I’m looking forward to Pandora’s impending new radio offering featuring Questlove of Tonite Show fame. The press release says the program will be called “Questlove Supreme”:

” . . . a raw and ingenious three-hour show curated and produced by the four-time GRAMMY winner. The show will be a weekly ride through the global musical landscape featuring adventurous music selections, compelling conversations and revealing interviews with music lovers from the entertainment industry and beyond. The show will have a similar music intensive feel to Questlove’s popular New York University class.”

There are two reasons why I’m stoked about this. First, it sounds like the Questlove program will at least aspire to serve up content that is both entertaining and thoughtful. Second, here’s the veritable symbol of individualized Internet listening offering what amounts to a conventional, real time, mass audience based  (dare I say it) . . . radio show.

The New York Times has a nice piece on the move titled “Pandora Looks For a Way Out of the Doldrums.” What interests me the most the use of the word “radio.”

“For Pandora, which has clashed with the music industry in the past, the involvement of an authority like Questlove — whose group is the house band on NBC’s ‘The Tonight Show’ — is an important endorsement as the company embarks on its biggest challenge yet: expanding its service beyond radio to compete directly with Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal.”

The term “radio” has now become even more subjective than it was five years ago (and I thought it was amazingly subjective then). So how come Pandora is “radio” and Spotify, Apple, and Tidal aren’t? The latter three services all offer personalized music streams of one kind or another. They’ve all to various degrees have redefined radio as a hyper-individualized on-demand or modified on-demand medium. And, in Pandora and Apple‘s cases, they’re now experimenting with old school mass audience radio in order to, well, I’m not actually quite sure why they’re doing it.

Still, I’m very glad they’re giving it a try. The Questlove show premieres September 7 somewhere on the Pandora cloud.

The post Pandora: when everything else stalls, you can always try radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Happy anniversary number ten to Think Twice Radio, the online talk cornucopia that invites you to think many times, actually. TTR is basically a matrix of interesting people who cogitate out loud about everything from dating to the origins of rock and roll to the BDSM scene in Buffalo, New York. A lot of the participants come from Buffalo, it seems, including its founder Richard Wicka. He wrote to me in response to an interview I did with KPFA in Berkeley, about my new book Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium.

Wicka started Think Twice in 2006:

“As you said [in the interview] streaming is expensive, so I set it up as download on demand. Over the past 10 years about 75 people have had radio shows on Think Twice Radio covering a huge range of topics. For example, one fellow, Russell Link, is 83 and his show is all about musical theater from the 1920’s and 30’s. Another, Michael Hoffert, does his show about comic books. There is a show for the kink community called BDSM in Buffalo, a sports talk program, a program about the local theater scene, a program for the Zen community called ‘Unraveling Religion’. One of my favorite programs is called ‘Baby I’m Amazed’ in which a very talkative 70 year old, Tom Mazur, simply wants me to sit down with him and listen while he goes on a stream of consciousness.”

Good to know something as purposely thoughtful as TTR is out there. Here’s to many more birthdays . . .

The post Think Twice Radio is ten years old appeared first on Radio Survivor.

My third book about radio is scheduled to be released on March 31 by its publisher, ABC-CLIO. It is titled Radio 2.0: uploading the first broadcast medium. The writer Susie Bright has already noticed its release via her Twitter account. The press has a very nice page for the small tome on its website. I thought I’d write up something for it here.

The whole “2.0” trope is, admittedly, a bit of a cliche. But I use it in this instance in a dialectical sense. First I make the case for the historical existence of “Radio 1.0” – a stretch of around sixty years in which AM/FM broadcasters streamed to something called “audiences.” These I define as large groups of people who took in radio content immediately and simultaneously, often conscious of themselves as such. The book contends that this was good for the United States. Radio 1.0 contributed to the forging of a national consciousness sufficiently coherent and self-confident to permit the greater integration of women, minorities, and working class people into the social structure. It is no coincidence, I argue, that broadcast radio’s greatest years coincide with 1920s feminism, the New Deal, and the civil rights struggles of the 1940s, fifties, and sixties.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, our government made a series of “constitutive choices,” to borrow Paul Starr’s noted phrase, that undermined not just some of the hallowed underpinnings of twentieth century broadcasting, such as localism, but the very concept of the audience itself. The audience now played a back seat to something called “competition,” which somehow would be furthered by breaking down media ownership barriers. This ironically led to the rise of the Clear Channel empire, whose principals very purposefully turned away from an audience based business model. Now conglomeration, informercialism, and maniacal cost cutting ruled the day.

As this new approach prevailed, a sort of vast audience technological diaspora followed. Its earliest manifestation predated the Internet by two decades. The SONY Walkman led the way towards the “personalization” of listening, followed by Discmen and CD-ROM men and subsequent digital men who created audio “pods” and then colonized the gadget once discouraged by government regulators from getting too far into radio, the telephone, now proudly wireless and digitized. Listening was now “asynchronous,” declared Internet radio pioneer Carl Malamud, for “asynchronous times.”

For those of you worried that from this point of departure my book descends into a sort of liberal Luddite narrative of decline, fear not. I spend quite a few pages celebratorily exploring all the audio techno-marvels of our age, many of which I have immensely enjoyed, among them Live 365, the grand legion of SHOUTcasters, Pandora, Spotify (and things within Spotify), Last.fm, podcasting, and the Turntable.fm phenomenon, which I dub a form of “deejay texting.”

I also note that one of the earliest visionaries of radio anticipated all this. Back in the 1920s, informed by German experimentalism and the wireless Morse code phenomenon, Bertold Brecht wondered out loud about the possibilities of a radio broadcasting system that allowed the listener to “speak as well as hear” and to bring this person into a “relationship instead of isolating him.” How, I ask, can Radio 2.0, which fulfills these tasks so well, merge in our time with the socially cohesive virtues of Radio 1.0? In answering this question, my lamplight shines on various examples: among them pioneering online community based broadcasters in the United States and the United Kingdom’s World Have Your Say service.

How can we synthesize the best of Radio 2.0 with its historical predecessor? Let’s stop speculating about the future of radio, I suggest, and start proactively thinking about what we want radio to be – even considering what the word “radio” means in the most virtuous social sense. That is what my book aspires to say.

I should add that I could not have written this book without continuously reading the words of my excellent teachers, Paul Riismandel and Jennifer Waits, here on the pages of Radio Survivor. They educated me about so many more radio possibilities than I knew of back when I spent my days narrating Pacifica radio’s accomplishments and troubles. I also have benefitted greatly from recent scholarship on radio produced by John Nathan Anderson, Dolores Inés Casillas, and Daniel Gilfillan, among others.

Anyway, Radio 2.0 will be out soon enough. It’s in the pre-order stage at Amazon and all the usual other places. I’m glad it’s done and hope it is of some use to somebody. That, of course, will be decided by others, perhaps even you.

The post Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Plug.dj is gone, but the idea of a service that offers virtual dj rooms to music sharers will not die. Four alternate turntable room style applications have become more prominent over the last six months: Dubtrack.fm, Juqster, Beatsense, and Soundtrack.io. Compared to plug.dj and its predecessor turntable.fm, they’re pretty bare bones. But maybe that’s the application/economic model that will survive this hypercompetitive interactive digital music sharing market.

“I was on both TT and Plug and they require more effort to be part of a room in any meaningful way,” one of our readers commented after plug.dj went down, “and since music listening is by and large passive they didn’t have the subscription numbers to support themselves.”

Dubtrack.fm’s Facebook page says it has been around since May of 2012. It is less involved than plug.dj or turntable.fm. Forget about turntable rows, dancing avatars, and such. Still, the basics are there: you can create rooms, search for tunes via YouTube and SoundCloud, and manage your room participants by setting up rules and dj waiting lists. You can also chat with other dubtrackers. It amused me that the room that I gravitated to, the Chillout Room, included a participant who named himself rip_plugdj. Another chatter borrowed the turntable.fm superuser avatar (see graphic on left). It’s like there is this collective remembrance of earlier iconographies as turntable room lovers migrate from one service to another.

Meanwhile Juqster says its name is an amalgam of “hipster” and “jukebox.” It offers the same SoundCloud/YouTube searchability as Dubtrack, but calls its rooms “hubs.” You can create your own hub or hang out in someone else’s. I did not see a whole lot of users in any given room when I visited Juqster on Saturday afternoon, but it was, after all, Saturday afternoon. Like Dubtrack and earlier services, it lets you log in via your Facebook or Twitter account.

As for Beatsense, I liked the “90sfreaks” room that I visited. “BeatRooms” include stats for the most popular songs and the most popular “Beatsters,” based on how many “upvotes” their chosen songs received. But as with Juqster, I did not see many very heavily populated rooms. I did like what happened when I tried to vote for my own song. “You can’t vote for your own song, silly,” the system responded.

Last, there is soundtrack.io, which defines itself as an open source “no-frills platform for listening to music with our friends.” The problem is that when I checked in on the service, I couldn’t find any friends. A home page participation script printout reported: “405 Rooms with 1 total listeners out of 1185 users.”

There are even more turntable sites allegedly coming around the bend. One of them is spinit.fm, which has a website but has not gone live yet. Another is turn.dj, whose progenitor tried to foster a discussion on Reddit last month about how he hopes to improve on the turntable concept. I found this response telling:

“Please, for the love of everything, just have a sensible business model. I won’t pretend like I know how this sort of business works, so I hope you have some good ideas. As said in the main post, a few avatars, a fancy name and the ability to post pictures in the chat just don’t give enough incentive for people to subscribe. I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea of prioritizing subscribers in the wait list or limiting non-paying users to play a song only ever so often, possibly even adding a restriction that non-paying room hosts can only have up to X visitors and their rooms cannot be private. If it’s necessary to keep you out of the reds, then there’s no argument against it.”

I’m starting to wonder whether there is any “sensible business model” for this format. Clearly the code is out there and available for modification and repurposing, but generating positive revenue from the framework seems much more daunting. Maybe this is something that needs to be offered by sectors of our culture less focused on the bottom line. The city of Denver, Colorado, for example, has a streaming channel specializing in local bands, delivered by the city’s public library. Any thoughts on other possibilities ? . . . .

The post Online turntable rooms: the next generation appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Shortly after the announcement that the turntable-style music sharing room plug.dj would cease operation, I wrote to the site’s founder, Jason Grunstra, for an analysis. “It really just comes down to money,” Grunstra responded.

“The development and hosting of a massive real-time application is no small feat. It’s incredibly complex and we just couldn’t find the right audience that was willing and/or able to pay for the service in the time we were allotted, given our expenses and our financial runway. At the end of the day it was money-in vs. money-out. Money-out won.”

