15 rules for FM do not specify transmitter power, only signal strength as received at three meters. However, meeting this limit typically means using less than .1 watt of power. -ed.)

It’s rumored that a Part 15 FM signal can only go a few hundred feet, but I prefer testing things out myself instead of listening to rumors. (According to the FCC Part 15 permits “an effective service range of approximately 200 feet” on FM. -ed.) I bought a Whole House 3.0 FM transmitter which seemed like the best device to do my testing with. Using the transmitter in its default low-power US mode, I was able to get a decent signal between 600 and 800 feet in my car, with the transmitter sitting on the window sill on the second floor.

I’m sure it would cover more ground if I were able to raise it higher. So many factors decide how far a signal can go: obstructions, receiver sensitivity, the antenna, weather, and line of sight. Still, even if I did put the transmitter on the roof, this device wasn’t going to cover the 4500 foot radius I needed to get the signal out to the majority of my town.

Being I have a background in math and physics, I started working on numbers. Many people tell you how far Part 15 FM should go, but nobody talks about what you need to hit a certain distance. So I had to figure it out myself. Would transmitting with several times the maximum unlicensed Part 15 power limit that show that a new class of stations can be created and not cause serious disruptions to licensed stations? I found that by the numbers, it seems possible.

In Canada, their equivalent of Part 15 rules (BETS) is a maximum of 1000 uV received at 3 meters from the transmitter, and there haven’t been reports of any serious problems there. I determined that under optimal conditions, a small town like mine could be covered with a transmitter that put out a signal that measures about 1600 uV at three meters. However, that wouldn’t fit under the original design of Part 15 FM transmissions which are not intended to go far.

Asking the FCC to extend unlicensed Part 15 FM limits to either my suggested 1600 uV standard or even the Canadian 1000uV standard may work, but you don’t want the airwaves cluttered because of so many unregulated devices spewing FM signals that can go ¾ of a mile. After some thought, I decided that extending the range of Part 15 might not be solution. Instead I think it would be better to create a class which will allow a station to cover an area large enough for a small town, like a mile or two.

My idea is to have a new class which I call Community Low Power FM (CLPFM). The intent is to be between LPFM–which may be too powerful and for which new applications are not being accepted–and Part 15 FM, with coverage that is far too short to be of any use.

Since its purpose is to serve a community, the station would have to be non-profit, and have a worthy amount of local coverage. The station would have to be licensed so that the organization running the station would make sure that they don’t run too much power, don’t bleed into adjacent stations, and that they’re held accountable for their community programming. If the station were to be unlicensed, one town could see several people competing for space on the dial, and that would just get too chaotic.

Kids and adults could use the station to learn how a station works and spin records that the big stations never play, exposing more people to different forms of music easier than any internet service. It’s also a far more personal experience. Who wouldn’t love to hear their friends and family on a local radio station? It could bring a community together far better than something you’d find on the internet because you know these people personally. They’re not strangers.

I realize that in this day and age a town can run their own web site and stream their own content, but people still listen to the airwaves, and there’s a serious gap in the airwaves for the voice of a town. I think it’s time that towns get that voice on the air.

Michael Gaines runs the D20 Podcast Network.

The post A Middle Ground Between Unlicensed Micropower & LPFM? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Dear Radio Survivor reader:

I am writing this post in my role as Radio Survivor’s Business Manager, offering some very unbusinesslike observations. The re/code technology site reports that the rapid pace of technological change “continues to drive media fragmentation, muddying the once-simple world of TV, radio and print.” Advertisers now have to split their budgets between many mediums. Content providers scramble to provide ad companies with the return they expect for their money. Nobody really knows how this uncertain new marketing environment will play out.

What a rat race. How are we at Radio Survivor dealing with this? Simple. We are getting rid of our affiliate ads as fast as we can. Thanks to your initial response to our Patreon campaign, we have surpassed our first milestone goal: $100 a month in support. In response to your response we have dumped all our Google Adsense display and banner ads. That’s what we promised to do and it’s done. They’re all gone. Kaput.

Full disclosure: I love it. I love not having any of those stoopid squares and rectangles for casinos and dating services.What’s the next affiliate ad-related milestone goal? Once we reach $500 a month in support we’re going to pull down all of our Amazon ads too.

Me at the 2015 SXSW conference, looking discombobulated after the umpteenth panel discussion about money money money money . . .

Why does this matter? First and foremost: online affiliate advertisements influence content for online sites. Anyone who tells you that this isn’t true is blowing smoke in your face. Now to be fair, no advertisers call us and complain about Radio Survivor content. But once a site takes its revenue from affiliate banners, its content producers must confront the obvious: the more page views a post gets, the more revenue the site generates. Bottom line: stories about Sirius XM, Apple stock, and the latest wireless gadget generate ad clicks. Stories about wonderful new (or old) community radio stations don’t. Stories about interesting chapters in college radio history don’t. Stories about unknown but brilliant podcasters don’t. Stories about improving the Federal Communications Commission’s Low Power FM rules don’t.

That’s why I hate online affiliate ads.

