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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boston public radio station WBUR reports,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect sound forever, again!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— David Marugán (@RadioHacking) January 20, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, the idea might turn out to be fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¡Viva la minidisc!

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

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

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

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

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

“Friend,” the sales pitch explained:

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

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

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

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

Here is my favorite part of the statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not All Stations (but Still Too Many)

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

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

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

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

Your Community Is Your Audience, and Your Base of Support

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

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

I get it.

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

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

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

Finding Your Community, and Your Audience

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Comfortable Tension and a Happy Medium

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

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

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

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

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

Illustrating the Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue the Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my continuing quest to stay a step ahead of recording media degradation and obsolescence, I have undertaken the digitization of my remaining audiocassette collection. Last year I wrote about preserving my archive of interviews and air checks on minidisc, with the hope that the post would be informative and maybe compel some readers with similar archives and still-functioning players to get moving.

I’m spurred to action on the tapes because I still own a reliable and functioning cassette deck and it’s increasingly difficult to obtain decent quality decks in working condition. Sure, a quick Ebay or Craigslist search may turn up dozens of decks stated to be in working order because someone quickly played a test tape in it, but components made of rubber and plastic easily degrade and break, often meaning a repair that costs several times what you paid.

You can also find a ready supply of USB-equipped cassette decks on Amazon and other online retailers that appear ready-made for the task of preserving your cassette collection. However, a little bit of research and reading reviews from knowledgeable people indicates that this modern generation of decks most resemble the bottom of the barrel, with flimsy and often slapdash construction. As it stands, no reputable major consumer or professional audio brand manufactures or sells new cassette decks.

That said, there are several record and stereo stores in my town which sell used audio gear that has been checked by a technician, or refurbished as necessary. If you find some of these stores in your local area that’s probably the best place to start if you need a deck. You’ll probably pay a little more than on Ebay or Craigslist, but have a better chance to get a working unit with a low-hassle return or repair if needed.

Pioneer days

My cassette deck is a late–90s vintage Pioneer CT-W606DR. By no means is this a high end model. It’s more of a bog-standard dubbing deck of the time, but with an interesting and rare feature: digital noise reduction. Readers of a certain age who amassed big cassette collections may remember how Dolby noise reduction could be persnickety. Turn on Dolby for some pre-recorded tapes and the hiss went away while leaving a relatively clean audio signal. But then try it on another tape and the high end would disappear along with the hiss.

With the CT-W606DR you can leave the Dolby turned off for all tapes and yet the hiss is cleaned up nicely without any significant degradation of the audio that I can detect. I’m certain this process isn’t perfect, but it’s a rare cassette that has such high fidelity to begin with.

Recording Zoom-Zoom

To make this process go as quickly as possible I’ve connected the outputs of the cassette deck to the line input of my 8 year-old and still-kicking Zoom H2 portable digital recorder. This way I don’t have to tie up a computer doing the real-time digitization. You could use any decent quality portable digital recorder that has a true line input. However, I would caution against less expensive digital voice recorders, since they’re intended more for voice dictation, and not the highest quality. Voice recorders also tend to only record in compressed MP3s.

Recording directly into a computer is fine, too. I have some specific advice for that route below.

A quick note about using the Zoom H2: you should keep the input level set at 100 at all times. As I learned from a blog post by media preservationist Richard Hess, setting the level to lower than that sometimes results in the audio being clipped and distorted. If the audio level seems too low you’re better off increasing the volume in an audio editor application later rather than having the Zoom amplify it by setting the record level higher than 100. I don’t know if this advice applies to the newer H2n model or any of the other Zoom recorder models.

Do the WAV

For archiving I highly recommend avoiding saving your audio files as MP3. Instead I recommend recording in uncompressed WAV files at CD quality (44.1kHz sampling rate at 16 bits) or higher. Then, if you’re really concerned about hard drive space (though with the price of USB hard drives dropping like a rock, I wouldn’t be), you can compress the files as lossless FLAC or lossless ALAC. These file formats do not throw away any audio data, and both are relatively easy to convert to other formats, like WAV, MP3 or AAC. FLAC has the added benefit of being open source, but it is not natively supported on Apple devices.

My advice to use uncompressed WAV to record is not just about audio quality. While an MP3 file may sound perfectly good to your ears, the files are much more limited in what you’re able to do with them. You can edit them, but you’ll also be introducing another compression cycle if you save the edited file to MP3 or another compressed format. If you play MP3s on the radio, the resulting internet stream–which is also compressed–can introduce distortion that can be very audible. So, at this point in time, the storage savings isn’t worth the compromise in utility and quality.

Although my cassette deck has auto-reverse, my experience is that the sound quality suffers a bit when playing back the B-side on reverse. So I only use the deck playing forward, choosing to turn over the tapes manually.

Give it a little trim

Once I’ve digitized a cassette to a WAV file then I transfer it to my computer, where I trim the heads and tails. You can do this in any audio editing software–the free Audacity software works great. Because I’m working with an uncompressed WAV file, there is no loss of quality.

Some of the cassettes I’m digitizing have music, albums that are out-of-print or otherwise unique or one-of-a-kind. With these I like to break down the WAV file of one side into the individual songs. You can do this with an editor like Audacity, but it’s kind of tedious. For this task I really like the MacOS app Fission. The app is specifically designed to cut up audio files, even MP3s, quickly and without loss. If there is a little bit of silence between songs Fission does a good job of auto detecting individual tracks. Then you just tell the software to export individual WAV files.

Never metadata I didn’t like

Another important step is to input metadata into your files. Right out of the recorder the file will probably just have a generic name and number. The first thing I do is rename the file to something clear, like “JohnDoe_interview–1996–06–05.wav.” I use the year-month-day date format because then when files are in alphabetical order they’ll be in date order too.

Most audio file formats also have additional metadata that you encode in the file, including fields like artist name, track title, album title, year, genre and comments. This is the info you see when you play a file in iTunes or on your mobile device. I always fill out this data as completely as I can. In Audacity you can edit the metadata by clicking File, then selecting Open Metadata Editor. iTunes also lets you edit a file’s metadata by right-clicking on the track and selecting Get Info. Fission also has a good metadata editor.

For tapes that have extensive notes on the liner j-card or some nice artwork, I also scan that in. If you don’t have a scanner you could take a picture with your smartphone or digital camera. Most audio files also permit artwork to be part of the metadata. I don’t know how to do this in Audacity, but with iTunes and Fission it’s just a drag and drop operation. I usually also save the artwork as a JPG or PDF file in the same folder as the audio files.

Then if the file is something I want to share with someone online or take along on my mobile device I may create a MP3 or AAC version of it for that purpose, being very careful to keep my full-quality WAV, FLAC or ALAC original. In most cases all the metadata will be included in the MP3 or AAC file.

Duplicate, duplicate

Very importantly, once I’ve digitized my tape I make sure I have more than one copy. I keep one copy on a hard drive which I back up into the cloud using Crashplan, and then at least one more burned to CD-R or DVD-R. As mentioned in my minidisc post, I’m considering uploading my radio work to the Internet Archive for further safekeeping, though I haven’t yet.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to make multiple copies. One of the biggest advantages of digital files is how easily they are copied, so it just makes sense. Also, if possible, keep a copy in a different physical location, like a office or a relative’s house–just in case of a real disaster, like a fire or flood.

Options and final advice

Now, this is not the only way to create decent digital copies of cassettes; it just happens to be the most efficient workflow for me.

For instance, you don’t need to use a digital audio recorder. You can just connect a cassette deck to your computer. The main stumbling block is that many modern computers (especially Macs) don’t come equipped with stereo audio inputs any longer. While some PCs still do, the quality rangers from acceptable to poor. Because the inside of a computer is hostile environment for audio, it’s not unusual for noise and hiss to be high, or for there to be chirp-like artifacts introduced.

For digitizing direct to a computer I recommend a USB audio interface. It shouldn’t be a huge expense–decent ones, like this Behringer UCA202 start at just $30. Just make sure it has a line-level input. A microphone input will not work correctly.

Finally, I strongly recommend using a cassette deck rather than a Walkman style portable player. Some vintage models were truly great sounding, but finding a unit that is working properly will be more difficult than finding a deck. You can find new portable cassette players, too, but they seem too be even worse quality than the decks you can buy, even the ones with a USB port that advertise being designed to digitize tapes. On top of these problems, with a portable tape player you’ll be forced to use the headphone output, which will introduce a little more noise.

If you don’t have access to a functioning vintage cassette deck and have to buy something new, then definitely stick with a tape deck. Though I don’t have any personal experience with them, the decks from Ion, Pyle, or Marantz Professional (which isn’t as professional as it used to be), seem like they’ll be OK. In fact, I think they’re all the same deck, just with different brand names on them. I would buy one from a retailer that won’t hassle you over returns, since I understand quality control can be one of the biggest questions.

Now, let’s preserve some cassette audio history!

The post Preserving Audio That’s on Cassette appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Medialife ponders the imminent collapse of iHeartMedia, a product of Clear Channel’s famous leveraged buyout, which, apparently, has not rescued the new company from its $21bn mountain of debt. Bankruptcy is what the author of the piece hopes for, which will unleash 850 radio licenses onto the market.

Ditto for Cumulus Media, drowning in red ink with 550 radio stations (here in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live Cumulus is dumping on air talent left and right).

Then there’s CBS, which wants to exit the radio business. Add another 117 radio stations to the equation.

All these entities are or will be looking to bail in various ways following the news that 21 percent of United States households no longer own an AM/FM receiver at home. We are talking about something like ten percent of all USA radio stations here, and a much much higher percentage of aggregate radio advertising revenue.

So what does it all mean? Where is this going ? Honestly, I don’t know. But here’s where I hope it is going. I hope it is moving in the direction of much lower prices for radio licenses, and new owners who see them as something more than glorified ATM machines. I’m hoping for another era for radio similar to the period following the television explosion in the late 1940s, an era when expectations for radio were so low that networks were willing to experiment with outliers like Bob and Ray and Jean Shepherd; when free form stations WBAI in New York City and KSAN in San Francisco became household words.

The Irish used to have a saying: England’s troubles are Ireland’s opportunity. Maybe corporate radio’s troubles are local, community based radio’s opportunity?

I think that’s enough unbridled, naive optimism for one post. Obviously that was then and this is now, with Pandora, YouTube, Spotify, and SoundCloud complicating any and all historical comparisons. We’ll see (and hear) what happens soon enough.

The post Are we at the dawn of the post-iHeart radio era? (And will it be good?) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The usual excellent suspects associated with our Radio Survivor podcast produced an interesting debate program about the “self-imposed smallness” of college radio last week. Popular radio blogger Ken Mills served as the show’s guest critic. He’s a very smart articulate guy with a lot of experience in radio.

“I come from a management background,” Mills told Jennifer Waits, Paul Riismandel, and Eric Klein. “I come from a background where, in the commercial world, if you don’t make your budget you’re out. And in the non-comm world you may get another chance but at some point you’re out. I look at things through that lens.”

So here’s Mills’ bottom line on college radio:

“I think that college radio’s self-imposed smallness is a threat to its future. The key to long term success in any non-profit, non-commercial media in particular, is independent long term sustainability. And I don’t hear anybody in college radio talking about that. It’s kind of the same as it was in the 1970s.

The reason I talk about threats is, they’re coming from all directions, first, universities are cutting, second student fees are getting are getting out of control, and third, the price and cost of getting into the FM spectrum continues to rise, and so the big public radio companies, and particularly the big religious broadcasters such as the Educational Media Foundation are on the hunt for stations that they can sweep up . . . “

At this point Jennifer waits came in with a good question, what do you mean by self-imposed smallness?