Indeed, the real-time-ness (so to speak) of an application that hosts thousands of online interactive animated music rooms must be very challenging. Even we received complaints of too many plug.dj maintenance mode situations. But I’d also read that one of plug.dj’s biggest problems was that its audience was literally too young to monetarily support the site. I asked Grunstra about this. “To a certain extent, yes,” he responded:

There were quite a few people that wanted to chip-in to help keep us plugged-in, but simply could not because there are very few (if any) easily accessible payment options for younger people when it comes to online transactions. And while it can certainly be a challenge to convince someone who has enjoyed a service for free for so long to one day start paying for it, I do believe that a lot of them genuinely saw great value in the service of plug.dj — how much value we just may never know because of all of the barriers they have when it comes to transacting online. But clearly when people spend over two hours a day using a product/service, they do find a considerable amount of value in it.

In addition, because we had such a large international audience, that presented another huge challenge of providing international payment options that integrate easily with the website. We wanted to eventually make the pricing dynamic based on some one’s local currency value. Fans in Brazil or India or Slovakia for example should all be able to pay the equivalent value as their US counterparts. It’s just not fair to ask them to pay a higher percentage of their income just because they were born into a place where their currency valuation is less than the US. It was a feature on the road map, we just never got there.

One of our readers has tipped us to the launching of two new turntable style sites. I’ll give them a try over the coming weeks. Hopefully there is something to learn from the plug.dj experience. Speaking personally, however, I very much enjoyed my plug.dj room and will miss the service.

The post The perils of a young audience: why plug.dj died appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I was very sorry to see the following announcement posted in my plug.dj room today:

“Thank you for joining our party and plugging in with us,” the statement says. “Unfortunately, we did not reach the amount needed to keep plug.dj online any longer.”

Plug.dj’s latest blog post doesn’t offer much more information.

I don’t have time today to compile an analysis of why this happened, but needless to say it is not good news. When last I checked in with the fundraiser, it was almost half way to its goal, but apparently that wasn’t sufficient to keep the operation going.

Your thoughts on the cause of this loss in our comment section would be welcome.

The post Plug.dj is shutting down appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“It has come to the point that the costs of running plug.dj exceeds the income that we are generating, and that could prove disastrous to the future of plug.dj if we don’t make some important changes very soon,” warns the latest plug.dj missive on its blog site. Plug.dj is asking its members to donate six dollars or at least $1 to keep the application going. I kicked in my six bucks this morning. Plug.dj is well worth the money. Here’s why:

First, plug.dj is an immensely creative service. Basically it carries on the torch initially launched by Turntable.fm, providing virtual community rooms where subscribers can share music files and music videos and chat with each other in real time about the content (or anything else). Enthusiasts and developers from all around the world converge on plug.dj to create what I call “distributed deejay” radio spaces. The excitement that these efforts convey really has to be experienced to be understood.

Second, plug.dj does an outstanding job of maintaining its platform. All of its features are interesting, attractive, and well managed. I always want to stick around when I am in a plug.dj room.

Third, plug.dj makes a huge effort to provide content searchability for its members. Unlike other services, plug.dj continues to keep SoundCloud functionality going.

Fourth, the plug.dj team is a very efficient, lean-and-mean operation (maybe too lean, actually). I know that that six bucks I just forked over won’t be wasted.

As a long time plug.dj user and sometimes community keeper, it’s important to me that this contribution campaign works. I am guessing that plug.dj may transition to some kind of service that remains free to guests but financially scaled for community developers. That would be reasonable, as far as I’m concerned. Where I don’t want plug.dj to go is towards reliance on advertisements.

“If 6% of the people who use plug.dj each month donated just $6 today, or if 10% donated $1 each,” plug.dj notes, “we’d hit our goal needed to operate for the next 6+ months, build an Android app and pursue other fundraising opportunities. Without your help, we cannot continue to build the community we’ve all grown to love.”

So let’s all chip in and keep a great thing going.

The post Why plug.dj is worth your support appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Strolling along my old stomping grounds in the East Village of Manhattan last week I ran into this marvelous new mural, painted on the corner of Second Avenue and First Street.

This boom box man masterpiece went up earlier this month, it seems, painted by the Brazilian muralist brothers Os Gemeos. I particularly love the trompe l’oeil effect of the upper hand and knee popping out of the canvas colored wall. Trompe paintings make objects seem to jump at you.

The figure’s hat is also a train:

And his sneaker and boom box are interlaced with urban faces:

Looks like this mural will be visible until a residential tower goes up and obscures its view. So if you live nearby or are visiting, get over there and enjoy it while you can.

Here’s a YouTube about the artists.

The post Meet the trompe l’oeil boom box man of the East Village appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“Great article.

Saw no mention of the great station I currently DJ at, though: WXRW in Milwaukee, Riverwest Radio. We have our LPFM license in hand and we will soon be broadcasting over the air at 104.1 on the fm dial. We are currently streaming our programs online at our website (riverwestradio.com) while we raise the remaining needed funds for our transmitter. We are extremely excited to be transitioning from online station to terrestrial station, and the love we have received so far from the Riverwest neighborhood has been incredible.”

One of the coolest things about Riverwest Radio is that you can actually watch the live broadcast or earlier broadcasts. For example, you can check out an interview with a musician during the Brew City Chatterbox Hour:

Here’s some more music during Ingrid’s Inspirational Hour:

And here’s a call in show on the Bucks arena controversy:

There are 213 WXRW broadcasts uploaded so far! Here is to many more . . .

The post Watch your low power FM too at WXRW of Milwaukee appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Larry Rosin of Edison Research has this to say on his blog about the new music discovery market and radio:

“Our tracking data shows that over the course of the last 13 years ‘Radio’ has been supplanted by ‘Internet’ as the source Americans turn to first to learn about new music.”

It certainly has, as this Edison chart indicates:

Edison Research

“Whereas in 2002 Radio enjoyed a 7-to-1 advantage over Internet, by this year’s most recent study the Internet had blown past Radio by a sizable margin,” Rosin writes.  “The numbers among 13-34 year olds are, no surprise, much more dramatic.” Indeed, they have been for a while.

Still, Rosin thinks that “artists and labels want nothing more than to get their songs onto the radio.” I’m afraid that wasn’t my impression when I attended SXSW earlier this year. Edison does offer data, however, suggesting that consumers still see radio as a critical music choice, which, of course, it is.

The post New music seekers say farewell to AM/FM as first choice appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Community radio station WFMU-FM in New Jersey has won another grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to further its brainchild-in-the-works: Audience Engine. This additional $100k brings the Dodge Foundation’s support for the project up to half a million dollars. WMFU has partnered with Boston software developer Bocoup to create the system, and will distribute it as an open source digital platform through its subsidiary Congera.

Making my way through the press release that WFMU sent us earlier this week, I found myself asking what you are doubtless wondering as well: what the heck is Audience Engine anyway? The key to the platform’s philosophy can be found in this quote from the release from Molly deAguiar, Director of the Dodge Media Program. The main point of Audience Engine is that “media organizations have to stop building platforms for specific content, and start building platforms that put community first.”

What that means is that community based radio stations have to start thinking about online platforms that don’t effectively abandon discussion and networking to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or LinkedIn, and the rest of the usual suspects. The reason for that is that once your listeners and/or website readers are off to Twitter/Facebook-land, they’re all but gone. They’re not commenting on your podcast or stream or blog post in your house. They’re far far away, helping Mark Zuckerberg bring in that advertisement and audience data cash. They are nowhere where you can cultivate, or, to use AE’s term, “marshall” dialogue on your content and effectively generate support in exchange for your efforts.

Audience Engine’s answer to this dilemma is called the “interactive second screen,” a kind of in-house online town square designed to keep listeners and readers around to converse about a broadcast or news report. “The problem for the content producer,” WFMU says, “is that when they send their audiences to off-site destinations, these giant data mining operations skim off critical information that should be the lifeblood of the digital producer – information that should be sustaining the artist or producer, not the big data enterprises.”

So Audience Engine’s philosophy can be summarized in one of its own slogans: “Be your audience’s first and second screen.” You can see that strategy manifest itself in this sample AE page, presumably from WFMU’s own website:

The visual strategy is pretty self-evident. Get the comments on top of the page rather than on the bottom, so that readers become immediate content producers rather than just reactors to it. This encourages more comments, ideally generating a kind of community dialogue chain reaction. The same philosophy applies to a website’s radio page:

Once again, the idea is to get that live discussion right next to a radio stream, where it effectively becomes part of the program. Now that the audience is intensely marshaled on the station’s web, mobile, and tablet sites, the next task is to appeal for support:

No surprise that WFMU is taking a vanguard role in this approach. Half of the station’s listeners tune in online. 70 percent of its donations come from its website and related applications.

But Audience Engine is also an implicit critique of and opposition to the direction in which the Internet is moving, a landscape in which one percent of aggregators profit from the ninety-nine percent’s global digital conversation. I doubt that WFMU’s project can turn that situation around alone, but it’s a start.

“Audience Engine’s fundraising tool Mynte will be released at a launch event in New York City in October,” the WFMU release says, “where content makers and coders worldwide will be invited to customize and create on the Audience Engine platform.”

The post Keeping your listeners with you: inside WFMU’s Audience Engine appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As I promised in my last post about [soon to be] fully Pandora owned radio station KXMZ-FM in Rapid City, South Dakota, I’d try to get more details from KXMZ deejay Mike Swafford about how “Hits 102.7” is working with the streaming service to connect with the Rapid City audience. On Friday, Swafford sent me a summary about the Pandora/KXMZ collaboration. Here are various ways that it is playing out.

For the last two years Pandora has been working with KXMZ via a Local Managment Agreement. The “first and most obvious thing” Pandora gave the operation, Swafford emphasized, was data on the tunes to which Rapid City Pandora subscribers have been clicking the proverbial thumbs up icon:

o Within our format we were able to use this information to select the songs the local listeners wanted so that our selection of music each week could reflect that as opposed to using national charts to decide what listeners were interested in locally.

o Prior to the relationship with Pandora the station would have had to pay thousands for a company to do local research with various unreliable methods that would be presented weeks or months after they conducted their research.  With Pandora it is weekly results with their actual interaction as opposed to recall or asking if they like certain songs.

KXMZ’s Mike Swafford

Next, Pandora created a channel that featured the format and songs generally played on KXMZ. Hits 102.7 deejays directed listeners to the channel, and “we were then able to follow the trends of our listeners from their interaction on that Pandora channel,” Swafford says. Based on this information, KXMZ created a “Ten at Ten” show that introduced the station’s fans to tunes that “weren’t on our playlist yet but were new songs on Pandora that were getting a lot of interest.” This was followed by a similar “Five at Five” program and various additional Hits 102.7 Pandora channels.

