Radio Survivor

I’ve known about this station for well over a decade now. As a metalhead living in Central Illinois I’d occasionally travel north to the Chicago area or Milwaukee to see concerts and encounter banners and fliers for an all heavy metal station on the AM band called Rebel Radio. However, I can only recall hearing the station once when on the highway between Milwaukee and Chicago.

Music radio on the AM dial is nearly an anachronism now, and most of the practitioners now are either ethnic stations or easy listening. Nevertheless there are a few hold outs–mostly mom and pop operations or stations owned by relatively small groups–that program niche formats on AM stations. Being on the air for about sixteen years certainly qualifies WPJX 1500 AM in Zion, IL as a true AM music veteran.

Unfortunately, WPJZ isn’t exactly a powerhouse when it comes to transmission strength. In fact, the station broadcasts with just 250 watts from the far northeastern Illinois town of Zion, a good 38 miles from the Chicago city limits. What that means for a city dweller for me is that I simply cannot tune it in, no matter how hard I’ve tried. The stations serves southeast Wisconsin about as well as Illinois, still missing most of the major north suburbs of Chicago. Adding to the frustration is the fact that Rebel Radio does not yet have a web stream, although its website currently promises one soon.

Then, today while perusing their website again I noticed a note saying Rebel Radio is simulcast on a co-owned station, WKTA 1330 AM in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago, on Sundays from 4 to 8 PM. So this afternoon I tuned in Rebel Radio for the first time, thanks to WKTA.

First off, this is truly a heavy metal station, playing many examples of the genre from the more mainstream–like Metallica–to the lesser known–like Armored Saint. At least during this four-hour window there’s a live DJ spinning the tunes and talking quite knowledgeably about the bands and songs, pointing out local concert dates as appropriate. That element alone is quite refreshing and rarely heard on commercial radio, even if it also includes a too-long inane phone call from a friend of the DJ calling in from a Renaissance Fair.

In terms of fidelity, I’m not terrifically impressed. Contemporary heavy metal has a pretty broad frequency range and often is not mastered to be optimized for radio like a lot of pop and mainstream rock music. That means there’s a fair amount of sound in the high and low frequency extremes that AM radio doesn’t cover well. I think it takes some pretty good EQing and signal processing to make metal work well on AM. On the whole the station doesn’t sound bad, but the midrange and high end sounds pretty crowded and compressed. A little strategic equalization might let the high end come through a little better and make the station a little more listenable. I acknowledge that the main station WPJX might sound better than the simulcast that I can tune in. And, to be fair, on a portable radio or boombox the sonic compromises are far less perceptible.

Listening to Rebel Radio I was reminded of the Z-Rock syndicated heavy metal format. I first listened to it when I lived in New Jersey in the late 80s and early 90s when it was broadcast on an AM station out of New York on 1480. It didn’t always come in well in Passaic County where my parents lived, but I did tune in occasionally when looking for something different on the radio dial. Even at the time I didn’t think the sonic quality of metal on AM was that great.

Nonetheless, Rebel Radio proves that there must be a very loyal audience for heavy metal on the radio willing to deal with the compromises inherent in music on AM.

International Radio Festival Banner for East Village Radio

With webcasting we all have the opportunity to sample radio stations from all over the globe, but it isn’t every day that there’s a chance to listen to a curated selection of international stations. The organizers of the International Radio Festival hand-picked more than 30 radio stations for inclusion in their festival taking place September 5 through 11th in Zurich, Switzerland.

During the festival, representatives from stations as far-flung as India, Paris, Moscow and New York City will be presenting programming over the Swiss terrestrial airwaves, online, and on cable throughout Switzerland. Among the 30 or so participating stations are three from North America: Canadian campus-community radio station CJLO AM (Concordia University, Montreal), online-only community radio station East Village Radio (New York City), and commercial radio station Wild 94.9 FM (San Francisco).

A few of the other stations slated to appear at the festival include Ghetto Radio (Nairobi), 102 FM (Tel Aviv), MotorFM (Berlin), and Obo & Hobos (Moscow). There will also be a keynote panel discussion about the state of radio internationally, music performances, and other events.

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.

Please stop all the censoring!

As most radio enthusiasts have probably already heard, veteran talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger appeared on the Larry King Live program Tuesday night and announced that she would leave her show at the end of the contract. Schlessinger made the decision in response to growing flack over her repeated use of the so-called “n-word” with a black caller on the Aug. 10 edition of her program. The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters organized a swift and effective campaign calling attention to Dr. Laura’s remarks and joined with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Women’s Media Center, and UNITY Journalists of Color to “hold [the program's] advertisers accountable and find out exactly where they stand.”