“The view more often than not is inward,” Mills replied. “In other words they really don’t broadcast to the larger community, they’re really more concerned with their peer group, people right around them, and if it’s educational sometimes it’s solely training. But there isn’t a lot of thought about audience . . . and there is a direct correlation between audience size and the ability to generate revenue from listeners, whether that be pledging or underwriting or events or whatever.”

As the conversation continued, Mills acknowledged Waits’ observation in an earlier podcast that a whole slew of college sponsored Low Power FM radio stations are coming down the bend. This obviously challenges some perceived specter of a generalized abandonment of radio by universities. At some point the discussion moved onto the lack of ratings for college radio stations. “Why are ratings important?” Paul Riismandel asked.

Mills: “Because the size of an audience is directly correlated to the ability to have more diverse funding, particularly listener funding, and my belief is that college radio has been too dependent for too long on student fees and the largesse of the university’s involved.”

Riismandel pointed out that many college stations can’t afford to subscribe to Nielsen Portable People Meter ratings (not to mention accessing the encoding system needed to participate). “I don’t disagree with you that having a larger more diverse audience means you can bring in more fundraising,” he added, “but not subscribing to ratings doesn’t indicate that a station doesn’t care.”

I’m not going to transcribe the whole show, because I want you to listen to it. But the conversation definitely struck me as one in which everyone was right at least part of the time. I would add to Mills’ list of worries the accelerated abandonment of the humanities at many universities. And I’d also add that too many college and community radio stations spend too much time constructing fictional narratives about “communities,” rather than trying to figure out how to reach broad groups of people who don’t necessarily have much immediate involvement with each other but live in the same place (aka “audiences”).

But ultimately I think that college radio’s problems are political rather than managerial. Colleges aren’t supposed to provide services solely for sale; they’re supposed to teach and offer at least some things that we need but aren’t necessarily willing to buy as individuals. Not a few of the college radio programs I cherish around these San Francisco Bay Area parts are anything but marketable. The question of how to support that sort of fare is a question for everybody, not just for radio station managers, blogger consultants, and us podcasters.

The post Can station managers fix the “self-imposed smallness” of college radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Morning show host Carl Wolfson has another ten days or so over at XRAY FM in Portland, Oregon, then he says he is quitting.

“OK. I’m done,” Wolfson declared on his Facebook page in late January:

“The vitriol of so many Bernie [Sanders] supporters and the threat they pose to Democratic unity is a bridge too far. Politics itself has gotten so nasty, so extreme and so personal that I have even been drawn into uncivil discourse in the past few days. If progressives that I have spoken for during the past nine years on radio (and during 40 years of activism) have lowered themselves to label Hillary a “fascist” or the “spawn of Satan” and worse, I have too little faith in politics to continue.”

Shortly after that Wolfson reported his car poop smeared with the declaration “Fuck Hillary.”

XRAY is a wonderful new community radio station. Jennifer Waits has a great profile of the signal. Portland is, of course, a big Bernie Town. 30,000 Portlanders showed up for a recent Sanders rally, I’m told. I don’t want to get into the Bernie versus Hillary thing, but I do want to encourage discussion about how to keep talented people like Wolfson from fleeing from community radio signals after they say stuff that their listeners don’t like.

Before that, it should be noted that Wolfson isn’t quitting just because of smearage. Not so long ago he had a Blue State talk spot on a Clear Channel progressive signal, KPOJ. Then out of nowhere the station switched to all-sports. After a hiatus he landed at XRAY, where, like every other community station I’ve heard of, money and resources are scarce.  “Ninety-hour work weeks and the stress of producing two-hours of live radio on weekdays with a bare-bones staff has taken a terrible toll on my health,” Wolfson lamented on his Facebook statement. “And after the Clear Channel boot, I’ve had to sink too much of my savings into the effort.”

But it appears that Wolfson’s criticisms of Sanders and the response he’s gotten from his audience was the proverbial last straw. His perspective is “crowded out,” he recently told Oregon Public Broadcasting, by his audience. “I will not listen to you any more,” he says they tell him. “You are a traitor.”

“That is a little too much on my side,” he warns, “because it will not allow me to even broach the issue of Bernie’s electability. And I haven’t even endorsed Hillary Clinton; that’s the odd thing about this.”

One of the dilemmas that community and public radio stations face is that, to generate support, they encourage a sense of ownership among their listeners. For example, last year XRAY ran an audio piece contest titled “Radio is Yours.” Folks who contribute to XRAY become “members.” This isn’t unique to the station in question. Most community signals engage in this sort of proprietary sign making. But it comes with a price. “What is this person saying on my radio station?” listeners understandably ask when some controversial issue must be vetted.

What’s the solution? I am not sure. But awareness of the problem is a good first step.

The post How can we protect community radio talk show hosts from their listeners? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Like a lot of people making their way through the KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz transition saga, I am listening patiently to the new sound. And this, apparently, is what I am supposed to do.

“I would love for people just to have some patience,” Nikki Silva of the legendary Kitchen Sisters (which got its start at KUSP) told The Santa Cruz Sentinel last week. “There’s a lot of work to be done, and everybody’s trying very hard to make it work. It’s not just us that’s changing. It’s the whole radio landscape.”

Silva was presumably speaking in defense of the station’s embrace of a Triple A music format. The three As stand for “adult album alternative” (or something like that). KUSP’s new general manager, Lee Ferraro, has hired a small gaggle of professional sounding deejays and given them access to a big expandable database of songs. Sentinel reporter Wallace Baine charmingly struggles with the composite sound. Here’s his summation:

“[AAA] can feature such boomer icons as David Bowie or Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan (while shying away from the classic-rock hits), but also embraces such millennial stand-bys as the Animal Collective, Blitzen Trapper and Spoon. Nick Drake bumps up against Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings. Washed Out slips in behind Tom Waits.”

I’ve been auditing this stream pretty regularly over the last two weeks and I’m less interested in the rather tedious debate over whether it’s good community radio (or not) that is raging across Santa Cruz, and more interested in my own ignorance of so much of this remarkable music. When I listen on weekday mornings on the way to work, I hear playlists full of tunes that are consistently ironic, bittersweet, and folksy in an urban but out in Coney Island (or Santa Cruz) urban sort of way. Then I think to myself, where was I when all this music got written and performed . . . am I that out of it?

Yes, part of me concludes. I’m old and don’t go to clubs any more (this is all true, BTW), so of course I don’t know these bands and their people. But another part of me suspects that it isn’t all my fault, that music really did change in the 1990s . . . that the Clear Channel counter-revolution really did banish new creative music from the analog airwaves, so that the guys and gals who emerged after The Pretenders and The Talking Heads and The Smiths and Jane’s Addiction just did not get on mainstream FM radio, so if you weren’t part of a specific age demographic collectively hipped into the right new technologies and trends at the right moment, you missed all the next stuff.

Obviously the ‘you’ in this instance is ‘me.’ Listening to the new KUSP I feel like somebody invited me back into the club, into the party, or back into some scene from which I’d been secretly disinvited. Mind you, now that I’ve returned and grabbed a drink, I have mixed feelings about what I’m hearing. At various points in the day, there’s a certain baroque similitude to the content that I find moving, charming, and repetitive all at the same time. Mostly I want to ask the under-40 audience that KUSP seems to be targeting if they’ve all plastered the same Baudelaire quote on their refrigerator: “What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! And be sad!”

I suppose I should mention the obligatory KUSP-FM crisis backstory at this point. Trying to compete with KAZU-FM in Monterrey, KUSP adopted an NPR format that put the station in a huge financial hole. The license almost got sold. Now they’re trying the aforementioned AAA format. I like the deejays, but I wish they’d share a little more of their real selves over the airwaves . . . Anyway, I’m going to keep listening. I gave a little money. Let’s see what happens.

The post Rough notes: reflections on (patiently) listening to the new KUSP appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that struggling public radio station KUSP has laid off its general manager Terry Green. He ran the operation for a dozen years, the last eight or so dedicated to making the signal more competitive with neighboring NPR outlet KAZU. But now KUSP is “on the brink of bankruptcy,” according to the Sentinel, with loans and payments due reaching over $700k, much of it owed to NPR. Green’s last day as GM of the station was Wednesday.

Since earlier this year, KUSP has been trying to reconceptualize itself. Its board almost decided to sell the station, then didn’t, then proposed a series of possible new tree named formats which it eventually whittled down to three and then to one, created by a KUSP Internal Working Group and presented at a public board meeting in mid-July. (You can view the forest of resultant Powerpoint slides here; thank you KUSP Forward group).

I attended that gathering, which was presided over by Green as well as several board members who have since resigned. The meeting room at the Aptos Community Foundation building was packed with attendants. Without quoting anyone directly, here are my impressions:

First, members of the audience were extremely skeptical about the final proposal. One pointedly asked Green and others how it substantially differed from KUSP’s current NPR-laden lineup, perceived as expensive and redundant given KAZU’s format. Sitting close to these attendants, I could tell that they remained unconvinced by the responses they received.

Second, various people in the audience obviously wanted KUSP to go back to some kind of music-centric format. They argued that a music-oriented station would be more affordable and enjoyable. Speaking from the floor, one individual was indignantly skeptical about claims that most public radio listeners want news and public affairs programming rather than music. I sympathized with this person’s love of music; I mostly listen to radio for music myself; but most studies I’ve seen suggest that a preponderance of public radio subscribers want news and talk; many feel like they can curate music on their own.

Third, the NPR debt may be very intractable. KUSP owes about $435k in back fees for NPR programming. A few people at the front table (board members I think) confided that they thought they had been making progress with NPR about renegotiating this debt, but then NPR became increasingly conscious of the public example its leniency might have with other debtor stations and became more rigid about the issue.

Fourth, it was clear that some board members felt like they had been dealt out of the conversation. I am a bit of a cynic about these things. I’ve been to a lot of public/community radio board meetings and expect to hear the following statements at every one of them: “I don’t see a lot of people like me in this room.” “We need to reach out to the community.” “We need to get back to our roots.” But as jaundiced as I am, I was struck by comments suggesting, at least to me, that the internal conversations of the board were dominated by a few individuals. They in turn spoke defensively at the meeting whenever this possibility was raised.

Fifth, KUSP has no sense of identity. To keep the forestry theme going, it has become so subsumed in putting out immediate fires that it has lost any clear, concise definition of itself. People on the board more or less said this at the end of the meeting.

The event concluded without adopting any particular plan and the summer delayed along until now. My guess is that, money issues aside, this latest shakeup may have been precipitated in part by soliciting so much community input and then letting matters drift. The Sentinel article quotes KUSP Board President Kelly O’Brien suggesting that the station may indeed place more of an emphasis on music. On the other hand she also warns that the signal still could wind up being sold if the operation’s finances aren’t repaired soon. I continue to hope that the station will not adopt an ersatz “something for everyone model” that is intended to make all participants happy and achieves the opposite result.

The post Rough notes: KUSP dumps its general manager appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Some interesting items on community radio from two very different places.

In Zambia supporters of the Patriotic Front (PF) electoral party “briefly interrupted operations” at the Mkushi Community Radio Station on Tuesday “in protest against [the] alleged political inclination of a Board Member of that Station.” That’s according to the Lusaka Times online newspaper. It’s unclear from the article what kind of “interruption” took place. Apparently the board member in question is a member of the United Party for National Development (UPND).