“Knowing that many people listen to more than one type of music allowed us to promote these other formats on air and the Hits website,” Swafford explained, “so that when they wanted to turn to that type of music they could listen to it on Pandora and know that the songs were based on what the people in Rapid City like listening to.”

Finally, KXMZ created another local program called “What’s on my artists Pandora Channel?”:

o This airs during the morning show and is a fun program where we take a featured artist from the Hits 102-7 playlist and play the first three songs a Pandora user would get if they typed in that artist to create a station.

o The first song will be from the featured artist and then the second and third songs are based on the algorithms that Pandora is able to create from the first song.

o This sometimes leads to playing second and third songs that we may not normally play but because it has a musical DNA with the first song we follow the process and introduce listeners to the songs and why they are related to the featured artist’s song.

What do Pandora and KXMZ have planned for the future? Their relationship “opens the door for HITS to be able to target listeners on Pandora in Rapid City for certain artists that we may be doing a promotion with,” Swafford says:

o This means that if we are promoting a concert for Meghan Trainor on the radio station we can run promo’s on her artist channel in Rapid City to inform them of the show and what the radio station is doing.

o It also means that if we decide to bring in a concert or help a concert promoter in Rapid City find out how popular that artist is locally we can find that information based on the artists local Pandora use.

Like “I said before,” Swafford’s note concluded, “these are the things I work with and make it exciting for me.”

The post How Pandora helps its South Dakota FM station build audience appeared first on Radio Survivor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pido-B4_2TM

In addition, the agency authorized a broadcaster for the Hajj religious festival in the Bradford region, scheduled for September.

I wish our Federal Communications Commission did things like this. I also wish the FCC allocated short-term restricted service licences (SRSLs) for festivals, holidays, and community events, like they do in the UK. Ofcom has published a list of the Ramadan winners here.

The post UK runs YouTube draw for short term radio licenses for Ramadan appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It came to a team of WKNC-FM coder deejays to create a music visualization display because 1) a competition had been set up to do it, and 2) the group wanted to publicize the North Carolina State University campus radio station. Now their project has won second prize in the Code+Art Student Visualization Contest.

Photo by Cameren Dolecheck

“A surprising number of people on campus are not aware of WKNC or that N.C. State even has a radio station,” team leader Cameren Dolecheck explained in an interview with NCSU’s student newspaper. “One of the key goals of this project was to get the piece in a space that when people walk into the library, they would see this piece, think of WKNC and become interested.”

The visualization sets up a theater room sized landscape of NCSU and the surrounding city environment. The building objects change as frequencies emanating from WKNC’s signal change. Each online listener is noted as a bird, or “boid,” flitting about the terrain.

WKNC is into all kinds of interesting stuff these days. Jennifer Waits reported last month that the station has launched a website dedicated to its history, going all the way back to its founding as WLAC-AM in 1922.

Last.fm, by the way, experimented with audio visual coding some years ago. One application involved tracking the complexity of a song’s rhythm, harmony, and timber, then translating that variability into a flower-like image. The thicker the respective color petal (green=harmony; red=rhythm; blue=tambor), the more variability.

Another tracked age and gender preferences into lengthy word charts, although I liked the flowers the best. But there’s definitely something to be said for being able to go into a room and watch a visualization with other people. The iPearl Immersion Theater at NCSU’s Hunt Library will show the WKNC visualizer through April 29.

The post WKNC coders: visualize music; visualize your radio station appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We got some interesting e-mail and Facebook updates this week from various developers who wanted to catch our eye (or ear). These included:

Boomboxfm. “Let us introduce you to your next favorite song,” the site explains. “Get free, downloadable songs every week directly to your inbox, personalized to your tastes. . . . We scour the world for the best undiscovered music so you don’t have to.” Basically you sign in and choose some genres and soon some tunes will arrive in your e-mail inbox. Will you like them? Let us know.

There is also the DJ Boombox, which has a Facebook page describing it as so:

“The DJ Boom Box is a 20 foot shipping container expertly fabricated into a giant ’80s boom box complete with sound and lights. The ‘tape decks’ open to reveal a full DJ booth, creating a concert/party vibe wherever your event may be. The boom box can be delivered and picked up before and after events easily. The DJ Boom Box has an on-board generator for events where power is an issue or can be plugged into a power source.”

Apparently the DJ Boom Box will make its first appearance at the 2015 Kentucky Derby Pegasus Parade. “We’re already starting to get booked up, so give us a call and reserve the Boom Box for your event now!” (The phone # is on the Facebook page).

Lastly there’s Sonicbids, which is a band networking site. You can search for bands. You can narrow down to the search to location or other criteria. You can get audio samples. And, of course, if you are a band you can sign up to be (hopefully) searched for and found and perhaps even be shipped somewhere in a 20 ft container (or not, maybe you’ll prefer to fly or drive).

The post DJ Boombox! stuff to check out this weekend appeared first on Radio Survivor.

SXSW gets started on Friday, and Radio Survivor will attend. I’ll fly in to Austin from San Francisco early next week and catch many of the event’s music days. Here are some of the key radio focused presentations.

Thursday, March 19:

Redefining Radio for the Digital Age: “How will radio listeners experience music in 5 years?” this panel will ask. “What is radio in the digital age? Is it time for a ‘new’ definition of radio?” Among the conversants: David Porter, CEO and Founder of 8tracks, Owen Grover of iHeartRadio, Deborah Newman of MusicStrat, and Paul Brenner of NextRadio.

The Marriage of Radio and Online Listening: “Hear how listeners and artists are benefiting from the unity of traditional radio and music streaming services.”  Panelists will include representatives from Quartz, Cumulus, Glasnote Entertainment Group, and Rdio.

Gear Up, Lean Back: Linear Radio Becomes Dynamic: “With so much talk about ‘radio style services’ entering the market, what experience sets the standard?” Reps from the BCC, Tunein, iHeartMedia, Guvera, and 7digital will discuss the challenge.

How to Win on Streaming Services: Advice from staffers at Republic Records, Spotify, and Digital Sin.

Friday, March 20:

How to Crack UK Radio: “BBC radio heavyweights Steve Lamacq and Huw Stephens reveal how to get a foot in the door at UK radio.”

Public Radio, Public Relations, and Music: “National radio and online radio programs have a unique set of needs to create their programming and its important for publicists and managers pitching them to understand those needs. You’ll hear from some of the most influential producers in public radio’s music coverage.” Talkers will include presenters from NPR Morning Edition, NPR Music, and Dmitri Vietze of StoryAmp.

In Store Radio: 200 million people hear in-store radio every day. The complexities of this “captive-audience” medium will be discussed by reps from various in-store playlist companies, and . . . Chipotle!

Curating the Stream: In the streaming environment “curation is becoming more critical as users encounter a firehose of content.” Wizards on this panel will include reps from UMB, Rdio, SVP Music Group, and Borman.

Earlier discussions and events will include the Thrilling Adventure Hour (Saturday, March 14), which will stage “in the style of old time radio featuring actors from TV, movies and animation.” The show is also an “Eisner-nominated graphic novel, a comic series from Image and a hit podcast on the Nerdist Network.” A panel titled “NPR and PBS: Public Media, Reaching New Publics” will run on Sunday, March 15. “Hear from representatives from PBS and NPR,” the description says, “who’ll cover what’s working, and what’s not when reaching out to younger and more diverse audiences for public media.” Presenters will include staff from PBS Digital Studios and NPR’s Code Switch.

Also of interest: “Fast, Fair & Open: The FCC’s Broadband Future” on Monday, March 16. Federal Communications Commission counsel Gigi Sohn will talk about the agency’s net neutrality decision and its implications; “The Art of the Interview” (Friday, March 20) will focus on media conversation preparation; and “The Evolution of Audio in the 21st Century” will present on Friday, March 13.

Got something going on at SXSW that you want Radio Survivor to know about? Send me an email.

The post SXSW cometh . . . Radio Survivor will be there appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Respond to our poll on 87.7 FM!

Here at Radio Survivor we’ve been following the Great Debate over whether Low Power TV stations should be able to stream the 87.7 portion of their channel 6 frequency as an FM signal. A week ago Paul Riismandel noted that in Chicago Weigel Broadcasting is poised to run a Baby Boomer targeted “Me Music” format on that notch. Meanwhile the Federal Communications Commission is trying to decide whether the practice should be permitted at all (here are pro and con filings in that proceeding). The official FM band ranges from 88 to 108 MHz FM.

The other day it occurred to me, however, to check whether my car FM receiver can even access 87.7 FM. It turns out that it can’t. The lowest the LED screen goes is 87.9 FM (which enjoys a sort of special circumstances status on the FM band). My old boombox radio panel goes no lower than 88 FM. On the other hand, I’ve got an ancient Kensington “Super Delux” transistor AM/FM radio, and its FM dial wheel descends all the way down to 87.5!

Just for kicks, I spent some of the weekend trolling around looking at images of FM receiver panels. Here are some possible 87.7 FM getters (click the image for a closer look):

tonsoldradios.com

mcintoshlabs.com

I’m guessing that these or similar receivers sometimes slip down a bit into the 87 FM zone, and that’s why lots of consumers can receive these intrepid little indie 87.7 FM stations. How about doing Radio Survivor a favor and checking your gear for us. Can you access 87.7 FM? If you can pinpoint the notch, can you hear anything? Please post a comment below on your findings. Thanks!

The post Can your radio receiver access 87.7 FM? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Speaking of digital strategies, BBC Radio 1 has a funny little primer on how to deploy YouTube videos to build and diversfiy your radio audience. Hosted by BBC visual expert Joe Harland and Radio 1 Presenter Greg James, it’s definitely worth a look.

BBC Radio 1 does mostly live music. The accompanying YouTubes, the tutorial explains, either offer some kind of (often comical) response to a performance, or the producers cook something up that the hosts can talk about on the radio later. The former would include Greg James doing a parody of a Miley Cyrus video; the latter would include Hugh Jackman belting out a rather labored version of “Who Am I” from Les Miserables.

Radio 1 does about one of these a week, the video says. The staff keep an eye out for viralness. There is no hard and fast YouTube formula, however. “Look at what is successful,” Joe Harland says. “Be inspired by it. But don’t try solely to replicate it.”