In announcing her departure from the airwaves Dr. Laura put forth a curious interpretation of the Bill of Rights when she told King, “I don’t have the right to say what I need to say. My first amendment rights have been usurped.” Lest anyone be confused, the current state of US law and policy makes it perfectly legal for Dr. Laura to use the “n-word” and most other words in the English language on the radio. The only exceptions to this are in cases of indecency, which only pertains to discussing matters of sexual and excretory functions; racial, gender and other types of epithets are not policed by the FCC in any fashion.

Rather, what happened to Dr. Laura is that she felt the harsh sting of the marketplace at work. Rather than attempting to bring any sort of governmental action the coalition led by Media Matters took aim squarely at Dr. Laura’s advertisers and called them on the carpet for supporting her program and the speech it contains. As it turns out, it looks like big companies like General Motor’s OnStar and Motel 6 decided they’d rather not be associated with a program that tosses around the “n-word” and pulled their advertising.

That is not censorship, and it has nothing to do with the First Amendment, which reads, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech[.]” It does not read, “GM shall not pull its advertising dollars from a program featuring speech it does not wish to be associated with.” In fact, there’s nothing stopping Dr. Laura from continuing to be on air except Dr. Laura, and maybe her production company and affiliates.

That’s the funny thing about the Constitutional right to free speech. One has the right to say just about anything she likes, in nearly any forum, and the government has very few Constitutionally valid reasons to either stop the speech or punish the speaker. But that right to free speech does not mean the speaker cannot be held accountable by others for what she says and the venue where it’s said.

Dr. Laura has benefited significantly from commercial radio consolidation, which made it both feasible and profitable for her show to be carried on hundreds of stations. It’s that size of reach that has made her show attractive to big advertisers like Motel 6. But big companies like these are also protective about their public image. Obviously Dr. Laura miscalculated the public’s tolerance for such brazen use of the “n-word,” especially in confronting an African-American caller. Motel 6 decided it can ill-afford to make the same miscalculation.

Now, advertisers’ tolerance for challenging or offensive speech cuts both ways, making it difficult to get sponsors for programs that are more left-leaning, too. But I always find it curious when free market loving conservatives like Dr. Laura decry being held accountable by the consumers who patronize the companies that fund their paychecks. I’m doubly amazed–but not surprised–that someone with her record of callous remarks should be so thin skinned to begin with.

There’s an observation of the commercial media system from the journalist A.J. Liebling that is often tossed around by media scholars: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” We might paraphrase that as: “freedom to broadcast is guaranteed only to those who own radio stations.” Furthermore, even if there is a right to speak freely, there is no commensurate right to profit. Dr. Laura could certainly take some of her sizable fortune and buy up a few stations to spout her nonsense without regard to what Media Matters, Motel 6, GM or any advertiser thinks.

But somehow I don’t think she’s really willing to put her money where her mouth is.

wikimedia commons

It’s always a treat to check in with the House Office of the Clerk’s lobbying disclosure database and see what broadcast radio’s big boys are spending on Congress these days. Needless to say, the top roller is usually Clear Channel Communications, which forked over $1,370,000 in the second quarter of this year.

And what did that wascally wadio company use the money for? According to its disclosure form, Clear Channel educated our nation’s representatives on the Fairness Doctrine, “broadcast decency enforcement,” satellite stuff, various bills relating to the proposed Performance Rights Act, which would require radio stations to pay royalties to artists as well as copyright holders, the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act, and H.R. 5175/S. 3295, aka the (hold your breath) “Democracy is strengthened by casting light on spending in elections act.”

That last bill’s summary says it amends the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to prohibit foreign entities and government contractors from “making expenditures with respect to such elections.” The bill treats payments of “coordinated communications” as “contributions.” And that includes

any communication that republishes, disseminates, or distributes, in whole or in part, any broadcast or any written, graphic, or other form of campaign material prepared by a candidate, an authorized committee of a candidate, or their agents. [italics added]

That’s probably what has Clear Channel’s attention in this bill.

According to the Open Secrets database, Clear Channel isn’t tossing out quite the level of moolah that it did back in 2008, when it spent over $4.0M on Congress. But $1.37 million in one quarter isn’t turkey feed.

CC’s nearest competitors don’t even come close to this figure. The runner up as far as I can tell is CBS Corporation, which has its hands in lots of broadcast and online radio ventures (eg, Last.fm). CBS spent $800,000 on Congress in Q2, mostly talking up the same issues. It doesn’t appear that Cumulus has done any lobbying in years.

This is all on a company level, of course. On a trade association level, nobody outdoes the National Association of Broadcasters when it comes to lobbying. Last quarter the organization spent $3,020,000 making sure its positions on Capitol Hill were perfectly clear.

I spent the better part of this afternoon listening to my new HD Radio receiver, the Sony XDRF1 HD, tuning through the Chicago FM dial. There are 33 FM stations broadcasting HD in Chicago according to iBiquity, which owns the technology. I was able to tune in the HD signal for 19 of them. After several hours of listening I remain rather unimpressed by HD Radio.