Concerns about non-partisanship on the station’s board were raised, but it seems like this sort of thing could be worked out without messing with the station’s functionality. The confrontation reflects tensions flowing from Zambia’s recent national elections. The ruling PF won 48.3 percent of the vote while UPND came in with a close 46.7 percent.

Zambia’s government isn’t a big fan of community radio, by the way. Back in July the Minister for Media pretty much said so.

“Let me make it very clear that it will not be possible for Government to fund community radio stations,” the Zambia Daily Mail quoted Chishimba Kambwili as saying. “Already we are struggling to fund our own ZNBC, Times of Zambia, Zambia Daily Mail and ZANIS, and it will be hard on public coffers to come up with support for community radio stations.”

At least you could not “interrupt” them. Just a thought. In any event, the Mkushi Community Radio station appears to have been kickstarted by UNESCO as a venue for communication within the Mkushi district. Residents of the area speak Swaka-Lala and share a relatively small border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s southern panhandle (see map above).

Student recruits at Delhi Community Radio.

Meanwhile, the University of Delhi has authorized the broadcasting of candidate statements in its upcoming Student Union elections over its radio station. That would be Community Radio 90.4MHz. All contenders will receive five minutes of statement time from September 7 through September 9.

This measure will “provide an opportunity to the contestants to reach maximum possible students at a time and to communicate their agenda and plan,” the President of the station told India’s The Statesman newspaper. ” The voting percentage should be maximum as possible and we all should strive to make high voting percentage a reality.”

The signal has around a 10km broadcasting contour and is, like a lot of India’s community radio stations, largely run by the faculty and students of a college.

The post Notes on community radio and democracy in Delhi, India and Mkushi, Zambia appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The New York Times editorial board is appalled by a Staten Island grand jury decision not to indict the police officer who chokeholded Eric Garner of Staten Island. Garner died shortly thereafter. We wrote about Garner when filmmaker Spike Lee produced a YouTube video comparing the man to his fictional character Radio Raheem from the movie ‘Do the Right Thing.’ Raheem is strangled after a fight over his boom box. Garner, who was unarmed and selling loose cigarettes on the street, perished after being dragged down the ground.

“This was vicious policing and an innocent man is dead,” the Times declared.

The post No justice for “Radio Raheem” of Staten Island appeared first on Radio Survivor.

An attempt to resolve Walkman/Boombox tension via a ‘boombox/walkman’ [stereo2go.com]

‘Some sociologists and other cranks are quite cross about the popularity of the Walkman,” Will wrote in June of 1981. “They say the device is ‘isolating’ and prevents people from ‘relating.’ I say: Yes, and isn’t that great?”

“Leaving aside the fact that a walk with Bach is bliss, who wants to ‘relate’ to strangers in the street or seated next to one on airlines? Who does not want to be isolated from the blather and screech of metropolitan life? Walkman is the civilized answer to something that should be illegal—those 20-pound stereo ‘boxes’ carried by young men with strong backs and bad manners, ‘boxes’ that pummel the ears of anyone within 50 yards.”

As this commentary was published, city police in New York and elsewhere were confiscating Boomboxes and handing out summonses by the dozens. Meanwhile, still somewhat pricey Walkmans sold by the ton, their owners tipping their headphones to each other on the street.

”It’s just like Mercedes-Benz owners honking when they pass each other on the road,” one Yuppie told The New York Times. Reading Walkman related articles from back then, I’m struck that when most big city newspapers covered the technology, they assigned fashion reporters to the story. At the same time, the Boombox was increasingly relegated to crime pages.

“Nobody ever asks the fellow who totes it to turn it off,” a Washington Post commentator complained. “That’s’ because he’s usually eight feet tall and weighs 400 pounds. If he’s small, he is generally believed to conceal a knife in one pocket and a zip gun in the other.”

Spike Lee got at the racial angle in this tension via his 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing. Remember Radio Raheem?

For my own Boombox experiences check out this essay.

The post Notes on the Boombox/Walkman war of the early 1980s appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Federal Communications Commission has opened up a new conversation on net neutrality in light of an Appeals Court’s mid-January strikedown of some of the agency’s Open Internet rules. “We establish a new docket within which to consider how the Commission should proceed in light of the court’s guidance in the Verizon v. FCC opinion,” a public notice released on Wednesday explains. I hope that discussion extends to data caps and their potential impact on Internet radio.

Before getting to that subject, a quick backgrounder: The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit opined that the FCC’s statutory justification for its regulations barring ISP discrimination against “edge providers”—pretty much anybody who offers audio, video, and similar services on the Net—was bogus (which I think it was). But the agency could avail itself of another section of the Telecommunications Act, the court ruled, which classifies Internet Service Providers as telecommunications services.

So back to the drawing board, says FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “We will carefully consider how, consistent with the court opinion, we can ensure that edge providers are not unfairly blocked, explicitly or implicitly, from reaching consumers, as well as ensuring that consumers can continue to access any lawful content and services they choose,” he declared in a press statement accompanying the new Open Internet docket.

I listen to a lot of Internet radio on my smartphone, especially in my car. It is linked via bluetooth to my stereo, so up and down the freeway I’m listening to SoundCloud music channels, community and college stations via TuneIn, and fun podcasts like “Welcome to Night Vale” via Podbay. I keep track of how much data these applications use. Due to the peculiarities of my work schedule, I commute about four hours on various state highways each week. I don’t look at mobile video  much. But despite that, it appears that if my job required driving every day, I’d blow my current mobile data ceiling from time to time, largely due to the additional consumption of Internet audio.

Should this issue be placed at the doorway of my ISP? Are audio edge providers “implicitly blocked” when consumers think twice about enjoying mobile Internet radio too often? AT&T has a plan to let edge companies pay to “sponsor” consumer data use, so that using their application won’t count towards your data limit. Would this constitute the kind of implicit “priority access” rent seeking that the Commission says is out of bounds—an express lane for content providers able to pay?

I am not sure, but I would like to see that conversation happen on this new Open Internet docket. Here is the RSS for the proceeding. Look to the top left and you’ll see links to make long and short comments. The docket number is 14-28. Or, of course, feel free to offer a comment below.

The post Net neutrality, mobile data caps, and the future of Internet radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Some days earlier, news surfaced of another innovation. Last.fm is developing a beta player that accesses music on YouTube for its subscribers. A rather amusing Last.fm YouTube explains the feature, to the bemusement of at least one follower. “So what’s the point of paying a subscription fee if all I get is a YouTube video?” asks Reloaded 211. “I can just go to YouTube and look it up myself. This makes Last.fm pretty much useless.”

Well, not exactly. One gets a very different listening experience at Last.fm than ones does wandering about YouTubeland, and of course the company is experimenting with all kinds of content (e.g., Spotify). Brad Hill over at the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN) notes that the YouTube move will save financially struggling Last.fm money.

“The tactical product change saves in the content-cost department, as YouTube handles rights management and royalty payments on the back end,” Hill writes.

But it appears that one ought not to traverse this route without some experience and support. A lone high school student named Luke Li decided that he would just up and develop a listening application that tapped into YouTube and investor beloved SoundCloud, and he got a little tap on the shoulder from the Recording Industry Association of America late last year.

“We demand that you immediately cease making this application available for distribution,” the RIAA wrote to Li. He quickly complied.

“I’m 18 years old, and I definitely do not want to get sued,” Li confessed in a December 31 blog post. “I am not a lawyer, so I’m not sure if this is exactly a cease-and-desist, but I definitely did not want to test the RIAA out on this case.”

To be fair, Li thought what lots of people might think. YouTube is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor” policy. As long as the operation keeps a reasonable eye on infringing content and takes down illegal stuff when rightsholders complain, the service is in the clear. So under those circumstances why can’t smart high school kids with programming skills tap into the YouTube API and work their magic? Well, maybe they can. But if Li stuck to his guns, I’m guessing he would have had to prove to a judge and jury that he was keeping a top eye out for illegal content as well, which he probably didn’t have the staff for. So the wise lad resolved to get out while the getting was good.

All this raises larger issues. As better prepared music streaming companies tap into resources like YouTube and SoundCloud (hello plug.dj), these big repositories of audio will slowly morph into what amount to government protected public resources. To recap: the DMCA offers three crucial liability limiting safe harbor provisions to entities that allow user uploads (pdf, see page 12):

• The provider must not have the requisite level of knowledge that the material is infringing. The knowledge standard is the same as under the limitation for information residing on systems or networks.
• If the provider has the right and ability to control the infringing activity, the provider must not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the activity.
• Upon receiving a notification of claimed infringement, the provider must expeditiously take down or block access to the material.

Without these provisions, it is safe to say that YouTube, SoundCloud, and similar entities would get the living bejeesus sued out of them and quickly cease to exist. These DMCA standards have thus far survived two concerted attacks. The first of these was Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google for infringement. Google won round one of this battle, but Viacom has appealed the case. Second was the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a crudely crafted law designed to end run the DMCA. It was stopped by public outrage.

If big sound/video repositories like YouTube and SoundCloud continue to expand thanks to vast armies of citizen uploaders, and more companies tap into them to provide creative services to the public, and the DMCA continues to survive, and the relationship between YouTube/SoundCloud and those smaller companies survives legal scrutiny, we will have come to an interesting place in the development of Internet radio. Entities like YouTube will have become quasi-public resources—state protected reservoirs of audio and video, if you will.

Think lakes, canals, forests, rivers, highways, the air waves. Welcome to the New Audio Commons. Where it goes after that, I am not sure.

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

The post Last.fm and the YouTube commons appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Comedian/actor Todd Glass

It used to be when a politician, celebrity or someone in the entertainment business had a big announcement to make that person would make an appearance with the likes of Barbara Walters or Larry King. A comedian or someone a little less famous in the mainstream might take it to Howard Stern or another syndicated morning show. But this week comedian and actor Todd Glass brought his story to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, coming out of the closet to the public and the comedy community at large.

Glass, who is 47 years old and hosts his own podcast, obviously decided to do this on WTF because he trusted Maron’s ability to handle the situation with empathy and grace. Having just listened to the program today, I can say I’m impressed how Maron played his role as host and interviewer with compassion, while also bringing lightness and humor. I also think that this episode represents a new milestone in the growth of podcasting as a medium.

In the interview Glass explains that he has been out to family and close friends for some fifteen years, and has enjoyed acceptance from them. Nevertheless, he candidly discusses the fear and anxiety he experienced about his closeted sexually in his professional life. Glass explains that what motivated him to finally come out publicly was hearing about gay young people who are hurting and killing themselves as a result of the harassment and bullying they experience just for being gay.

I was both moved and enlightened listening to Glass discuss aspects of being gay in a still intolerant society that I had not considered so clearly. While acknowledging that prejudice and bigotry comes in many forms against many kinds of people, he points out that a unique aspect of being gay is that you run the risk of not only being rejected by society at large, but also your own family and friends. Hearing Glass explain this so plainly and clearly, but with obvious passion was a rare and affecting podcast moment.

A few years ago, an announcement made on a podcast like this might have been reported on websites dedicated to the comedy or gay communities. But this week the story has appeared on such mainstream outlets as Reuters and the Philadelphia Daily News.

The post WTF podcast is platform for comedian’s coming out, marks a milestone in podcasting appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Earlier this week we explored how left wing listener supported radio station KPFA in Berkeley is debating Republican libertarian candidate Ron Paul. Just to be bi-partisan, now let’s see how conservative talk radio guy Michael Savage is handling the Texas Congressional representative. Keep in mind that several months ago, Savage offered Newt Gingrich a million dollars to get out of the primary race, “for the sake of the nation.”