The post The BBC Radio 1 School of YouTube appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Denver, Colorado now has a streaming channel specializing in local bands, delivered by the city’s public library. The service in question is called “Volume”. You plug in your Denver Public Library user name or library card number and password, and you receive access to a variety of area music groups for streaming, playlisting, and/or downloading. And all DRM free.

Currently the Volume project has the space to offer 100 albums every year, and pledges to add around 25 every three months. The library has obtained a license to host music for two years. “So by the end of 2015, and moving forward, we should have 200 albums on the site at any given time,” Volume’s About page notes.

The plan is to put out appeals for submissions to musicians from the state three or four times a year, so calling all Colorado artists. In fact, a new window for content has opened, and here is the submissions page.

Current categories include Americana, Country, Metal, Modern Folk, Rock, Soul, Hip-hop, Electronic, and World. Quite a few creative user playlists too. Reverb magazine has a nice piece on the service, which includes an interview with Volume project manager Zeth Lietzau. He notes that Volume targets two groups: people in their 20s and 30s who don’t interface with Denver’s library system much, and regular library patrons who do not patronize the local music scene.

“What we’re trying to find is a place that creates a really Denver-centric community,” Lietzau says. “That’s a niche that people are interested in.”

The post Denver public library brings local band radio to the city appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The fascinating world of online stuff and online music sharing continues to navigate its strange post-modern course as worried projections about Amazon.com and Pandora Media waft across the news/blogosphere. What do Pandora and Amazon have in common? They function in an environment in which revenue and profits appear to depend on technology, but in fact depend on (or flounder on) government and law.

In the case of Amazon, investors are realizing that the Internet retail giant’s razor thin profit/revenue margins have to a significant degree rested on the entity not paying state sales taxes. “Within a few years, I would expect that substantially every state in the union — or at least all of those with populations large enough to matter to a nationwide retailer — will be collecting sales taxes from Amazon and other online retailers,” writes Charles Sizemore over at Forbes. “The effect on Amazon and holders of Amazon stock is crystal clear: It’s bad.”

Thus The New York Times wonders if the “20-year honeymoon” between Amazon and its investors is coming to an end, as a small army of Wall Street analysts lowered their ratings on the company on Friday.

Similarly, the market is squinting at Pandora and listening to the blunt words of Brandy Betz over at Motley Fool.

“Pandora actually loses money with an increase of listeners, thanks to content-acquisition costs,” Betz writes. This is true. Bette Midler can grump all she wants about how much Pandora pays her in copyright royalties, but the truth is that the streamer’s royalty burden is a lead ceiling over not only its future, but the future of online music. Meanwhile terrestrial radio pays zero zilch nothing in performance royalties to musicians. This has nothing to do with technology and what folklorists like to call “free market capitalism.” It has everything to do with politics.

Where is all this going, online music sharing wise? I don’t know. But there are alternative models to consider.

The YouTube/Soundcloud commons model. In this system the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects these huge music repositories from crippling copyright violation lawsuits, and they lease their libraries to smaller entities, which then share them in interesting and creative ways. This is how plug.dj and 8tracks.com function.

The Bandcamp model. In this system artists post a portion of their music for free and offer the rest of their content for sale. That’s how it works at Bandcamp. Fans can deploy the free content in various interesting online ways, drawing further public interest in the music. Example: go over to the Progressive Rock Music Forum and there you will find various Bandcamp recommendations.

The listener supported model. Basically streamers create interesting musical genres and fans contribute to keep service going. This is the Soma.fm model.

The erzatz all-of-the-above model. The classical music website Sinifini roughly adheres to this approach. It’s basically a smorgasbord of Spotify playlists, YouTubes, interviews, articles, and forums. But, obviously, it’s very dependent on other extant services.

Here’s a model I am less enthusiastic about: the oligopoly throwaway model. Under this system Apple and Microsoft and similar hegemons maintain dreary unimaginative “radio” services that sustainably function because they represent only a tiny percentage of the entity’s costs. See iTunes Radio and Xbox Music as examples. They’re basically second thought online music services that the one ton gorillas have rolled out because, well, wuddever.

All of these models have their exciting and innovative qualities. I’m not sure any of them will work much better than Pandora, Last.fm, or Spotify. Was it any better a century ago when the “Big Three” (Edison, Columbia, and Victor) ruled the roost? Good question.

I keep thinking that there’s some public media model that might solve lots of problems, but I haven’t come up with how it might work yet. ‘Oh no,’ you say, ‘that would get the government involved.’ Guess what: it already is.

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

The post If Pandora goes the way of Amazon, what’s next? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Reading today’s New York Times story about National Security Agency USB hack gadgets that radio computer data back home, I immediately thought to myself: are these authorized by the Federal Communications Commission as Part 15 unlicensed broadcast/radiation devices? Or even, gulp, licensed?

The Times reports that the NSA gadgets get plugged into foreign host computers as circuit boards or USB cards. Then they send out a “covert” radio signal that can be picked up miles away via a “briefcase-size” relay station. This technology has been around since 2008, the article says:

“The radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers that adversaries, and some American partners, have tried to make impervious to spying or cyberattack. In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user.”

I suppose that this is all being done solely to protect us from evildoers, of course: terrorists, hacking units of the Chinese Army, etc. The article quotes officials saying that these snoopy USB radio chips have never been used in the United States, and I don’t believe that either. Maybe I’m being too paranoid, but the map in this article (and seen above) seems to suggest access points in the United States. If I’m right, it would be interesting to know which frequencies these devices use, and, to the extent that they do carry across or into the USA, to what degree the Federal Communications Commission is consulted on the matter.

Somehow I don’t think I’m going to find this out by skulking around the Commission’s frequency databases. On second thought, let me go look . . .

The post Those NSA radio snoop chips, are they FCC Part 15? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

For reasons that remain unclear to me, I bought an Xbox One with Kinect over the holidays. I’m trying to remember how I talked myself into the purchase—something about being able to communicate with my TV via voice. “Xbox! Go to Skype!” I commanded. It worked, except I didn’t have anyone to Skype with at the moment. “Xbox!” I declared. “Go home!” (this reminded me of a movie). Then Xbox explained that it wanted me to create an avatar and a tag. So I did. Then I downloaded one of those horrible fighting games and deleted it in fifteen minutes.

Impulse purchase, my Superego scolded. “Is this all there is?” I asked out loud. In response, Xbox mysteriously moved me several pastel green Xbox boxes to the right, at which point I noticed Xbox Music, which offered me a one month free subscription, which I took. Here’s the thumbnail assessment of Xbox Music. The sound is really good: excellent out of my Sony HDTV and even better than Spotify on my desktop and Android. And if you are looking for a less visually complicated interface than Spotify, Xbox Music is for you. Basically you get your options plus a big overhead screen that wants you to check out artists like Lourde and Kanye West. Very sleek.

But beyond that, Xbox Music doesn’t offer anything new. You can search for stuff and make playlists and listen on your Android or iPhone. You can share your tracks on Facebook (not Twitter as far as I can tell). You can type in some category and you’ll get a “radio” station based on your choice. But at this point I’m guessing that eight out of ten folks will ask why they should pay $9.99 a month for this instead of just listening to Pandora gratis.

The thing is that Xbox Music could be so much more if Microsoft thought about it like the company thinks about games. Xbox Live games are all about sharing. You can play them with friends by searching for their tags and adding them to your friends list. You can follow other game players or get followers. Why should these options be limited to gaming?

My sexy Xbox avatar: finster237.

So three suggestions for Xbox Music.

First, make it accessible for anyone who maintains an Xbox Live subscription. It is hard to imagine that Xbox Music is going to pick up that many subscribers based on a monthly fee of $9.99. After all, Pandora One is $3.99. At least give Xbox Live subscribers a substantial discount.

Second, integrate Xbox Music into the friends and followers system. Your followers should be able to access your playlists and chat with you as you pick tracks and listen to them. You can receive “achievement” points for doing various things with Xbox Music (such as adding a certain number of playlists). Adding friends to Xbox Music should also qualify you for achievements.

Third, integrate Xbox Music into the games themselves. Xbox should offer you the option of using your Xbox Music playlist as an alternative to a game soundtrack (assuming that there is one).

The social experience on Xbox Live is immensely complex, while the same experience on Xbox Music is comparatively poor. Perhaps if Microsoft thought about music the same way that it thinks about games, we might all enjoy a much more musically rich Xbox experience.

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

The post Memo to Microsoft: think of Xbox Music as a game appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I spent some of this weekend up to my nose in Soundrop, a Spotify chat room application. Soundrop has been available for about two years. I wouldn’t call the feature competition for plug.dj or its predecessor, Turntable.fm, but it is around and worth knowing about if you are a Spotify fan.

To access Soundrop you need a Spotify account, of course, and also access to either Facebook or Twitter. I’ve got all three applications. When I clicked Soundrop’s “Get Soundrop” button, it took me to another page with a “get on Spotify” link. Clicking that activated my Windows based Spotify program. I signed in and let Soundrop install on my version of Spotify as an app.

You need to sign into Facebook or Twitter to get full use of Soundrop—specifically the ability to add tracks, vote, and chat in the rooms. Once you’ve logged in via one of these social networks, you can fully explore the Soundrop universe.

Immediately upon signing in the feature offers you a variety of rooms: genre rooms, theme rooms, and popular rooms—the latter defined as rooms with lots of Spotify users in them. I jumped into a space titled “Indie Wok,” which defines itself as a “mix of all things Indie.” Last three picks of the room as I write: Franz Ferdinand, Joy Division, and the Arctic Monkeys. It’s a nice sound.

How do Indie Wok tunes get queued? Click “add track” and add a song to the play list. Indie Wokkers then vote on your suggestion. The tracks with the most votes get to the top of the play list. I can literally see songs I’ve voted for elevate up the queue.

This is an interesting and in some ways more positive method of programming a room. There’s no “dislike” or in plug.dj’s case “meh” button anywhere. Tunes get voted on before they play, not afterwards.

But if you are really looking for online chatting while music plays, I’m not sure that Soundrop is your best choice. Although Indie Wok had 139 visitors when I came by, nobody was chatting. Indeed, “nobody is here,” somebody strangely told me in the chat box. I’m not exactly sure what that meant, but I dropped by some electro and dubstep rooms and didn’t pick up a lot of discussion there either.

Also, Soundrop doesn’t make much of an effort, visually speaking. There’s no attempt to construct some sense of a physical room with deejays spinning disks. To be fair, it would be very difficult to create that kind of presence within Spotify’s overbearing metastructure.

Still, Soundrop greatly improves Spotify for me. Although I like Spotify’s play list feature, I don’t normally want to park myself in some music app and play tunes I know over and over again. And I don’t want some database algorithm doing it for me either. Call me an old fashioned romantic, but I still think that music is better with humans making the choices.