Here’s another thing. Every year we run a bunch of stories about cool radio related items to buy for the holidays. How do we decide what to recommend? Bottom line: we pick stuff that’s on Amazon.com. When you follow the link and click the ‘buy’ button we get a little piece of the sale. To be fair to us again, Amazon has a lot of stuff to purchase. It’s not like we can’t find good products there: great books, great DIY kits, cute radio related toys. But I despise the whole ritual anyway. I don’t want Radio Survivor to be part of the hyper-commercialization of Christmas, Hanukah, and the New Year. So I can’t wait until we reach our $500 milestone so we can yank Amazon off our pages once and for all.

And here’s yet another thing: an affiliate ad banner free Radio Survivor empowers us to speak out against the over-commercialization of media generally and in the radio sector in particular. I am really concerned about the proliferation of “enhanced underwriting” spots and the efforts of some public and college broadcasters to turn them into full blown ads. But how can I effectively speak out against this when our site is stuffed to the gizzards with affiliate spots, too?

As any self-respecting adolescent would say, it’s ridikalous.

In conclusion, thank you—all of you who have contributed to our Patreon campaign. And for those of you who are still thinking about it, first of all, thanks just for thinking about helping Radio Survivor. The more Patreon contributors we have, the more coverage we can provide for college, community, and indie radio in all its myriad forms. If you are digging our podcast, please know that we’ve got all kinds of ideas in the hopper: live conference coverage, webinars, the works.

So here’s the last thing: even a little help gets us closer to our goals. We have supporters contributing one, two, and even $1.67 a month, which is awesome. We know lots of you don’t have a lot of cash. Heck, we’re all in community media right? That’s one of the reasons we went with Patreon—to create an easy, affordable support vehicle for our readers and to become a reader supported media source. Slowly but surely, we are moving towards that goal. Thanks for helping us get there.

Matthew Lasar
Business Manager
radiosurvivor.com

The post Radio Survivor without affiliate ads: why it matters appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Turntable.fm shut down its last component earlier this year: Turntable Live—a concert version of now gone turntable.fm. TT.fm founder Billy Chasen reflected on the end of the Turntable project in a blog entry posted on Wednesday:

“Ultimately, I didn’t heed the lessons of so many failed music startups. It’s an incredibly expensive venture to pursue and a hard industry to work with. We spent more than a quarter of our cash on lawyers, royalties and services related to supporting music. It’s restrictive. We had to shut down our growth because we couldn’t launch internationally. It’s a long road. It took years to get label deals in place and it also took months of engineering time to properly support them (time which could have been spent on product).”

As I’ve said before, while the actual products that Chasen and his associates created wound up being unsustainable, their online chat room based music sharing concept lives on in services like plug.dj and Soundrop. That is an enormous achievement, for which they should be proud. I was sometimes disappointed at the level of vituperation that was directed at Turntable by various room developers, as if misjudgment isn’t a given for any venture.

The Internet is sometimes compared to the American frontier. If that comparison is apt, a comment by former Colorado governor Dick Lamm seems appropriate. “Failure,” he once said, “is as American as apple pie.” The quote comes from Patricia Limerick’s book Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Path of the American West. “To many Americans, the West promised so much that the promise was almost sure to be broken,” Limerick notes. And no sector of the wild wild ‘Net offers as many breakable promises as online music sharing. Go back to Napster and start making a list. Two hours later you’ll still be working on it.

The reality is that the fate of every major independent online radio service is uncertain. Take Pandora. As we posted last week, a United Kingdom research firm calls the beloved music streamer’s business model a house of cards, largely because of royalty costs.

“Pandora is a really wonderful service, but it is very hard to see anything wonderful about the company’s business model, or even its future prospects if it carries on as it is,” its report concludes.

It’s easy to take a hard line on all this. This is what capitalism is all about, right? Entrepreneurs take risks and reap the rewards, or not. But government plays a huge role in the imagined online “free market” music ecology. Many services, including Last.fm and plug.dj now depend on licensing agreements with YouTube.com and SoundCloud for their online content. And like westerners depend on government regulated water systems, these bigger services in turn depend on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to avoid being sued out of business every time some singleton user uploads an illegal video or music file or two. A nice chunk of the economy of FM music radio is about the fact that Uncle Sam doesn’t require music stations to pay performance royalties to musicians. Meanwhile broadcasters endlessly protest the prospect of Federal Communications Commission public interest “mandates” directed at them, such as localism requirements. But they aren’t above broadly hinting at mandates for other industries—such as a directive that mobile phones include FM tuners.

The truth is that the online music sharing environment is laden with uncertainty, unprofitability, and unsustainability for musicians, developers, and consumers. For developers unequally apportioned royalty costs represent a huge growth barrier. This in turn means that the Internet radio sector continues to stall, shortchanging the possibility of meaningful income for most musicians. It also means that many online music services will never get past the Juke Box tune dispenser phase of their development, denying consumers the rich possibilities inherent in true audience based radio.

That’s why eliminating inconsistent and unfair copyright royalty rules is so important. It’s why protecting nascent services from rent seeking ISP practices is crucial—a potential example would be allowing wireless ISPs to set low data caps and then sell music applications the privilege of exempting their data from a consumer’s data use ceiling. And it is why strengthening public media is critical—greater government support for public music radio in all its forms, listener-supported, college, community, and NPR based.

As turntable.fm demonstrated, the market often accomplishes wonderful things, but only up to a point. If online music radio is indispensable to us, shouldn’t we set aside at least some portion of the Internet/FM landscape as a place where failure is not an option?

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post Beyond the wild west: government and the future of music radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.