Savage: All right, let’s take the callers. Barbara in New York on WOR, go ahead please.

Barbara: Michael, it won’t make any difference if Obama wins or not, because all the Republican candidates are the same. And you know the only candidate, the “deranged” Ron Paul, is the only one who has spoken out against, not only NDAA, but SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act . . . he spoke out against the Patriot Act years ago. He’s the only one warning about the fascism and oppression coming to America. And he’s been right.

Savage: Hold on. He is right, but he’s not electable.

Barbara: You supported John McCain four years ago, and who was the author of the . . .

Savage: Woah woah woah hold on a minute. Stop. You wanted me to support Obama?

Barbara: No. I want you to support the candidate that supports the constitution.

Savage: Wait. Don’t get hysterical. Please. It’s one thing to say the man has some good ideas and some crazy ideas. It’s another thing to be a realist and ask yourself ‘could he beat Obama.’ You don’t really believe that he could beat Obama, do you?

Barbara: That’s where you are wrong. You think nutcase Newt can beat Obama?

Savage: No. When did I say that? Ma’am. Ma’am. Stop. You sound like you are hysterical. You sound just like Ron Paul. Why are all the Ron Paul addicts so hysterical (I’d like to know)?

Barbara: Because they care about this country and they’re tired . . .

Savage: You mean only you care about the country? I don’t care about the country?

Barbara: Let me just say this: the Republicans are no different from the Democrats. Not one of them has spoken out against NDAA or SOPA or the Patriot Act; they’re all for going all over and bombing all over . . .

Savage: Well, you’re wrong. When you say ‘none of them have spoken out,’ you mean none of the Republican Senators?

Barbara: None of the Republican candidates have spoken out against NDAA, except for Ron Paul.

Savage: Ok. On this point you are correct. But this still does not make the crackpot electable.

Barbara: He’s not a crackpot, Michael. He’s been saying things that you agree with.

Savage: Really. He’s being saying things that I agree with? You mean I agree that Israel should be annihilated and disappeared off the planet like he does? . . . You want me to play the sound bite? . . . [a lengthy debate about Israel ensued; see update below]

Barbara: Michael, I’ve been voting since 1972. I voted for George McGovern because he was anti-war, so it’s not like I’m naive and—

Savage: So you’re confirming what I suspect. Most people who support Ron Paul are dyed-in-the-wool liberals.

Barbara: I’m not a liberal! . . . I’m an American!

[UPDATE – readers are complaining that I left out the part of the debate that focused on Israel. I just thought it was too long and involved, but due to popular demand, here goes]:

Savage: I will be happy to play the sound bit of Ron Paul basically calling for Israel’s non-existence.

Barbara: No he’s not. And he’s the only one, let me remind you, in 1980 or ’81, when Israel bombed the nuclear power plant in Iran [actually, it was Iraq], the only one who supported it was Ron Paul! Because Ron Paul believes that Israel should take care of herself, she should have the right to defend herself, without any kind of overseer by the United States.

Savage: That’s all well and good, but where is Israel supposed to get its arms from, since all of its weaponry is American. Other than the domestically manufactured material, where is Israel supposed to get its munitions from? The bunker busting bombs that it has come from the United States of America. So that’s a moot point to say that Israel should defend itself. Without weapons it can’t defend itself.

Barbara: It’s got plenty of weapons, Michael, and you know it. It’s got more weapons probably than we do by now. And they do a damn pretty good job of defending themselves. Remember the raid on Entebbe? They do very well.

Savage: Entebbe was a long time ago. That’s when they had real leadership in Israel, before the people with Saks Fifth Avenue charge accounts took over the country. That’s before the Russians came to Israel. That’s when Israel was still Israel. Israel is a shell of its former self.

Barbara: It’s up to Israel to get its own leadership, like its up to the United States to get its leadership that’s authorized by the constitution.

The post Michael Savage: Ron Paul supporters are hysterical, dyed-in-wool liberals appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Berkeley, California based listener supported station KPFA did an interesting and informative program on the candidacy of libertarian Republican Ron Paul on Tuesday. KFPA talk show host, Mitch Jeserich, hosted the discussion on his Letters and Politics show as Republicans (including Paul) compete for favor in the Iowa Caucuses. [UPDATE 10:41 PM CST: Paul comes in close third in Iowa race].

The program began with Nation magazine correspondent John Nichols, who characterized the Iowa event as “a sort of Kabuki theater, where most of the people who go don’t actually participate in the delegate selection process, they just go to participate in a glorified straw poll.” But that poll result, “doesn’t have anything to do with delegate selection. So while it is said that this is the beginning of the [Republican] nominating process, it’s really sort of a false construct.”

The real beginning of the process comes next week in New Hampshire, Nichols noted, where a more traditional primary will take place. And Nichols doubted that the Republican “party bosses” will let Paul get very far.

Nonetheless, much of the progressive blogosophere has been engaged in a fierce debate over Paul, who insists that he did not author various racist statements famously identified in his Reagan/Clinton era newsletter. Despite this, and Paul’s opposition to right of women to choose, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and other 20th-century reforms, bloggers who offer qualified defenses of his campaign note his opposition to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on drugs, the Patriot Act, and Federal implementation of the death penalty.

“Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits,” contends Salon writer Glen Greenwald. Ditto says Robert Scheer in The Nation, given Paul’s “devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.”

Other writers, such as Bill Weinberg of the World War 4 Report, don’t see it this way. “If we ever see a President Paul, he’ll be bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, all right,” Weinberg warns “—to wage a race war in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Houston.”

Nichols told Jeserich that he thinks the Paul cause is “a very dangerous game.”

“I understand that there are people who are passionate supporters of civil rights, Medicare, and Medicaid, who simply want to send a message and this is a way to do it,” Nichols explained. “But Ron Paul is a pretty complex player, and he has a lot of history on these issues that is pretty unsettling—in some cases repulsive.”

The conversation then went to Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report, who was asked for his opinion of Paul.

“I hope he does well,” Ford began. “I don’t like him, but it’s really a reflection on what’s happening in the Democratic Party, that the only conversation that the corporate media finds compelled to cover that has anything to do with empire . . . is coming from the Republican Party or from this libertarian within the Republican Party. So for those of us who would like to hear the term ’empire’ uttered, Ron Paul is the only show among the two parties. He’s the only game in town.”

Jeserich asked Ford about the more controversial comments coming out of Paul’s newsletter.

“Paul comes from a cultural, political milieu that is totally saturated with racism,” Ford observed. “He is a hyper-American nationalist. And many people say how could that be, he is talking about the end of American empire; that’s not what we associate with hyper-American nationalists. But there has always been an American nationalism that was isolationist.”

Ford noted that isolationists have for a century opposed the integration of forcibly acquired nations like the Philippines and Cuba on racial grounds, citing fears of “mongrelization.”

“These strains have always been among us, and I think that Ron Paul actually is part of that older strain, very strong, that just doesn’t get talked about in the American political conversation.”

Jeserich asked Ford what he thought about progressives who see Paul as someone who could potentially make President Obama address issues that otherwise won’t be raised?

“Obviously they’re looking for the magic wand and some kind of way to oppose these corporatist policies of Obama that he shares, in fact, with the Republicans,” Ford replied. “They’d like a magic wand; some kind of button to push in the electoral arena, that would allow them to avoid the hard, hard work of grassroots movement building that is necessary.”

An interesting show, definitely worth podcasting or downloading.

The post Racist or empire foe (or both?); KPFA vets the Ron Paul question appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Popular radio comedian and WTF podcaster Marc Maron was on the Conan O’Brien show the other day, and he offered this holiday present wisdom:

"I don’t buy gifts for a lot of people," Maron explained. "I buy gifts for one person, my girlfriend, because that’s the way you gotta do it."

"I don’t know if you are in a new relationship. My relationship is pretty new. If you have a person you are with and it is your first Christmas together, buy them many presents. Because if you buy one, there’s always the possibility that they won’t like it. And then they’ll pretend like that they like it, and then you’ll know that they’re pretending that they like it, and then you hate them for that. And then what happens is you are like, ‘I thought that this was the perfect gift for her, yet she doesn’t like it, so she’s not who I thought she was, and she’s never going to be, ever.’

And then what happens is that she doesn’t think that you got her the right gift and so you don’t understand her and she doesn’t know if you ever will, so that little misfire, that one gift thing, can be the cancer that erodes your entire relationship.

So what I’m saying is, ‘is you are not going to buy more than one present on Christmas morning, just break up with her’. Just say ‘Merry Christmas, it’s over’."

There you have it guys. No pressure. If you still need gift ideas, we’ve got some here.

The post Marc Maron’s do or die holiday girlfriend gift advice appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Having followed Jennifer’s first-rate coverage of the unfortunate sales of college stations KTRU, WRVU[apologies for the error, WRVU has not been sold, but it is under threat] and KUSF I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to how college stations solidify themselves. As some readers may be aware, in addition to fourteen years of experience in community radio, I got my start in college radio twenty years ago and have been serving as advisor to WNUR-FM for the last three years. Therefore the survival of college stations is very dear to me.

Jennifer has already succinctly enumerated nine tips to ensure college radio’s survival. What I’d like to do is drill down on some points that I think are very important, adding some suggestions for action.

I have to credit WNUR’s Graduate Advisor Brenden Kredell who made the astute observation that the time for a station to start girding itself against outside threats–like having its license sold out from underneath it–is way before any of these threats manifest. That is, if you wait until it seems like your station may be under threat, it will be a definite uphill battle. Nevertheless, I also think it’s never too late to make a concerted effort to strengthen your station’s place on campus and in the community.

I intend to share some concrete tactics and approaches that a station might put into action right now. I will do this in a series of posts each focusing on one particular principle. In forthcoming posts I will cover recruitment and student involvement, finances and publicity. Today I start with what I think is the most important piece of advice:

Be True to Your School

The principle here is simple: you want your station to be thought of as an integral part of your school’s campus life. It appears that concerns about a station’s role on campus are often expressed by administrators justifying the sale of a station. There are some simple and effective things stations can do to make positive contributions to their schools, and to also make sure students, faculty and administration can see and hear these contributions.

While there are no guarantees, I think that dedicating effort to the kinds of initiatives I’m about to outline will go a long way towards demonstrating your station’s value. These fall into five basic categories:

1. Be student-run

2. Be perceived as student run

3. Provide service to your school

4. Throw events on campus

5. Document, document, document

1. Be student-run

When I first started as advisor to WNUR I was given very smart and strategic advice by the school’s previous advisor who had been in the position for over a decade. He told me that it was important that the station continue to be student-run, and all the more crucial that the station always be perceived as student-run.

WNUR has always been student-run; students fill all the positions on the executive board, produce and direct all major programming blocks and make up the majority of the station’s staff. But, due to longevity and the fact that they don’t graduate every four years, many well-known programs are hosted by community volunteers or alumni. So, it’s almost inevitable that these folks who have invested many years of effort in the station will receive attention that student-hosted shows don’t.

I personally think the contributions of community volunteer and alumni DJs can be valuable to college stations by providing some ongoing continuity, making a very direct connection to communities outside the immediate student population as well as serving as mentors. Nevertheless, it appears that one of the chief complaints universities and colleges contemplating a station sale have leveled at their stations is that they appear to be an activity for people who aren’t students.