Other features: you can “favorite” a Soundrop room and it will appear at the top of your room directory. You can turn the rooms’ latest offerings into a Spotify play list. You can share a room as a web URL. And you can create your own room. That’s Spotify/Soundrop in a nutshell.

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

The post Dropping by Soundrop: Spotify’s chat room feature appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I have an RSS link to everything that YouTube produces tagged “radio,” and the strangest things come into my browser as a result. Today’s example: this Gmod video titled “radio” by Eltorro64Alt, whose work seems to be inspired by cult movie maker Alejandro Jodorowsky.

In this piece the rather meaty protagonist wanders about some kind of remote factory town with a reel-to-reel boombox, which he hoists menacingly on his considerable shoulders. When a mentally challenged vagrant displeases him by attempting to pulverize a metallic object with a concrete girder, he ominously raises the box to halt the activity.

The rest of the vid has our hero flung about and jettisoned into all kinds of incomprehensible trouble. But the opening seems indicative, at least to me, of the representational fate of the boombox in our time: a great big out of control urban juggernaut—a trend perhaps initiated by Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing. The boombox is no longer just the Poor Man’s iPhone; it has become the Really Weird Dystopian Poor Man’s iPhone. Discuss.

The post Gmod video: the radio boombox as dystopian weapon appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Plug.dj has rolled out its new look and expanded community based structure. I am wandering about its corridors, marveling at the sights. Here are six of the most well attended communities as of this weekend. All of them revel in various kinds of dubstep, electronica, and sampling based themes and sounds.

1. Monstercat + Tasty = #Tastycat. This community had over 550 participants at various points that I checked in (mostly Sunday morning Pacific Standard Time). It is a consortium of MonsterCat Media and the Tasty Network, which are both EDM record labels.

The plug.dj #tastycat community.

The theme of the room: “Any type of Electronic Dance Music is allowed here. Some genres include Dubstep, Electro, Electro-House, Complextro, House, Progressive House, Big-Room House, Drum and Bass, Drumstep, Liquid Drum and Bass, Trance, Trap, Glitch-Hop, Moombah, Hardstyle, Garage, and Breakbeat.”

Top five #Tastycat rules:

1. Don’t complain. We are all here to have fun.
2. Monstercat and Tasty Network artists have priority to the booth.
3. Skips are decided by staff. Don’t ask for skips.
4. Don’t play mixes.
5. We remove AFK [away from keyboard] DJs from the stage. Talk in the chat to avoid being removed. If you are caught auto-typing to avoid being removed, you will be kicked.

Want to become a featured DJ on #Tastycat? You could be considered “if you produce awesome music that everyone enjoys! Managers can choose to promote you to Featured DJ if they feel it is the right choice. However, please don’t ask to be promoted.”

Very lively audience; hyper danceable music; tons of fun snarky comments from the audience. Wish I could keep up with all the genres: “complextro”???

2. [EDT] Electro,Dυbรтєρ & Techno ϟ. Well over 300 folks hung around this room on Sunday. I’m guessing from the “I [heart] Brazil” comments and the Portuguese rules that this community is a Brazilian project.

The “Temas permitidos” (permitted themes) include: Electro, Dubstep, Techno, Trap, and EDM. The room has a very active Facebook page. A lot of interesting hybrid sounds come from this community—some of them slower paced and subtly flavored with tangoesque rhythms and harmonies. Definitely worth a visit.

3. SpaceLand | LTP ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ .

Around 250 folks gravitate around this community. Approved genres:

Party, chill, dance, electro, house, and dubstep. No-nos: “[NO RAP jumpstyle ir hardstyle PLACE].” When I visited, somebody was playing Biffguyz’s hit Бум-бум-бум. I can’t tell where these folks are from, but I picked up Lithuanian and Maltese comments on the chat line, so I’m guessing some kind of Eastern/Southern European hub. In any event, very nice energy from the room.

4. Absolut Lithuania. Welcome message:

“Sveiki atvykę į mūsų nuostabų kambarį” or: “Welcome to our amazing room!” Here are the rules:

1. Dont ask for fans, the message will be automatically deleted.
2. Dont ask for permissions from the staff, we decide it.
3. If song gets 25 MEHs, It will be skipped by admin.
4. Advertising isnt permitted.
5. Dont flood, or you will be muted in the chat.
6. Dont put songs more than 6 minutes.
7. This room dont allow porno and violent videos.

For the uninitiated, wikipedia defines “meh” as “an expression of indifference or boredom.” 25 mehs suggests an openness to a wide variety of formats, since that number would represent a fifth of the whole community. I pick up a sense of humor in this room. They were playing Serebro’s funny song “Mi Mi Mi” when I arrived.

5. Micaretinha.

Kudos to this Portuguese language based room for rule number three: “3 – No more videos showing sexual parts. Remember, there are kids here, physically or mentally.” When I visited they were playing 24 AVASSALADORES. I couldn’t figure out much else about this community except that the sounds are nice and it toggles between the third and seventh most popular site on plug.dj.

6. Just a chill room

Just a chill room plays, as you’ve probably already guessed, nice chill music. This is a refreshing break from the hyperfrenetic Woooooooooooo!!!! atmosphere you get in so many other plug.dj communities. The room has a good help graphic map for beginners, too. Just a chill’s appreciative crowd often propels it to number three on the plug.dj community list.

This is only a small sampling of what’s going on at plug.dj. Most of the venues hottest sites don’t hail from the United States. Almost everybody appears to me to be very, very young. Next week I’ll tour some of plug.dj’s less traveled but equally cool communities. If you want me to know about yours, contact me at matthew@radiosurvivor.com. Full disclosure: if I drop by your community, my plug.dj avatar is “gazoink.”

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

The post Plug.dj: six hot communities appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We’ve been talking about this for a while, and at last it has happened. Radio Survivor has fired up a forums site: radiosurvivorforums.com. The beta site has three forum topics for starters: College Radio, Low Power FM, and Indie Internet Radio.

Why the new venue? First—to get some kind of discussion system up that isn’t run by Facebook or Twitter. Don’t worry, we’ll still Facebook and Tweet our posts, but we wanted to create a place where Radio Survivor readers could initiate their own extended conversations about radio right out there on the old school World Wide Web.

We will add more forum topics as the experiment progresses. Suggestions are welcome. As usual, we want to encourage conversation about the rewards and challenges of building local, people based radio, about using new radio related technologies and platforms, and about how government, civil society, and the market fits into the picture. I’m hoping to add a forum about the complexities of accessing Internet radio in your automobile, but these three topics seem like enough for starters.

You can register with radiosurvivorforums.com here. Once registered you can post comments in any of the three forums. We’ve also got a widget on the left side of our main page that keeps up with the discussion. Let me know how it is going, and thanks for giving the site a try!

The post Radio Survivor launches discussion forums site appeared first on Radio Survivor.

WFMU’s RadioVision festival enters its third year this October 19 at the Scholastic auditorium in Manhattan’s SoHo. Curator Benjamen Walker said the overarching focus this year is, for radio producers and artists, “How can you stay true to yourself and find the right path?” One successful path is “what someone like (keynote speaker) Laurie Anderson represents.”

I spoke by phone with Walker and WFMU station manager Ken Freedman to learn more about what will go into RadioVision this year, and why the station puts it on.

Freedman stated that “there are actually a lot more people who are fascinated by radio, who want to work in radio, and don’t want to go into it via the standard route.” RadioVision is intended to inform and inspire these folks, who are ready to explore new forms of radio as it intersects with culture and technology.

This group includes “independent producers who don’t want to be part of the pubcast machine anymore, who want to pave their own path and be sustainable, (and) fund themselves.” Also included are “mainstream public broadcasters who are into new methods in storytelling and (becoming) sustainable,” as well as “community radio people who are curious about this stuff even if their stations don’t have all the tools they might need.”

Freedman observed, “You hear news that radio doesn’t appeal to young people anymore.” Yet at last year’s RadioVision “We saw tons of young people.” Rather than starting out at the entry level in mainstream public radio, he said young people prefer “the internet way.”

With the “internet way” a medium like podcasting lets a producer reach an audience without the backing of a station or syndicator, while Kickstarter lets an audience directly fund programs.

“You can create anything with a microphone on the internet,” Walker said. “Now we have the tools and we see someone like Roman Mars (and) shows like Nightvale. They’re recognizing that there are new financial paths to being supported by their audience.”

Sustainability and funding are headline topics on the RadioVision agenda. Walker said he is particularly intrigued by native advertising and wants to understand it better, which is why he scheduled a discussion on the topic. “It’s where all the money is coming from in publishing, but nobody understands the ethics. It offers piles of money, but what does it mean when a brand asks you to co-create content with them?”

That panel features Bob Garfield, co-host of NPR’s On the Media and an outspoken critic of native advertising, in conversation with journalist and Buying In author Rob Walker, writer and radio producer Starlee Kine and Buzzfeed’s Josh Fjelstad. Kine worked on a Levi’s sponsored project with The Thing Quarterly called Moment to Moment. Walker said that he’s eager to learn about her experience.

WFMU’s Liz Berg will lead a discussion about new funding models for radio and radio production. Included in this conversation will be Alex Blumberg from NPR’s Planet Money.

In this new funding environment Freedman reflected that “being noncommercial is becoming a more interesting question all the time.”

Walker also promised “one of the best comedy podcasting conversations, ever.” That panel features Tom Scharpling, host of the popular freeform comedy program The Best Show on WFMU, along with podcaster/comedy writer Julie Klausner and podcaster Jake Fogelnest.

Freedman noted that with the last two festivals “we got requests for more how-to sessions, that are less philosophical.” In response, this year’s RadioVision will have presentations focused on technology, including a demonstration of the Serato DJ system by Duane Harriott.

On the whole, Freedman said that RadioVision is “different from what you get at a typical conference. It validates the suspicion that there’s a different way to get into radio.”

Half-day and full-day tickets for the October 19 event are still available at the RadioVision website.

I will be attending this year’s RadioVision. Watch for coverage here at Radio Survivor.

The post WFMU’s RadioVision Festival to explore new routes to produce and sustain radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Every time RAIN (the Radio and Internet Newsletter) announces semi-finalists in its upcoming Internet radio awards, I learn about some interesting new online radio service. The latest is Zeno Radio, one of four semi-finalists in RAIN’s “Best Overall Digital Strategy” category. ZenoRadio lets North Americans hook up to radio and audio from anywhere via their mobile phone line.