So, it’s a fine line that college stations have to walk if they want to welcome community volunteer and alumni DJs into the fold. Most colleges and universities think of their student-run stations first and foremost as a resource for their students. Therefore at this very moment I think it’s vital that the management of college stations be as student-run as possible. At the very least the management should be majority students, although I’d advise bringing this as close to 100% as is practical. By doing this a station can immediately provide proof that students are in control, even if some observers claim otherwise.

2. Be Perceived as Student-Run

The other side of this equation is to try and make sure that the station is perceived as student-run. There a number of ways to do this, and many of them amount to making friends on campus and making sure they know about you.

One of the best friends a college station can have is its campus newspaper. Try and get them to write some feature articles about your station, especially the efforts of some of your most dedicated students. When it comes time for your big recruitment meetings or other events, contact the paper and pitch them as news items. At the very least make sure these listings make into into the paper’s events calendar. Also, you might consider running ads every so often to raise your station’s visibility on campus. Be sure to include a line about being a student-run station; don’t expect anyone to fill in that blank.

Many schools now also have online magazines or student-run blogs that are nearly as popular as the campus paper. The same strategy applies here–make friends with the editors of those sites and feed them information and story ideas. Make sure that your student staff are front-and-center in these pitches.

If your station has a website, a simple thing to do is to have a staff page that lists all the folks who run the station. Include their majors and graduation year to make sure it’s crystal clear that they are students.

Many colleges and universities also have some kind of governing or coordinating bodies for their student activities or clubs. Consider participating in these groups if it’s appropriate. This will serve not only to remind other students that the station is run by students, but also make the station seem more accessible and accountable to these campus leaders.

3. Provide Service to your School

The more visible your station is on campus, the more positively the campus community will regard it. But when the station also is making positive contributions to campus life then you’re backing up that visibility with additional substance.

One great way to get involved on campus is to offer to DJ events on campus. I would suggest doing this for free, or perhaps in exchange for being listed as a co-sponsor. Doing this sometimes requires some strategizing on music choices in order to play something that will be pleasing to a wide audience without giving the wrong impression about the station that might come from playing Top 40 music. I’ve seen that emphasizing world musics, electronic music and other non-rock forms can help bridge that gap. At the same time there may be organizations and events that welcome more exotic and experimental sounds–find them and beg to send them DJs!

Many college stations have a news department which can really help in this regard. Find a way to cover big campus events, from charity events to major lectures, and be sure that you alert the event sponsors to your coverage. By virtue of being on a college campus you have very easy access to a wide range of experts and newsmakers from a variety of fields. So highlight the professor making strides in cancer research or who authored a controversial article about gender relations. Then contact your campus’ public affairs office to let them know about the coverage.

You also have valuable air time that you can dedicate to important campus issues and events. Find a way to do live broadcasts of the most important ones, or record them and get permission to broadcast them later. Even if you can’t broadcast the event you can offer to publicize it. In exchange for broadcast or publicity ask if you can hang a sign or banner advertising your station.

Your sports department can also be an important ally in providing service to your campus. While the most popular men’s sports like football and basketball tend to get all the glory, there are also lots of other sports played by men and women that get lost in the shuffle. If you can, try and provide live play-by-play of women’s basketball, softball, lacrosse or soccer. Give similar coverage to the lesser known men’s sports. If it’s not practical to do live play-by-plays, then find a way to cover highlights during a weekly campus sports show or during news programming.

Whatever you do, work with the athletics department to see about getting some publicity. Ask them to list your sports programming on their website, printed programs or ads in the campus newspaper. If you don’t have a sports department in your station, this might be a great opportunity to partner with the campus newspaper which probably does cover campus sports.

Of course this is just a sampling of ideas for getting your station more involved on campus. But the rationale here is clear: if students and faculty see your station as making a positive contribution to campus life, they’re more likely to see it as something worth defending.

4. Throw Events on Campus

A perpetual challenge for most college stations is that only a percentage of students are regular listeners. This is usually due to the fact that college stations tend to focus on music and culture that is overlooked by the mainstream, while many students still have relatively mainstream tastes. These days many students aren’t even radio listeners to begin with. However, that doesn’t mean your station can’t provide information and entertainment in other ways.

Throwing fun events on campus, especially ones that are cheap or free are a way to build awareness of your station, build good will and bring in some new listeners. Since stations typically have connections with local musicians, throwing concerts is a very natural way to share the station’s expertise and connections.

This year WCBN at the University of Michigan sponsored a series of lectures on the value of freeform. The lectures brought together academics, theorists, artists and musicians to discuss the concept of freeform in contemporary culture, stressing the value of freeform in radio as heard on WCBN. I think this was a brilliant idea because it created a space for WCBN within the scholarly discourse on campus, reinforcing its artistic and cultural place beyond simply being a broadcast station.

It’s pretty common for stations to sponsor free film screenings or festivals featuring movies with themes around music and auditory culture. In a similar vein, stations can invite artists–not just musicians–who tackle subjects that relate to music, culture or politics of the sort heard on air.

Whatever kind of events your station decides to throw, you should dedicate significant effort to publicizing those events, too. The most obvious is to make announcements on air and to distribute fliers. But don’t forget to call upon all the other campus connections you should be making. Make sure the film department knows about your screening, and the music students know about the lecture from the composer you invited. Don’t wait and hope interested students will stumble upon your event. Invite them.

5. Document, document, document

Now your station has started efforts to do some of these things to make it more visible and integral on campus, or maybe your station already was doing some of these things. But memories can be short. In 2013, when half of the staff from 2011 has graduated, who is going to remember the events the station sponsored in September 2010? And what if that’s when someone important inquires about what the station has been doing on campus the last five years?

It’s absolutely critical to document all of the station’s activities in a way that future station staff can access and add to. Ideally this is something that a station’s advisor can help with, and may already be doing. In any event a station’s student management should work to keep a record of everything the station does on campus, with as much detail as possible: the kind of event, the dates and venues, any other campus organizations who were involved, how that event relates to the station’s mission. Having that data at the ready might also help when pursuing grant applications or future collaborations on campus.

It’s not a bad idea to log that info on a station’s website. It provides a single place to keep that info while also making it easily accessible to the campus and public at large. Simply, putting a record of your station’s campus involvement only a Google search away means it’s much more likely to be found.

………………..

As I wrote in the introduction, there’s no guarantee that doing these things will insulate your station from all threats. However, I don’t see how there can be a downside to working hard to knit your station into the fabric of campus life. At the very least you will recruit new DJs and listeners. More optimistically, you create the opportunity to catalyze a productive interchange of ideas and culture on your campus that would not happen without your radio station.

I’m interested in hearing about Radio Survivor readers’ ideas on this topic. I’m especially eager to learn about other college stations’ efforts to be relevant and integral to their campuses. Please post your ideas and responses in the comments to this post.

The post The mediageek’s advice for college stations, part 1: Be true to your school appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to Fresh Air broadcast Maureen Corrigan’s decidedly negative review of Kyung-sook Shin’s hot new novel Please Look After Mom. The commentary finished by recommending that readers check out Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids instead.

“Smith will get your book club on its feet and pumping its collective fists in the air, rather than knocking back the wine and reaching for the cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction,” Corrigan concluded.

I winced. Turns out that I wasn’t the only one to do so. That final remark brought a strong reaction from dozens of NPR fans. Here’s KCRW listener Joon Park‘s:

I’ve been listening to NPR for the past 20 years and I never felt compelled to take time to comment on a story (let alone a book review) until now. NPR and Maureen Corrigan need to issue an apologize period. No matter how you may rationalize this in your mind…your commentary exemplifies a cultural insensitivity which borders or possible crosses over to racism. Don’t for one second think b/c you are a public liberal news radio or that you have a PhD or that you are a self proclaimed “feminist” makes you somehow immune to being a cultural elite ethnocentric. And if you want to somehow justify your comments then be consistent and STAND BEHIND your commentary. Next time you issue a book review written Carlos Fuentes be sure to use the term “Burrito scented Kleenex”….Toni Morrison what else but “friend chicken scented Kleenex”…what about Maxine Hong Kingston “sweet and sour pork scented Kleenex”….you should be ashamed and you probably do even know it. Also, don’t drag “feminism” in the gutter by attempting to use it as some veil of protection or rationalization for your ignorant rants….Also, Patti Smith would be embarrassed by your review as well….

That’s a little more than a wince, of course. Fresh Air comes out of WHYY in Philadelphia. WHYY’s Senior Producer Danny Miller offered a defense of the commentary.

“I must admit I was surprised at the reaction,” Miller is quoted as saying on NPR’s Ombudsman page. “It didn’t occur to me that this phrase would be deeply offensive to some listeners, and I’m certain that was not the intention…. To repeat, no offense was intended.”

“The review was not an attack on Korean culture. It was a negative review of a novel that—despite its popularity—Maureen thought was a melodramatic.”

No doubt. My guess is that Corrigan used “kimchee” because it alliterates with “Kleenex.” Unfortunately, the phrase  bleeds at least a drop or two of her contempt for the novel in question onto Korean culture in general, even if that wasn’t her intent. Add Corrigan’s earnest-to-a-fault voice to the chemistry, and Fresh Air got what it got.

“I hope Maureen Corrigan and NPR will respond to the anger and concern her reporting generated,” writes another listener. “I think the audience deserves a respectful response, the silence adds insult to injury~ negligence.”

The post NPR draws listener fire over ‘kimchee Kleenex’ comment appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This pirate kid was no Hard Harry.

So that kid I posted about on Monday, who was running a pirate station in Ottawa, Ontario and accused of threatening to kill another local radio personality? He was convicted Thursday of criminal harassment of both the DJ and the officer from Industry Canada who was investigating the station. He was also convicted of violating Canada’s Radiocommunications Act. The teen is due to be sentenced on the 24th.

My question is, if some other DJ on a licensed station made threats against a DJ on another station, would there be a similar police response? (This is a sincere question, not a loaded one…)

Word to the wise: death threats make radio regulators cranky.

The post Ottawa pirate teen convicted for harassment and unlicensed broadcasting appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Susie Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s lover in the early sixties, died last month, and NPR recently played an excerpt from a 2008 interview with her. I was very moved by the interview, and felt that it gave me a startling and fresh perspective on an important part of Dylan’s early work—his love (and hate) songs, and perhaps the role that women play in his songs in general.

Rotolo is known primarily as the woman walking with Dylan on the famous album cover photo for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” But in the interview she shows us how much more than that she was. She was someone who loved and understood Dylan better than he did himself, someone who never lived her life as “Bob Dylan’s Girlfriend,” but rather as a free and independent person, someone who was cruelly and publicly punished for causing Dylan heartbreak, and yet someone capable of remembering and retelling it all with warmth, humor, compassion, and, incredibly, in a tone free of resentment.

Growing as the daughter of New York left wing intellectuals, Rotolo was exposed to so much of what would make up Dylan’s world: left politics, the civil rights movement, the struggle for authenticity in a twisted commercial culture, poetry, art and music of all kinds. She enthusiastically recalls exposing him to these things, and the joys of immersion in them amidst the excitement of young love. For example, as she was helping stage a production of one of Brecht’s plays she introduced Dylan to Brecht’s work and Weill’s, which had a large impact on him. It’s easy to attribute a lot of Dylan’s politics in the early sixties to her. It’s probably not an accident that her departure from his life occurred as he left the political arena for the more interior, surrealist songs post 1964. In a voice full of warmth and kindness she described the thirst for life and the curiosity that she and Dylan shared. And later, as she explained why and how she left him (twice), there was no animosity or resentment or critique.