How does Zeno Radio work? A radio station in, say, Ethiopia sends ZenoRadio its stream via a URL and Zeno assigns a dedicated phone line to the operation. Ethiopian expats in the United States can then listen as long as they have an unlimited mobile voice plan. According to Salon Ethiopia, ZenoRadio has worked with radio stations in 30 countries to build a user network of 500,000 listeners.

In January, ZenoRadio signed up Pio Deportes, the Dominican Republic’s biggest sports station, as a client. The service also has its own immigrant oriented radio network, immigrationnation.us. All this reconfirms my impression that immigrants are Internet radio’s vanguard market.

Other semi-finalists in this category: ESPN Radio, iHeartRadio, and Tunein. The finalists will be announced next week, and the winners disclosed at the RAIN Summit in Orlando, scheduled for September 17.

Further reading: Stand up paddling Internet radio station makes semi-finals in webcaster awards

The post Immigrant radio-to-phone service makes semi-finals in Net radio awards appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Media Audit research group has dubbed Portland, Oregon NPR affiliate KOPB-FM‘s www.opb.org/radio “the top radio station website in the country.” The outfit’s “FYI” newsletter cites a report (presumably its) that concludes that “more than 385,000 out of a total metro population of nearly 2 million have visited the public radio station’s website in the past 30 days.” That is almost 20 percent of 18+ adults in the Portland, Oregon metro region.

Second place: WGR-AM of Buffalo, New York (6.2% visits); third: KLAL-FM of Little Rock, Arkansas (5.5%); fourth WSRZ-FM of Sarasota, Florida (5.4%); fifth: KRMG AM/FM (4.7%). The study cites three big radio clusters to watch out for: Bonneville stations in Salt Lake City, Entercom signals in Buffalo, and Clear Channel stations in Columbus, Ohio. All three groups command at least ten percent of website traffic in their respective areas.

“The latest figures suggest that radio websites are growing in popularity and are becoming more important in defining the overall reach for a radio station or radio group,” Media Audit’s news blurb on the report concludes.

The question, of course, is why these sites are so successful in drawing in web traffic. What are listeners visiting for? How much does audience size correlate with web visiting? Does the fact that KOPB also runs a TV station give it an advantage? More data please.

Hat tip: RAIN newsletter.

The post Portland public radio station website named number one in US appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Meet the latest innovation in digital communications technology: a radio receiver built the year that Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It is a 1938 Philco console rigged by shortwave operator Gerhard, W6XH to pick up a Voice of America Radiogram. These radiograms are basically radio propelled text messages transmitted via the multiple-frequency shift keying method. The Philco has some help, of course; it is hooked up to a Radiogram software equipped laptop PC.

The result is something that looks like an e-mail, sort of (see below).

Why is this important? Project supervisor Dr. Kim Andrew Elliott explains: “We are doing this because shortwave transmitters might be a useful link when the Internet is disrupted by disasters [or] dictators. . . . Sometimes it’s useful to have news and information in text format, and occasionally in poor shortwave reception conditions, when the announcer’s voice is difficult to understand, text might get through with much greater reliability.”

Of course, dictators can try to block shortwave or AM too if they like (or they can try to ban the use of shortwave radios). But the more complicated we make it for them, the better.

Hat tip to Bennett Z. Kobb for bringing this to our attention.

The post The 1938 radio receiver that picks up text appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Some weeks ago we posted that Hollow Earth radio has received a grant from the city of Seattle to apply for a Low Power FM license and transition the signal to a terrestrial operation. During my research on the station, I learned that Hollow Earth streamed into a Second Life room for a while. Just out of curiosity, I fired up my old Second Life account to see if any similar operations existed. Turns out there are plenty. In fact, the Second Life wiki lists many streams with a Second Life connection or presence.

Before we get to them, here’s a description of Second Life for the uninitiated. It’s an online “virtual world” in which you download a client, log in, set up an avatar for yourself, and wander about visiting online Discos, games, beaches, bars, discussion rooms, museums, pretty much anything you can think of. You are there. Gazillions of other Second Lifers are there. You take it from there.

Second Life Old Time Radio. Yes, that’s me in the middle. In Second Life, I’m a cat.

Within this context, Second Life has radio stations. My favorite venue is the Weekly Old Time Radio Shows room, which plays lots of radio ballroom music from the 1930s and 1940s.

Another location is ourworldonline.net’s OWorld Online Radio, which teleports you to a nice little park island surrounded by water and classic rock tunes. Then there is War Child Radio, run by the War Child non-profit, based in the United Kingdom, which helps kids stranded in Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Oworld online radio; an island next to the sea . . .

Each of these links transports you to a digital terrain where you can wander around, communicate with others, and listen to songs and deejays. Just go to the Second Life search engine, type in “radio,” and start exploring. Or, check out this unofficial list of Second Life radio streams.

The post The secret radio life of Second Life appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radio strategy consultant Mark Ramsey is hosting a one-day “ideas festival” for radio called Hivio in San Diego today. While I wish I could have flown out to sunny Southern California to attend in person, I’m glad to watch a live feed of the show from my back deck in sunny Chicago today.

Ramsey introduced the show this morning to frame its raison d’être to the audience: that radio needs to look to ideas that come from outside the radio industry. That’s why more than half the conference speakers aren’t from radio.

He suggested that maybe radio isn’t as special as those inside the industry like to think it is, asking the provocative question: “If you’re going to make plans to the future, is it better to make them on the basis of myths or on the basis of reality?”

Ramsey then outlined a list of radio’s vulnerabilities, which are areas which other media compete with radio, taking away audience. According to Ramsey, the most vulnerable area is “soundtrack,” where radio provides music for a listener’s day. There are obvious competitors and replacements in this area, from smartphones to Pandora.

Star access is where radio is least vulnerable, Ramsey argued. This is where radio has exclusive content and talent that can’t be found elsewhere. Whether it’s Howard Stern on SiriusXM or Terry Gross and Fresh Air on NPR, this is the place where the old adage is relevant: content is king.

As a counterpoint, Ramsey gave the examples of Marc Maron and Kevin Smith, two very popular podcasters who have moved to cable TV, but not radio.

Of course, I can’t agree enough that personalities and content are king on radio. My opinion is that’s where commercial radio has failed epically for the last decade and a half, ever since the biggest owners, like Clear Channel, started treating stations more like Monopoly houses, firing local talent and squeezing the life out of content.

This is a valuable conversation for the mainstream radio industry to have, and one that I think public, community, college and low-power stations can benefit from. In some ways it’s a sign of mainstream radio’s predicament that it takes an effort from outside the main industry players to even broach these questions.

Strategy is important, and it has to be about more than just marketing and branding. But economics will trump. Commercial radio has to be willing to spend money on content and talent, not just talk about it.

That said, I look forward to the rest of Hivio today.

The post Festival of ideas looks outside radio for strategy and inspiration appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Apple has confirmed the long awaited expectations: some kind of iTunes based “iRadio” application should be available by the fall. The Washington Post article summarizes the subscription free service:

“Using the firm’s Music app, users will be able to create digital radio stations based on their favorite artists or songs. Listeners can then tweak the stations by indicating which songs they like and which they don’t. Users can also buy songs with one click, see what music is trending on Twitter and share songs with friends.”

Nothing earth shattering about this offering, but the tech blogosphere is already marinating in debates: Will it hurt Pandora? Will it help Apple? Is this too late, or will Apple’s hugely developed music infrastructure allow the company to quickly catch up with the dominant online individualized music streamers?

I asked the undergraduates at my big survey classes at UC Santa Cruz if they were excited at the possibility of an Apple service similar to Pandora. I got a lot of lukewarm hand gestures, not much else. To be fair, it’s not like Apple has promoted the thing very much. “iRadio” does seem like a bit of an afterthought, however, especially following Google’s All Access rollout.

Perhaps the new rule is that all big online music empires must offer some kind of streaming service as part of their infrastructure. I remember when individualized streaming radio was the cutting edge of everything. Now it’s just part of the background autoflow.

The post iTunes “iRadio” will come out in the iFall (but do iCare?) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

[www.johan.redstrom.se]

The Erratic Radio is a re-designed radio that ‘listens’ not only to normal radio frequencies but also to those around the 50Hz band – frequencies emitted by active electronic appliances. As a reaction to increasing energy consumption, the functional behavior of the radio becomes erratic and unpredictable, thus conceptually relating to the unpredictable, uncontrollable, and intangible effects of increasing energy consumption.

Morozov thinks out loud about the utility of this strange product: “Imagine hungry radio listeners bringing the radio set into the kitchen to grab some food without missing their favorite show,” he writes. “As they move around the kitchen, the show gets increasingly difficult to hear, as the sound reflects the strength of the electric magnetic field in the the current location.”

Most radios don’t consume that much energy, but the point here is to raise awareness about the costs of the typical array of devices we deploy. As designers Anders Ernevi, Samuel Palm, and Johan Redström elaborate:

As you sit at your office, you switch on the radio and tune in the preferred station. Listening to the music for a while, you realize you need to turn on the light. Starting to turn on a series of desk lamps, the radio gets increasingly noisy as it shifts away from the selected frequency. Only by turning the lights off again, returning to the original state, will the radio work properly again….

The trio posit a whole array of “erratic” gadgets designed to challenge the very “distant” sense most consumers have regarding skyrocketing energy use, including erratic television sets, erratic toasters, and erratic blenders. Yet more on the radio:

In order for the radio to tune out and behave erratically, this center frequency needs to be shifted. The ‘erratic-ness’ of the radio is thus created through hacking into the radio channel selection filter, allowing a microcontroller to slightly alter the frequency chosen. In order for the radio to react to energy usage, a sensor has been devised, measuring the electrical fields around the radio. This provides a sense, not only for the actual consumption, but also for the electricity that surrounds us in our everyday life depending on where the artifact is placed. This kind of sensing does not provide accurate measurements of consumption, but it gives an additional feature of mobile measurements.

“We are suckers for various technologies,” Morozov notes, “but we rarely recognize that their use is only made possible by vast sociotechnological systems, like water supply and now cloud computing. Thus does the author praise the “strangeness” of these gadgets. “The strangeness is deliberate: it seeks to introduce aspects of risk and indeterminacy into the use of such devices.”

I suppose that it would be simpler just to set up some kind of energy overuse alert system in one’s house—a flashing red button or something similar. But I wonder how many people would soon shrug their shoulders and experience the alert as part of the background auto-flow of life.

A radio, on the other hand, that suddenly gave me Rush Limbaugh rather than my local classical station . . . now that would get my attention.

The post Wasting energy? “Erratic” radio gives you wrong frequency on purpose appeared first on Radio Survivor.

{http://journalism.uoregon.edu/whatis/radio/}

This Thursday the What is Radio conference begins in Portland, and Radio Survivor will be there. Both Jennifer Waits and I are presenting papers. Expect some blogging about the conferences activities too.

My paper is titled “The rise of the radioText” deejay, and wonders out loud whether it is possible to function as a radio deejay without speaking, that is, to interface with one’s listeners via text messaging and text chatting only. Most texting and IRC style chatboarding in radio today comes in hybrid form. Take for example UC Santa Cruz college radio station KZSC’s chat feature, or radiovalencia.fm of San Francisco’s chatterbox widget.

But some of it is entirely text based—a service like turntable.fm comes to mind with its very busy music room chat boards, or Radio Reddit’s IRC chat feature.

In my paper I write:

Do these innovations substantially differ from on air deejays who deploy, say, a Facebook announcement page? I think that to some degree they do. They take deejay conversation far away from the realm of the human voice, replacing it entirely or in part with a text based discussion. They decentralize the deejay. He or she often becomes a collective of discussants, rather than a single individual.

As texting more and more approximates the pace of the human voice, the big question is whether “radioText” approximates the deejay voice. I think that to some degree it does. Your thoughts are welcome.

Pictures to above right and below, in order:  radiovalencia.fm chatterbox, turntable.fm, KZSC chat, and Reddit Radio IRC.

The post Are you still a radio deejay if you just text? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Earbits has been around for about  two years, running a nice site full of curated music channels where independent artists can strut their stuff. Nothing earth shattering about this; we’ve been reviewing indie oriented streaming sites for years. But then someone got an idea. Why not reward the network’s listeners for extolling Earbit artist selections on Facebook and Twitter?

And so it has been done. As of this post, just mosey over to Earbits.com, log into your Facebook account, Facebook or Tweet about your favorite tunes, and you not only become a promoter of the music, you earn a newly minted currency: “Groovies.”

An Earbits band page.

If you are my age, it’s a comfort to know that young people still appreciate this term. Nostalgia aside, Groovies allow you to “purchase” more music on Earbits. Rather than just listening to the site’s curated channels, you can now buy on-demand access to songs.

How do you get these Groovies? “Basically any time you take an action that benefits the artists or a label or our platform, if you share a track with friends, or join a Facebook fan page or mailing list, or do anything that is a measurable creation of value for the artist, you earn Groovies,” Joey Flores, CEO of Earbits explained to us earlier this week.

The Groovies earning rate can range from 15 to several hundred pieces of the currency, “depending on the action that you are taking,” Flores notes. At this point, you accumulate 500 Groovies by opening an account, then 100 for each music recommendation you make on Facebook and Twitter, and 50 Groovies when you “like” an artists’ official Facebook fan pages or subscribe to an e-mailing list. Then you can cash in on the Groovies at the rate of 10 Groovies for each on-demand song.

Bottom line: the curated channels are free. “So if you want to come and spend your time listening to a curated channel that we’ve created, you don’t have to participate with Groovies,” Flores explains. “But if you say, ‘Wow. These guys are really good. I’d like to hear five more songs by this band,’ then you need to spend Groovies to access those tracks.”

An Earbits “Groovies” earnings page.

Users also earn “Karma” on top of Groovies. Karma is more complicated. It tracks artist  loyalty and allows bands to reward the Most Faithful with swag, or Google hangout time, or similar goodies. In any event, I asked Flores why he thought that consumers would choose Earbits over Spotify.

“The majority of Spotify users are not paying, which means that they have restrictions on how much listening they are allowed to do for free,” he pointed out. “They have to endure commercials and ads. At Earbits is it much cleaner; there are no ads; there are no commercials.”

The potential genius of this service is that all it does is ask listeners to do what many of them already do: plug their favorite bands on Facebook and Twitter. In exchange they get a free and ad-free curated channels plus on-demand tunes, with no restrictions on how much they can listen.

In a sense, Earbits combines the energies of a music promotion company with a social networking site. Last word goes to Flores:

“We are trying to build a direct-to-fan platform for artists and labels to reach new audiences. But we believe that the best way to make those tools more powerful is by putting them on top of a really engaging consumer experience. So you have a lot of artist-marketing companies that are building tools for bands and labels to use to maximize the value of their existing audience. And then you have all these streaming sites where consumers are spending a lot of time. But those things are typically not generating a lot of value for artists. We are trying to merge the best aspects of both of those things.”

Earbits CEO Joey Flores’ homepage.

Mobile applications are on the way. The Android app should arrive in April; the iPhone version will be “coming out later this year,” we were told.

The post At Earbits radio you promote the music, earn “Groovies,” and listen on demand appeared first on Radio Survivor.

SF Music Tech Summit is happening all day today at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco. Panelists are debating the future of music, sharing the latest music technology, and counting down the minutes for the after-parties tonight.

Although I wasn’t able to make it to the conference in person, I did catch a bit of it through their live webcast on UStream this morning. On the Music Discovery panel and the Clear Visions for a Cloudy Future panel I heard mention of radio, social media, and digital tools. Additionally, there was discussion about social music discovery and that for young people, sharing You Tube links seems to be the modern day equivalent of their parents sharing records and tapes with friends. No specific data points were shared to support this and one panelist even pointed out that it’s important to take care when sharing anecdotal reports like this.

Later in the day I saw a bit of a demo session. Various folks demonstrated music technology projects that they had created at a recent Music Hack Day in San Francisco. First up was a leap motion controller tool that allowed users to wave hands (in gestures reminiscent of a Theremin player) over a small device in order to control music and visuals.

Right now (from 3:30 to 4:30pm Pacific time), viewers from home can watch a session (see the schedule PDF) about live concert streaming. Since I was only able to see the streamed sessions, I didn’t get a sense of where radio (in all forms) fit into the discussion across all of the panels, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing a variety of recaps of the event from the many journalists and bloggers in attendance. For the moment, you can get a quick look at initial thoughts from the attendees and participants on Twitter.

The post SF Music Tech Summit Attendees Delve into Future of Music appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Happy World Radio Day Radio Survivor readers! Apropos, every year Radio Gwendalyn puts out a call for radio visions and the Swiss web radio outlet airs them during The Gwenstival. This year the celebration of adventurous radio content will stream in FM over two cities in Ticino—the southern and Italian speaking region of Switzerland—they being Mendrisiotto and Lugano.

We here at Radio Survivor have received an invitation to participate from
Alan Alpenfelt, Radio Gwendalyn’s Chief Editor.

“We have a daily program called Rainbow Radio in which we give another radio carte blanche for 30 minutes,” Alpenfelt wrote to us. “It airs from 13.30 to 14.00 every day. The content is up to you, you can experiment as much as you like. Same goes for the language.”

Participants should record their program and send it to The Gwenstival by the end of February or mid-March at the latest. “Of course, if you have older podcasts, you can use them too,” Alpenfelt added. “A program can be divided into more episodes.”

It should be noted that Radio Survivor is not a radio station. It is a news site and blog about radio. But we, Paul Riismandel, Jennifer Waits, and myself, all have experience as radio DJs, reporters, podcasters, and producers. So we are going to join the show.

Alpenfelt says the event “gives the chance to worldwide radios to air also here in Southern Switzerland.” Keep an eye on this page for further details, or contact him via email.

Here are scenes from previous Gwenstivals.

The post Global radio will converge at the Gwenstival in Switzerland appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Emma Norman’s The World of Internet Radio (above) won for Best Under 18 category. It is a tight collage of global Internet location identifications, languages, and vital statistics about Internet radio. “An interesting production brought to life by the incorporation of the snippets of radio from around the world,” one judge declared.

Juan Villalba’s The World’s Longest Musical Score and Helmi Wolff’s Would we Survive? (below) tied for the Over 18 category.

“The World’s Longest Musical Score is based on telephony,” Villalba’s entry observes, since as we dial numbers we create musical notes. Would We Survive is a touching remembrance of the Battle of London.

“Dreamy. Left me wanting to know more,” one judge said of the World’s Longest Musical Score. “I was with her in the bunker-a script packed with detail, emotion and memory,” a panelist wrote of Would We Survive.

The runners-up are posted here. The First Spark Radio Festival is a brainchild of SoundArt Radio 102.5 FM in the Totnes area of Devon, United Kingdom. Congratulations to everyone involved with the project.

The post One minute radio documentary contest: and the winners are . . . appeared first on Radio Survivor.

@bbcr1 hey radio 1!! Great music today!! Could u play Reflekt – Need to feel loved for me, I love this song, u dont have to bt I love it! Xx

— Steph (@StephLisax) January 4, 2013

Hey Radio stations, we need a true fact show by the people & 4 the people. Crystal Wright @gopblackchick would be a great choice for the ppl

— GeraldMueller (@GeraldMueller) January 4, 2013

@radiodisney hey radio Disney I just called this is me Belieber Girl as u can see and I don’t get it the number I called what was it for???

— Belieber Girl (@Belieber7900) January 4, 2013

Hey radio. There are a lot of songs other than Ho Hey and that god awful Bruno Mars song. Just sayin.

— Clair Visconti (@pCLAIRadactyl) January 4, 2013

Hey radio, give Dustin Lynch a break.I’ve heard “Cowboys and Angels” about 17,467,500 times today.#easeup

— Hunter (@HunterUzzle) January 4, 2013

Hey radio stations, Nicki Minaj has more songs out than just “va va voom” good lawd play something else!!! #annoyed

— Alicia Dreier (@alicia_reneex) January 3, 2013

Hey radio stations quit playing depressing heartbreaking songs please and thank you , that would help alot

— alexandra(@AlexandraMacie2) January 3, 2013

hey radio stations, you do realize there are more than 6 songs right? stop playing the same ones over and over. thanks.

— Marty Mayo (@MartyMayo1) January 3, 2013

Hey radio there’s more artist then just Rihanna Justin bieber and Kesha just thought I’d let you guys know

— Joe Monsini (@joe_monsini57) January 3, 2013

hey radio stations could you play other songs other than diamonds and let me love you #kthanks

— Kayla Schlichting (@kschlichting54) January 3, 2013

Hey Radio 1, you do know the music you are playing is going out on air? #SplittingHeadache

— andy martindale (@AndyMartindale) January 3, 2013

Hey radio! Stop playing Mumford and Sons! It’s not Great American Music just because there’s a fucking banjo in it.

— David (@gammaword) January 3, 2013

@lurchlerouge @radioraheem2 hey radio any new players to watch out for it’s getting boring

— Kushagra (@Kushagra_India) January 3, 2013

Hey radio, stop playing sad love songs. Thanks

— Josh Edmond (@JoshEdmond) January 3, 2013

Hey radio can you play Diamonds by Rihanna 30 more times? Not sure I’ve heard it enough.