Rotolo left for a trip to Italy in 1962, something she had always wanted to do. Thrilled with meeting international students with the same artistic ambitions and interests, she stayed eight months because she “was out in the bright fresh air . . . It was just thrilling.” She contrasted this with the increasingly suffocating atmosphere of living in the folk music culture in Greenwich Village. She didn’t talk about what was wrong with Dylan that made her leave, but rather how she know what was important for her to do with her life, and that this wasn’t it.

The breakup with her caused him to write some of his most appealing early songs, such as “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s all Right”. When she left for the trip to Italy, he wrote these songs and sung them around the village and out into the world. When Rotolo returned from her trip, she was astounded and deeply wounded by how public the personal story of their relationship had become, and she felt that all the musicians and all their social circle seemed to have blamed her for being cruel and hurting Dylan. She would go into a club and the performers would sing those songs, pointedly, at her, and even sing all kinds of other ‘she-did-him-wrong’ songs to punish her.

But Rotolo had not left Dylan in order to hurt him, nor did she see it as the end of their relationship. She left him because she had wanted to go to Italy for a long time, and the opportunity presented itself, and she didn’t think of herself as Bob Dylan’s girlfriend, someone obligated to assist the great man’s famous career, but as herself, someone who knew what she wanted. When she came back, they resumed their relationship, but she saw now again that this isn’t what she had wanted—he was now in a world circumscribed by the structures of fame, a man who apparently thought he could have a girl in each of several cities, and she was reduced to just being ‘this chick’, that he could come back to after adventures on the road. As she says about his girl-in-every-port privilege, “Men could do that”. So she walked away from it. And judging from her tone in the interview, she never regretted doing this, nor did she waste her precious time resenting him.

What startles one is the contrast between her graciousness in describing these events and what he expressed toward her, and about her, in his music. Whose feelings, whose life, really matters? That of the super-rock star, or the soon to be unknown private woman? The artifice and extraordinary conceit of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” makes this clear.

“Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” feels like a remarkably perfect folk love song (lyrics here). When I heard Eric Clapton sing it on the 30th Anniversary Bob Dylan Celebration Video, I was struck by how traditional it sounded—after listening to it for over thirty years, hearing so many covers (notably by Joan Baez), the song doesn’t sound like something written in modern times—more like something you expect to find John Hurt or Muddy Waters doing. A song that’s always been there, part of the canon, if you will. It’s perfectly constructed, the rhymes and chords and emotive qualities of Dylan’s voice melding perfectly in a sad song of lost love. Yet when placed in the context of Rotolo/Dylan story, one can see it as a perfect mirror image—an inversion—of genuine love and genuine longing, rather as a way of showing off one’s sensitivity and plaintively expressing how hurt one is, yet blaming that hurt on someone else. This is an early Dylan masterpiece of a genre he perfected, if not created: one of blaming his unhappiness on a woman’s failings, while parading his superior sensibility, honesty, and intellect.

What follows is a rough, unkind, yet I think accurate prose version of what Dylan tells his ex-lover in this song.

He tells her that there’s no point in thinking about what went wrong, since she should have known by now—some lack of caring, or selfishness, or insensibility has caused her to not see where she went wrong, so there’s no point talking about it. Contradictorily, he later says “We never did too much talking anyway.” He’s forced to leave, he says, and it’s because of her—but that’s ok (we are asked to believe), I’ll just talk about it this way, singing and telling you and the world of how badly you hurt me.

Even though I gave you my heart, that apparently wasn’t enough, you wanted my soul, you wanted to own me, to give you some part of myself that no one can turn over to someone else. Even as Dylan asserts this, he is simultaneously demanding from her exactly what he is denying her—he wants her soul and her destiny under his thumb, she had no right to leave, because he needed her, on his terms, here.

He tells her that she’s been less than kind to him (the clear meaning of “I ain’t saying you treated me unkind/you could have done better but I don’t mind”) and that she’s wasted his precious time (it’s hard not to imagine that Dylan thinks her time less precious than his), but that she needn’t think about, it’s all right. And so the message of this song is exactly backwards to what happened between them (and also backwards from how the song is usually understood). In this song, Dylan is the true and hurt one, not the possessive and egotistical one. But as Rotolo said about the life Dylan was leading when she got back from Italy: “I saw it as a small, cloistered, specialized world, that I just didn’t belong in it.”

And so she left it for a private life, one that remained politically and artistically active, one that remained true to the values they had shared. Now and in the future, there will be many thousands of references to Bob Dylan for every reference to Suze Rotolo. But I suspect, that at end of their days, she was able to look back on a life of virtue and decency, something that I think will be impossible for him.

The post Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan, and the Woman Question: The Virtues of Thinking Twice appeared first on Radio Survivor.

One of the nation’s most prominent self-appointed Presidential scholars gave his audience a history lesson today, minus a fairly important detail. Radio rantmeister Rush Limbaugh was musing on the latest economic statistics, which are disappointing. The unemployment rate has dropped to the still high rate of nine percent, indicating that the tepid recovery will continue to be, well, tepid. Economists blamed bad weather for the mediocre news.

Limbaugh, of course, blamed something else: President Obama.

In 1936 Alf Landon won 8 electoral votes to FDR's 523

“And also keep in mind no president, no incumbent has ever been reelected with an unemployment rate above 8%,” the Rushbo noted. “So that’s where we’re headed here.”

Except, of course, for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was reelected twice with unemployment numbers above eight percent—in 1936 when the jobless rate was at 16.9 percent, and in 1940 when it was at 14.6 percent.

Eventually somebody tapped Limbaugh on the shoulder to point out that he was pulling stats out of his rump.

“Now, okay… ” the Rushbo added later, after a pause. “Yes, there is an exception: FDR was reelected twice with a jobless number higher an 8%, but that’s because FDR never squandered the goodwill that he had. Everybody still believed he was doing his best with the New Deal and to fix everything, and they had a lot of hope and change invested in FDR.  That’s missing with Obama now.  I don’t know if ever gonna recapture that.”

Actually, the Roosevelt story should serve as an object lessons to Republicans. One reason for FDR’s huge re-election victory in 1936 was that Alf Landon, the Republican challenger, was a truly mediocre candidate. And FDR beat Wendell Wilkie in 1940 despite the fact that by then he had squandered much of his good will, thanks to blunders like his attempt to pack the Federal courts. But as the war in Europe heated up, Wilkie just couldn’t convince voters he’d represent an improvement in unstable times.

One other point Limbaugh glided past: when Ronald Reagan retook the White House in 1986, the jobless rate wasn’t at eight percent, but it was at an uncomfortable seven. We’ll seeeee . . .

The post Rush Limbaugh erases then restores FDR to economic history appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“You know, don’t a be a bitch,” declared the masked man on the Sunday Night Showdown radio network. “You know what I mean?”

“Please give a fuck,” added another panelist.

“That’s right,” concurred the masked guy. “Please give a fuck about the city that you live in and that some day your children will live in. PGAF – Please Give A Fuck.”

Thus concluded the SNS’s compelling (if somewhat ripe) appeal for folks to support the wrestling radio channel’s holiday Salvation Army food drive appeal in St. Louis.

“Donate some cans. We know you got cans at your house. There are people who are fucking starving,” another member pleaded.

“What does it take to bring three can food items, four canned food items, TEN canned food items? ”

“It takes a small plastic bag, a little bit of gas, and some time.”

“Or a box of Ramen noodles?”

“I’d watch it with the Ramen noodles because where are they going to boil the Ramen noodles?”

Anyway, Ramen noodle debate aside, kudos to SNS for their relief work. Hope lots of people got fed.

The post SNS Radio smacks down for homeless relief appeared first on Radio Survivor.

In real life, Vladimir Putin is the poker faced Prime Minster of Russia—liked in his own country despite a pretty creepy human rights record and his past with the Soviet Union’s KGB. But on free form WFMU-FM he is the semi-regular subject of Thunk Tank’s Salutin’ Putin fan fiction feature, hosted by Bronwyn and Jay.

“We’re obsessed with him now,” Bronwyn confides to Jay on a recent program. “I do think it’s healthier that you’re obsessed with Putin. Because when you used to be obsessed with Justin Bieber, that made me worry a lot. But this is better. He’s like a more masculine, manly . . . ”

A Vladimir Putin action comic T-shirt

“Well,” Jay interrupts, “they’re doing a Colab, is what I heard. 2012—it’s going to be the Putin/Bieber ticket.”

“That’s horrifying,” Bronwyn exclaims (laughing).

Somebody almost calls the station, then doesn’t, and the conversation goes on.

“How did this start?” Bronwyn continues. “I don’t remember.”

“I got very excited last week to talk about Putin putting out forest fires,” Jay explains.

“And then I read that he went out in a little rubber raft, out on the choppy northern Atlantic ocean or Arctic ocean or some frigid ocean—” Bronwyn jumps in.

“—wearing a very sporty orange jump suit,” adds Jay, “very nautical.”

“And he shot a dart with a crossbow. I like the story that he shot a gray whale with a crossbow. But then because he’s Putin and he knows, right? that shooting a whale with a crossbow is not that cool, it was actually a dart with some kind of vaccine in it to help the whale.”

“No no no. It was for scientific research. They were taking a sample.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

Soon to be an adjective

“What I also love is that Putin is a man of the people—right? And he has a real humility that he brings to his endeavors. And so when he came from shooting the whale with his crossbow, he said, ‘I got it on the fourth try.’ He admitted that three times he missed the whale with a crossbow. But on the fourth time he got it.”

“He did that intentionally!”

“Well, there’s a question.”

“I think he did! I think he hit it on the first try, but he doesn’t want to say. I think you’re right. He’s a man of the people. Trying to be a man of the people.”

“The average person could never sit in that boat and shoot that gray whale with a crossbow. That is a Putinesque endeavor.”

“Has ‘Putin’ become an adjective yet?” Jay asks.

“It should,” Bronwyn declares.

One can’t resist reading something into this very funny repartee—something drearily learned about the meaning of it all. I’ll keep it brief. Here we are, living at the end of history, and what’s the payoff? A global free market Internet economy in which a canned mediocrity like Justin Bieber rises to the top, and a newly “democratized” world that puts its faith in political fixers like Vladimir Putin.

But if you want to live, you gotta laugh. And that’s what shows like Thunk Tank are for. Thanks guys.

The post Tootin’ with The Putin—making sense of WFMU’s Vladimir Putin fan fiction project appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Man, my student Jacob Margolis got himself into a deep tub of digital hot water the other day over at KPCC-FM public radio in Pasadena, CA. Jacob took my telecommunications history class up at UC Santa Cruz and now he’s an intern down there. His crime? Explaining the mechanics of P2P file downloading on one of KPCC’s cool new local programs, the Madeleine Brand Show.

The show topic was How do you watch television?

“What if you can’t afford TiVO or Apple TV or you simply don’t want to pay for it?” Brand asked. “There is a way, and it’s an illegal way, and who better to get the skinny on illegal downloads than our intern Jacob Margolis.”

Who indeed? I can second this endorsement, and Jacob got right to it.

“Let me stop you right there and say that I do not download any of these things illegally,” Margolis began. But he acknowledged that he knows lots of students who can’t afford cable TV subscriptions and video on demand fees (which are indeed expensive).

So “what do you do?” he continued. “You need a broadband connection, go to a torrent website like PirateBay.org and you can download the torrent file.”

Jacob showed Madeleine the site.

“I see Dexter there, and, oh, it looks like the Fifth Season, and that hasn’t even aired yet!” she exclaimed. “Wow, looking at all the offerings here, the networks must just be furious.”

“They are,” Margolis replied, but they’ve “kind of hit back” with Hulu.com and other legit online video sites. “And a lot of people go online and watch there.”