— Samir Hamsafar (@SAMIRTHESAV) November 25, 2012

Hey radio host guy on 104.1, quit talking shit on John Mayer

— Chase Kozlowski (@ChaseBreather) January 3, 2013

The post Hey radio stations! Here is what Twitter wants you to know: appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’ve listened to a lot of radio documentaries, but I’ve never heard one that concludes “within a hair’s breadth of 1 minute.” Then I noticed this call-for-content item on the free103point9 newsroom blog:

Your radio documentary can be on any theme and told in any format, so long as it is audio only. It should be within a hair’s breadth of 1 minute, and have a great title. It must be entirely your own work, though could be a reworking of something you have made before. You can enter as a team or as an individual. No other information (eg pictures, explanatory text) will be taken into account by the judges.

Your sixty second masterpiece will become part of the First Spark Radio Festival, scheduled for February 2, and a brainchild of SoundArt Radio 102.5 FM in the Totnes area of Devon, United Kingdom. Here’s the description:

First Spark is part of a programme of work at the station around the sometimes-forgotten fire festivals of Beltane, Lammas, Samhain and Imbolc, as we seek to find new ways to celebrate these turning points of the year. So First Spark is the earliest sign of spring, and a time for new ideas in radio, transmission art and electronic music.

Anyway, if you’ve got something along these lines (or are now inspired to produce it), you can upload the piece here. The deadline is Friday, the 18th of January at five pm.

“We’d really like to play them all on Soundart Radio during the first week of February,” the announcement says . . .

The post Got a one minute radio documentary? Send it to First Spark appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Meet “boothoven[bot]”: a turntable.fm helper.

I guess you could call it a BOT revolution. The name of the BOT is called “boothoven[bot].” The software for it was written by Alain Gilbert, Jason, Michael Frick, and David Haslem.

What does the boothoven[bot] bot do? It automates a whole lot of turntable.fm COAK processes. Among them:

—Boothoven keeps a list of the room’s most popular selections (eg, the number of “awesomes” and “lames”). So when there is only one DJ on the deck (which normally causes the room to go silent), boothoven starts playing tunes.

—Boothoven automatically boots trolls who come into the room and try to play pieces in other genres (eg, dubstep). I’ve seen boothoven do this with amazing speed, far faster than I could do it (and I consider myself an excellent troll booter).

—Boothoven feeds links to the chat line on command. These include links to the room rules, the room Facebook page, and a list of emoticons that chatters can deploy.

The code runs via node.js—a JavaScript software system for writing applications on the Net. A number of services offer free hosting for the system.

Here are all the listed chat commands:

/skip – Skip my current song

/bop – ‘Awesome’ the current song

/songinfo – Display current song information

/removeme – Removes DJ from stage after current song [this allows a DJ

/playlistinfo – Display my playlist length

/rules – Link to room rules

/forum – Link to Turntable Classical forum

/fb – Link to COAK on Facebook

/icons – Link to Emoji cheat sheet

/about – Display bot information Favorite artists Restricted commands (for authorized users):

/addsong – Add the current song to my playlist

/deletesong – Delete my current song from my playlist

/refresh – Exit and reenter the room

To my mind, this software is a tremendous step forward for tt.fm and COAK. It means that I can always access great classical music from the room, even if nobody else is there at the moment. I can also count on the room never (or at least rarely) being hijacked by trolls.

I don’t hang out in a lot of other turntable.fm rooms. If you are using this technology in yours, send us a comment on how it is working!

(Thanks to tt.fm/COAK user :elephant::dash:: for helping me with this article).

The post Roll over Boothoven! inside turntable.fm’s bot revolution appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Despite the east coast heat, I wish I’d been at the Suffolk Street Community Garden on the Lower East Side of New York on Sunday. There free103point9 revved up a couple of FM transmitters and treated the locals to a performance titled “Habits of Imagination,” an “outdoor public installation/performance using live broadcast radio and audience interaction in a celebration of John Cage’s one hundredth birthday.”

It was all part of the Underground Zero festival, a celebration of performance art and avant-garde theater.

You’d never know it was the Big Apple, looking at this bucolic scene below . . . wonder what Cage pieces they played?

John Cage listeners at the Suffolk Street Community Garden; source: free103point9

The post Some John Cage on FM in the garden appeared first on Radio Survivor.

My friend and noted radio historian Jesse Walker e-mailed me the other day. “Just found out that there’s a ton of back issues of the WBAI and KPFK folios posted at archive.org,” Walker wrote. “Did you know this?”

He was referring to the Internet Archives, of course. I think I did know, but then I looked at the resource and thought . . . wow. Indeed, there really is a boatload of Pacifica radio related stuff going back to the earliest KPFA subscriber folios (KPFA was the first Pacifica listener supported station, launched in 1949; WBAI came next in 1959; KPFK in 1960).

Then I wondered how much material is available from other community radio stations. Looks like there is a considerable amount of recent content from WFMU in New Jersey, quite a bit from KAOS in Olympia, Washington, a bunch from WORT in Madison, and a not-too-shabby helping from Pirate Cat Radio in San Francisco.

Much of this is audio. I haven’t got the time to do a station-by-station search of all the pirate/college/community radio related content available on the site, but it would be fun to get a thread going that indicates what other searchers are finding.

Who is uploading all this neat stuff, anyway? Never mind. It’s great that it’s there.

“To think one once had to leave one’s home to track such things down,” Walker observed.

Update: In the case of the KPFA Folios, the uploader in question is Brian DeShazor of the Pacifica Radio Archives. He’s made every Folio from KPFA’s inception to the demise of the magazine in the mid-1990s available. “He had most of them,” notes former Folio editor Richard Wolinsky on the KPFA Listeners Facebook page, “contacted me, and I retrieved the rest from deep storage.”

The post How much community radio content can you find on the Internet Archives? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

#1: 2Day and Fox FM sponsors: Cancel advertising until Kyle Sandilands is dumped from radio #VileKyle

According to the petition, Australian radio personality Kyle Sandilands offered this response to a journalist asking about his show ratings: “Fat slag…you’re a piece of sh*t. You haven’t got that much titty to be wearing that low cut a blouse. Watch your mouth girl, or I will hunt you down.”

The Kyle and Jackie O radio show airs weekday mornings on 2day 104.1 FM in Sydney. The protest reads:

Sandilands has a long track record of offensive comments—in 2009 a 14 year old girl revealed she had been raped while taking a lie detector test on his show, and he responded “so that’s the only experience you’ve had?”

These 2009 comments sparked advertisers Optus to pull out of their sponsorship for the Kyle and Jackie O show.

I call on you to immediately pull out of any sponsorship or advertising during Sandilands’ show (both the Kyle and Jackie O show AND the Take 40 Countdown) until he is sacked from radio.

Looks like Sandilands is still on the air. But the missive has been signed by 34,952 supporters.

#2: LM Radio: We request LM Radio to obtain a licence to broadcast in Gauteng

Gauteng is one of the nine provinces of South Africa—home to Pretoria and Johannesburg. From 1936 through 1975, LM Radio broadcast popular music to South Africa from Mozambique in Portuguese (Mozambique being a Portuguese colony until 1975). The station offered a cultural alternative to apartheid South Africa’s state run system of broadcasting (SABC).

Here’s an excerpt from LM Radio’s history page:

In the late 1950s the station underwent a major format change to cater for the younger generation who were not being catered for in South Africa by the state owned SABC. LM Radio as it was popularly known, was world renowned for its Top Twenty chart show and played a major role in promoting South African Artists and their music. LM Radio lost much of its sparkle when it was taken over by the SABC in 1972. On 7th September 1974 the station was occupied during a bloody uprising in Lourenco Marques and the administration of the station was taken over by the Frelimo army. On 12th October 1975, following Moçambican independance in June of that year, LM Radio facilities were nationalised and the station closed down bringing an era to an end. It was replaced in South Africa by Radio 5.

Now a plucky band of older LM Radio lovers want the recently revised online version put back on South Africa’s airwaves via a license. The petition reads:

We request LM Radio to obtain a licence to broadcast in Gauteng.

We have been listening on audio streaming and/ or free to air satellite and you provide programming we want and that we can get from no other radio station in Gauteng. By not broadcasting LM Radio in Gauteng and the rest of South Africa they are denying a large part of the South African population the joy of listening to their music. Most of the people older than 45 grew up with LM Radio.

The request has been signed thus far by 1,910 people.

#3: Save Voice of America Radio to Tibet

The petition calls for the preservation of Voice of America radio broadcasts to Tibet. It is directed in part to the Voice of America’s Board of Governors, and to members of House Appropriations Committee of the United States Congress.

“We adamantly object to the proposal by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which manages the Voice of America, and their plans to eliminate the VOA Tibetan Radio Service,” the statement begins:

This campaign against Voice of America also comes during the detention of hundreds of Tibetans into Laogai (re-education through labor camps) upon their return from India after attending teaching sessions overseen by the Dalai Lama.  It comes while Tibetan Buddhist Monks are sacrificing themselves as human torches to shock the conscience of the world as the only way to dispel darkness and ignorance. It comes during the [Peoples Republic of China’s] ongoing crackdown on Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Falun Gong practitioners, and all prisoners of conscience in China.  It comes one week after the PRC sentenced Zhu Yufu to seven years in prison for writing a poem.

It is unclear what the VOA’s Board intends regarding its Tibetan service at this point. At its latest meeting, the Board asked that staff “form a working group to devise a holistic solution for reaching audiences throughout China, including Tibet.” The statement also suggested that the VOA’s “China distribution strategy” will require $3 million in additional revenue. The VOA’s Board of Governors includes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

So far the petition has received 859 signatures.

There are other radio related Change.org causes that have received some support. A petition to the United Kingdom’s Ofcom broadcast/telecom regulator for a new community radio license for Dubstep House Jungle Reggae station Radio Frequency FM has received 399 votes. A petition titled “San Antonio Texas Radio Stations: Local music artists & those who have concerts here should get radio play” has gotten 69 votes. And 64 supporters have signed a petition asking the public employees union that represents workers at the Dade County, Florida school district run radio station to step down in favor of a broadcast workers union.

At the bottom end of the list, a petition calling for the Pacifica radio network to inaugurate an “Arab Spring Netizens Radio Program,” has received no votes (at least so far). A missive titled Please Go Away Nick Cannon has received one. “He is taking up valuable radio air time from music and from people who are actually funny,” the statement reads.

The post The top three Change.org radio related petitions appeared first on Radio Survivor.