“Legally,” Madeleine emphasized.

“Legally,” Margolis agreed.

The sanctimonious responses to this perfectly factual and non-endorsing examination of the issue (which ended with tips on where to view legal content) can be read at the bottom of the podcast page.

Here’s my favorite; note the veiled threat in paragraph three:

Everyone should know that Internet piracy doesn’t only hurt the rich studios and fat-cat producers, directors, writers–the “above the line” people. It hurts all the “little” people who work on a film or TV show; the Set Dresser who is picking up all the furniture for the sets of Mad Men, the Prop Maker who is building the village scenery for Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom, the greens-man who is digging and planting rice paddies on the hillside of New Zealand to make it look like Japan, they all rely on residuals from sales of DVDs and LEGAL Internet downloads, etc. This is money they will never see in their bank accounts, but it is money that directly funds their health insurance accounts. Every time you steal a film or TV show from the Internet, you are stealing someone’s healthcare. Perhaps a family will eventually loose a child for lack of funds.

It might also be interesting to note that the Russian mafia runs most of the illegal download sites. So you see, Identity Theft is a close cousin to Internet Piracy. Is it worth risking that just to be able to watch a TV show for free?

Madeline, your show is in its first week of airing. You are based in Los Angeles, one significant center for production of film and TV content. Your inclusion of such information shows a serious lack of judgment at best, and at worst a profound lack of understanding as to the ramifications of the content of your fledgling show. I suggest you could do some educating of yourself and your audience as to the REAL harm of Internet piracy. Every major studio has a piracy crimes department who would gladly speak with you about the topic. I suggest you start with Paramount Pictures.

That’s right Madeleine and Jacob, shame on you for not following the Motion Picture Association of America’s party line on P2P file downloading right down to the last dot, failing to roll out big content’s bogus statistics on job losses due to file sharing, and not posting a picture of a homeless child or two to boot.

Anyway, one thing is for sure. If you want to get your radio audience’s attention, illegal file sharing is the topic to air.

PS: I like Dexter too.

The post Want to piss off your radio audience? Talk about P2P file sharing appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Crossley CR6002A-BK

Earlier this week my fellow Radio Survivor Matthew posted about this cute-looking little Crosley record player with a oblong clamshell design far more compact than a typical turntable. Unfortunately, I have to put a damper on Matthew’s excitement, since my opinion is that the Crosley CR6002A is nothing more than an expensive plastic toy.

Retro Thing wrote about the Crosley back in January, noting that it looks like a knock-off of the iconic Audio-Technica AT-727 Sound Burger record player from the 1980s. While the design of the Sound Burger may have been iconic, I recall the sound being mediocre at best.

I’ve been a vinyl enthusiast since I got my first record player as a child, and have consistently listened to records ever since. When I bought my first CD player in 1987 I also bought a new Onkyo turntable that lasted me a good thirteen years until I gave it to a friend. Throughout this time I’ve continued to buy new and used records, and I listen to records several times a week.

As I argued in a post on my own blog last year, the decline of vinyl in the 80s and 90s can be partly attributed to the cheap plastic turntables that came to dominate the era. Lacking any heft and therefore any isolation from the slightest bump or thump, these plastic players pass on every little bit of motion anywhere in the room right to the record and stylus and into the sound. While I’m thrilled that vinyl has seen such a resurgence in the last few years, I’m disappointed that it brought back these miserable bargain-basement turntable designs.

Walk into any radio station that still plays vinyl records (mostly college and community stations) and you’ll likely find a set of reliable Technics 1200 DJ turntables. Solid, heavy with direct-drive platters, they’re standards because they last a lifetime. Audiophiles may argue that the 1200s aren’t the absolute best sounding turntables out there, but they will beat the plastic off any Crosley out there.

At $500+ a pop the 1200s aren’t inexpensive, but it’s rare to be able to buy any consumer electronics that you can be sure will make it into the next three decades. Luckily, the popularity of the 1200s with DJs provoked many other reputable manufacturers to make their own versions at more reasonable prices.

For about $200 Audio-Technica makes a nice ‘table (ATLP 120) that even includes a USB connection to output directly to your computer. Sony has its own version (PSLX350H) for about the same price as the Crosley. Or you can go with venerable DJ brands like Gemini and Numark. Myself, I’ve had a Gemini direct-drive as my second turntable for over a decade of reliable vinyl listening.

So, dust off those old LPs, dig in to the vinyl bin at a garage sale or even drop in to a local record store for some fresh platters still in the shrink-wrap. With a decent, not-so-plastic turntable you’ll enjoy listening for years, if not decades.

The post For best vinyl playback avoid the plastic appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I have to admit that I didn’t get much of a chance to scan the radio dial the last two times I was in Seattle in 2006 and 2009. However when I first visited in 2002 there was certainly a vibrant pirate scene. During my time there for the first Reclaim the Media conference there was also a parallel convergence of unlicensed broadcasters who comprised a “mosquito fleet” of stations taking over empty spots on the Seattle dial, providing some airwaves resistance to the NAB Radio Show happening at the same time. Though pirate stations have come and gone in Seattle, there always seems to be at least one or two on the air at any given time. The hilly landscape provides many easy opportunities to get an antenna up high without having to construct much of a tower.

In any event, radio enthusiast’s visiting Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia should bring along a receiver and do a band scan for stations that will be more interesting than most cities.

The post Lots of interesting non-comm and pirate radio in Western Washington State appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Richard Wolinsky

Pacifica radio is running its semi-regular Local Station Board elections. If you subscribe to a Pacifica station, you should be getting a ballot soon for listener or staff candidates for your signal’s respective board.

Here at Pacifica outlet KPFA-FM in Berkeley, to which I donate money, there are two big slates running: SaveKPFA and Independents for Community Radio. I’m not endorsing anyone this year. In fact, I’m not a fan of these elections, which I think are a waste of Pacifica’s resources.

But I am a fan of Richard Wolinsky, whose “Cover-to-Cover” book author interview  programs on KPFA are just terrific. Richard has an interesting essay that responds to the endless call for KPFA to go all or mostly volunteer. It’s definitely worth a read, since it narrates the station’s history since 1975:

KPFA today starts with its paid producers, engineers, and board operators, people whom you barely hear on the air but are doing their jobs quietly and professionally. Competent board ops: What a novelty in 1975. You were lucky if, when you dropped off your tape, the announcer didn’t completely mangle what was heard on the air. The simple transition…show to PSA to station ID to theme cart to tape…sounds simple, right? Guess again. The good board-ops stayed a few months, then got jobs and left. The bad ones usually just stopped showing up, often without notice. Remove the paid board ops and the sound quality drops precipitously. Remove the behind the scenes people and force the on-air hosts to do the production work, and you’ll lose half the hosts. Stop paying them, and they’re all gone because they have to earn a living. Their replacements? Again, once a week or once a month, the best of the rest gone the moment a real job in radio opens up.

Read the rest here.

The post KPFA, the case against an all-volunteer station appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Live365 radio is celebrating its 11th year of operation by offering a “prize-a-day” sweepstakes to listeners through September.  The top prizes will include an iPad, Canon PowerShot digital camera, Flip Camcorder, C. Crane WiFi Internet Radio, Michael Jackson’s CD Box Set, Apple/iTunes/Amazon gift cards, and other stuff.

I’m trying to decide whether this prize business is a sign of Internet radio’s maturation or decline. All depends on your expectations for the genre, I suppose.

Anyway, the service’s latest newsletter has a neat array of Live365 logos going back to the beginning.  Here they are:

The post Live365, now with prizes appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Six wireless industry related trade associations sent Congress a letter on Monday that  goes ballistic on the idea of mandating FM receivers in mobile handsets. The  groups wrote in opposition to a reported deal between the National Association of Broadcasters and the Recording Industry Association of America in which the former would agree to the Performance Rights Act—radio stations paying royalties to performers as well as copyright holders. But there’s a catch: Congress would also require FM receivers in mobiles.

Bad bad bad, the groups insist.

It is simply wrong for two entrenched industries to resolve their differences by agreeing to burden a third industry – which has no relationship to or other interest in the performance royalty dispute – with a costly, ill-considered, and unnecessary new mandate. The proposed imposition of an FM chip mandate is not necessary for resolution of the dispute between performance artists and broadcasters and, if adopted, it would be bad policy for several reasons.

The reasons: It would jack up the price of mobiles; NAB and RIAA don’t know what they’re talking about, technology-wise; and there’s no need for an FM mandate for public safety because the wireless industry is working on a mobile broadcast emergency alerting system, as required by Congress.

And the letter concludes:

Calls for an FM chip mandate are not about public safety but are instead about propping up a business which consumers are abandoning as they avail themselves of new, more consumer-friendly options. Disintermediation should not be a basis for legislation, and a solution to the dispute between the recording industry and the broadcasters should not burden device manufacturers and carriers as they work to extend wireless broadband coverage to every American.

Signed, CTIA – the Wireless Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Telecommunications Industry Association, the Rural Cellular Association, TechAmerica, and the Information Technology Industry Council.

The post Wireless industry blasts FM receiver mandate for mobiles appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I can’t see why lawmakers would want to do that (besides to make big content and big broadcasting happy). Besides, lots of handsets already have FM radios, including my neat Droid X.

Here’s a Youtube video describing the innards of the Droid FM app.

The post Inside the Droid X FM radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radio One, the nation’s biggest African American oriented radio network, has endorsed the proposed Comcast/NBC Universal merger, now being evaluated by the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice.

Its CEO Alfred Liggins III praised Comcast for helping Radio One develop its TV One cable channel.

“The result is that today, as one of the nation’s two major African-American-oriented channels (and the only one owned by African-Americans), our network now reaches more than 50 million homes via cable and satellite and has an audience with enormous race, gender and generational diversity.

In addition to supporting TV One, Comcast has a history of giving diverse voices a megaphone. The company assisted in launching African-American-owned channels like Hip Hop on Demand, the Africa Channel and Crossings and boasts an unrivaled package of 50 Spanish language channels and 150 titles available on-demand. The newly formed company plans to build on this track record in a number of exciting ways.”

Radio One has mostly been in the spotlight of late for its quarrels with advocates of the Performance Rights Act, which would require broadcast radio stations to pay royalties to performers as well as copyright holders.

Critics of the Comcast/NBCU merger warn that the union would represent another step towards an Internet/cable entertainment oligopoly.

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Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross had comedy actor Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay on Thursday to talk up their new movie The Other Guys. The inane conversation impressed me as one of those new Gilded Age moments—a chance to eavesdrop on three lucky people who are plainly contemptuous of most less fortunate Americans.

The featured flick is about the antics of two inept back-office cops. Around the middle of the interview, to the great amusement of Gross, Ferrell described the sartorial preparations for his character. These included looking for a suit at a store “the next step below” a Men’s Wearhouse, Ferrell explained, “maybe a Marshalls.”

Then:

“I wanted to give myself a standard issue haircut,” Ferrell continued. “And I did go to a Supercuts in the San Fernando Valley and just walked in and got a standard haircut.”

Gross began to chuckle at the mention of the word ‘Supercuts’. McKay laughed too, apparently thinking the “just walked in” thing was really funny. Ferrell slowed down his words while giggling from time to time.

“I then forwarded the pictures to Adam, and you kind of were shocked,” he went on, presumably turning to McKay.

The director explained the context. “It was a thing where we heard Will was going to do it,” he said. “In theory it sounded like such a great idea. But you know have to remember that when you’re about to go into a movie that look is what you carry for the whole movie, so . . . ”

Ferrell interrupted. “I think your quote was, ‘We still want you to look good on camera’.”

McKay laughed hard.

Ferrell: “The haircut was perfectly bad.”

McKay: “Oh yeah.”

Ferrell: “And we kind of had to reshape it.”

Gross asked a question: “Did the hair cutter not know who you were?”

“She cut my hair for fifteen minutes,” Ferrell continued, “and then half way she didn’t say a word and then finally, towards the end of the hair cut she’s like ‘You’re one of the step-brothers, aren’t you’? And I said ‘yes.’ And that’s all we mentioned. We didn’t talk any more. So, it was kind of funny.”

“And you didn’t say, ‘I came here expressly for a bad haircut’,” Gross half seriously asked.

“No. In fact very few words were spoken.”

McKay: “So it was an awkward silence?”

“It kind of was. It was kind of an awkward haircut,” Ferrell replied.

“Was there a dog barking in the distance?” McKay joked.

“There should have been,” Ferrell chuckled.

The subtext of this snobby conversation was obvious. “Do people really go to Supercuts? But how could this be?”

Apparently it occurred to none of these celebrities that most Americans can’t afford $300 for a haircut and $2,000 for a suit. Quite a few of them have, in fact, recently lost their jobs, savings, and homes due to the bad economy. I believe this has been reported on NPR from time to time.

So they actually, really, yes way, go to Supercuts and Marshalls and similar retail establishments near the multiplexes where Ferrell’s new movie will play. There are 2,100 Supercuts stores and about 750 Marshalls stores across the United States. They’re not the ritziest places in the world, but they’re affordable.

And since these silly people and their dogs don’t have personal assistants to make their hair styling appointments, they indeed “just walk in,” sign a list and wait for a cut, or wait on the Marshalls checkout lines to pay for their clothing. No private dressing rooms. No handlers. It’s brutal.

It also apparently did not occur to Ferrell that the woman who cut his hair may have thought that she was acting professionally by not fawning all over him during the task (much as he might have wanted her to).

I wonder how folks who listened to that show and regularly go to Supercuts and Marshalls felt while Ferrell told his story and Gross laughed. I go to those places from time to time. I know how I felt.

And it’s a confusing feeling, given that Terry Gross periodically has on advocates for the poor and oppressed on her show. She respects them, for sure, probably because she relates to them—journalists, academics, book authors—professionals like herself.

But at least I’m a little less confused about why the pseudo-populist Tea Party is such a big deal these days. I’m less mystified at why corporate backed Republicans successfully pawn themselves off as friends of the people.

Just listen to Fresh Air, where liberals and Hollywood stars no longer even conceal their amused disdain for a working class America that is barely getting by.

The post Will Ferrell tells Fresh Air why he's better than Supercuts appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Dr. Michael LeNoir tries to have an intelligent discussion of Health Reform on the KPFA airwaves, and is mercilessly pummeled: A Case Study of the Left’s vilification of Obama and its dismissal of Partial Reforms

Last week, respected San Francisco Bay Area physician Dr. Michael LeNoir devoted his weekly “About Health” program to the just passed health care reform bill and the political debate around it. LeNoir is a pioneer in treating asthma in inner city children, and has a regular show on listener sponsored FM station KPFA in Berkeley. After saying that the bill is much less than he wanted, being an advocate of single payer, he said that it was important to understand what is in the bill, the good and bad of it, and to think about how we can use it as a foot in the door to widen and deepen the reform. He also said that he was disturbed that the Right seemed to dominate public debate about the bill, and he challenged his listeners to think about how we – those who want real reform – can have more of a voice in the debate.

LeNoir also expressed fear that unless we do that, the bill could be blocked, crippled and even repealed. The possibility that the Right could unseat those who had voted for the bill should be taken seriously, he warned.

This was clearly an attempt to engage in an intelligent and rational discussion of the bill and the political debate around it, but he got anything but that. Instead, a barrage of negative, polemical, incurious and dismissive attitudes were expressed by the eleven callers heard during the hour long program. Here is a summary of what LeNoir was told:

. A Single Payer plan is the only valuable option. Otherwise, all we’re doing is just making “them” richer. What we’ve got is just band aids “that will all fall down”.
. Only medicare for all will work. They tried twice (in California), only to have it vetoed. The reform bill is a debacle. Marches and things like that will not help, we’re going to have to sit-in at the congressional offices and demand single payer. Even that probably won’t help because they are all beholden to moneyed interests.
. Only when we ‘get the money out of politics’ will we be able to get health reform.
. The insurance companies will be able to raise rates as they like, so reform won’t work. Only the State Insurance Commissioners, like the right wing Republican we have in California, could stop them, and that’s a laughable prospect.
. Even if we had a million people marching, it wouldn’t help, because the media is so biased that they wouldn’t cover it.
. You’re wrong, there are lots of people out on the streets, for example the Peace and Freedom party, and if we elected a Peace and Freedom governor we would get single payer. That’s what people should be working for. By saying we’re not out there in the public dialog you are undermining us.
. We should take away everybody’s insurance so that they will see that they need it.
. People who voted for Obama are dupes, and this is an example of why.
. If Jerry Brown would run on single payer, he would win easily and that’s how we could get something worthwhile.
. The bill won’t work because the insurance companies will be allowed to charge 4 times as much as they do now. Whether or not the bill will be implemented or overturned will be determined in the courts and in the bureaucracies, and that’s not something that public advocacy can change.

Every one of the italicized claims above are either factually wrong (often egregiously), or are politically simple-minded. Over and over again, LeNoir politely challenged both the inaccuracies of these statements (for example, the bill provides for several mechanism for regulating rates, none of them being the whim of the State Insurance Commissioners), and kept asking people to see that the good of this bill could easily disappear if the Right’s superior position in the national debate is not challenged. No one would respond to these corrections honestly, no one would acknowledge that the Left has been missing in action (in fact, present only to express outright hostility to the bill). Everyone knew better than LeNoir that the bill was worthless (yet they had no interest in its contents), and everyone thought LeNoir was nave if not stupid in not recognizing that working with and within the bill was a waste of time.

Perhaps the most interesting case was the last caller, a member of a national reform group who probably had more practical political experience than the rest. His claim that public advocacy does not affect court rulings, the actions of attorneys general, or the decisions of government bureaucracies, could not be more false. It is the very sum and substance of real-world advocacy to do exactly these things. Yet here he was ignoring the implementation of the real bill just passed, in favor of the comparatively diffuse possibility of getting single payer legislation enacted and implemented in California (the most bankrupt state in the nation, as LeNoir reminded his audience).

This is a pathological political situation, I think. In all important respects, the reality is emphatically the opposite of the one posited by KPFA callers. LeNoir knows more about this bill, and about medicine, and about politics, than all these callers put together. Their condescension to him illustrates that the Left is no more civil or educated than the Right it mocks. The silliness of some of the statements – like the idea that there’s no hope until we elect a Far Left Governor from a fringe party largely populated by senior citizens from Berkeley, or until we eliminate the influence of wealth in politics – is only the most obvious piece of the problem. Worse is the lack of interest in the real world – in this case, the many interesting and complex provisions of the bill, and how they might or might not work. And of course the roots of all this is the need for a justification to do nothing. If the political system is rigged, if only single payer is acceptable and we’ll never get it because of (fill in the blank), then no action is required.

A word on single payer: The Left seems to believe that we must destroy the private insurance companies to have real reform. They seem not to understand that this is somewhere between impossible and fantastical within our particular capitalist system. So, in effect, there are saying that only fully socialized medical care – ‘socialized’, as in socialism – is acceptable.

Strikingly, this is the mirror image of the Right’s fantasies: that ‘Obama-care’ is socialism, and therefore the beginning of dictatorship. The idea that the reform bill just passed is socialism, or that only socialism can bring meaningful reform, are mutually reinforcing political fantasies. The armies of the Left that have recently written endless screeds denouncing Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) often express themselves more intelligently than these KPFA callers. But their message is, overall, similarly useless and self serving. If the Left had thought like this in the thirties, we’d have never have gotten the New Deal. If it had acted this way in the sixties, Medicare would have never been implemented. And if it continues this know-nothing-ism in the next few years, it may well doom the only chance we will have for useful reform for the foreseeable future.

The post Trying to have an intelligent discussion about health care on KPFA (and not succeeding) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Hey kids, let's talk about drugs! (source:goldensilents.com)

Over the weekend Sirius XM’s Doctor Radio Reports ran a show called Is Your Kid High?—Teens Speak Out, which offered advice to parents on how to tell if your tweens/teens are doing drugs. I read with great interest the summary of the wisdom offered by Elizabeth Urquhar and Naveed Etemadipour of San Diego’s Phoenix House during this program, since I went through this complicated process myself with a teen.

Here’s Naveed’s advice:

• If you are concerned your kid might be doing drugs, go into their rooms and open their drawers when they are not there—it’s ok to cross that boundary.
• Pens are sometimes used to smoke marijuana and other drugs. Check to see if the pen smells burnt. You can take a pen apart and make a pipe out of it and then put it back together so that nobody knows that you’ve smoked out it.
• Broken glass could indicate methamphetamine use because glass pipes are commonly used to smoke meth.
• Crumbled tin foil is a possible indication of drug use.
• Marijuana can be smoked out of almost anything.
• Light bulbs can be used to do drugs.

Well, you can decide that it’s “ok to cross that boundary,” but rest assured, your girl or boy won’t. Let’s face it, if they’re late 12 to early 14, they’ve probably already got you down as Nurse Ratched or Uncle Fester—see above photo for the latter; perhaps not the most apt analogy since the Urban Dictionary defines an “Uncle Fester” as a way to smoke  pot. In any event, doing a J. Edgar Hoover on their their room, opening their drawers, pulling apart their pens and light bulbs, or rummaging about for “almost anything” because you think they’re smoking doobies is going to kill any trust left between you and them for years. So do this only if you think it’s absolutely necessary.

The Phoenix House duo also offer these “warning signs and changes to look out for in your child’s behavior and personality:”

• Staying awake all night or sleeping all day.
• Suddenly not eating with the family or not eating very much.
• Eating lots more than they normally do.
• Suddenly doing poorly in school.
• Dropping out of once cherished activities.

Fine, but keep in mind that just about every one of these “warning signs” can happen to kids who aren’t doing drugs. Facebook has kept more than one teen up until four AM. I was a skinny high schooler who rarely took drugs but stayed out until one AM consistently through my mid- and late-teenage years. As for binge eating, doing poorly in school, and dropping out of favorite activities—depression, anxiety, and family problems can provoke these behaviors just as easily as dope.

So why don’t you start with the obvious—by just asking your child if they’re taking drugs. You can’t pose this question too early, to my mind; certainly as age 13 approaches.  Ask the lad or lass in an unexpected but friendly and casual style—like on the way to the ice cream parlor—with a smile on your face. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask . . . you taking drugs?” Something like that. Make sure you’ve got eye contact while you talk.

If they’re getting stoned, you’ll know, even if s/he claims otherwise. Then you’ll need to explain and justify your Policy regarding drugs (you should figure this out in advance). Needless to say, unless your Policy is “take all the drugs you want,” it probably won’t be enforceable. But at least you’ve made several things clear: (1) you don’t want your child taking drugs and, more important, (2) you care about the kid.

If your tween/teen gets exasperated with you, just throw in something nonchalant like, “say, while we’re at it, it’s time for us to have a conversation about sex . . . ” That’ll show everybody who’s the boss.

Parenting. What fun!

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