My Sony XDRF1-HD tuner in its habitat.

Primary HD Channels

First off I will address the question of sound quality and fidelity. iBiquity claims “drastically improved sound quality” for HD Radio over its analog counterpart. I do not agree with this claim. Tuning between the analog and primary HD channel for each station I could perceive slight differences in sound quality between them. The biggest difference is the loss of background noise and hiss in the HD channel. Now, this is a very subtle difference, primarily perceptible during quiet music passages (which are rare on commercial FM) and voice breaks. This leads to the perception that there’s a bit more dynamic range on the HD channel, but it requires fairly high listening volume to clearly detect.

While I welcome the lower noise floor of HD, I otherwise don’t perceive any other significant increase in fidelity. On nearly every station I listened to the primary HD channel sounded nearly identical to the analog FM. Much of commercial FM is overcompressed, and I found that if a station’s analog signal was so overprocessed, so was the primary HD channel.

Sometimes I would lose the HD signal–since it’s broadcast at a much lower power level than the analog signal–and I never noticed just by listening. I had to look at the tuner’s display to know for sure. The shift between the HD and analog signals is pretty smooth sounding on the Sony tuner. I can tell when it happens, but it’s quite unobtrusive. If I’m not paying close attention to the radio it can happen without me noticing.

All of the 19 HD FM stations I received are stations that come in reasonably well in analog in my apartment in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the far north side of Chicago. The Sony XDRF1 turns out to have very good analog FM performance, bringing in the analog FM signals of these stations better than any other radio in my house except my Tivoli Model One, which is another room. Of the 10 stations where I couldn’t tune in an HD signal, 8 of them don’t come in clearly in my house in analog, either. For two stations my tuner did not indicate there was an HD signal present. More details listening notes by station are at the end of this post.

Secondary HD Channels

The other big advantage touted for HD Radio are the additional subchannels a station can have. Each HD station I listened to broadcast one or two additional channels. By and large the second HD channel had decent sound quality, but that nevertheless never matched the quality of the primary analog or HD channel. This should be expected because there is only so much digital bandwidth for each station to exploit, and the FCC requires that the primary HD channel–which must have the same programming as the analog signal–have the biggest share of the bandwidth.

The second HD channels typically sound like a good webcast station. That is, they sound like medium-quality MP3s with bitrates of 128 kbps or lower. I hear more compression and less dynamic range than the analog side, and some rolling off at the high end. Right now I’m listening to WXRT’s commercial-free HD channel 2 called “Channel X” and it’s pleasant to listen to, no more fatiguing than most web stations.
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From the pages of Essence and the Huffington Post, Radio One’s Kathy Hughes and singer Dionne Warwick take potshots over the Performance Rights Act. African American station owner Hughes is decidedly con on  the proposed law, which would require over-the-air radio signals to compensate performers as copyright law has them pay royalties to song copyright owners.

“We keep hearing that these entertainer[s] need to get paid,” declares Hughes. “Oh, so Chris Brown needs another Lamborghini to beat up a girl in? No! The artists who they are talking about like Martha Reeves and the Vandellas aren’t going to get a penny. Nobody is playing Dionne Warrick [sp]. When was the last time she had an album. That’s what’s stupid about this.”

Warwick, who supports the PRA, was quick to return the compliment.

“In defending her refusal to fairly compensate the artists on whose back she earns her living, Ms. Hughes now claims poverty, which is pretty amazing considering Radio One owns 54 radio stations and reaped $316 million last year alone,” the singer wrote on Huffpo. “She even paid her own son, Radio One CEO Alfred Liggins, a $10 million bonus. Far from a struggling company, Radio One sounds more like one of those Wall Street rip off firms where executives pay themselves big bonuses while they rip us off and throw their workers in the street.”

Good grief. When will this end? Every time I try to come up with a position on this issue, I go into an endless feedback loop.

Sure, it’s not fair that online stations like Pandora have to pay the performance tithe and over-the-air stations don’t. But there couldn’t be a worse time for this law. A huge percentage of terrestrial stations are on the financial cliff. Even the Government Accountability Office appears to have found credible broadcaster claims that if the PRA passes, some licenses could close or lay off staff.

And more and more audio entertainment is migrating online anyway. Arbitron’s latest survey of formats finds 96 “adult urban contemporary” Internet stations, a number competitive with FM’s 144. In the case of the “urban contemporary” category the ratio is 81 to 126.

On the other hand, it’s sometimes hard to take broadcaster poverty claims seriously when they’re still getting busted for payola.

One thing is for sure, this strikes me as a real zero sum battle, and not a civil one either. That’s why every time the debate flares up, I want to take the advice of one of Warwick’s hit songs and just “walk on by.”

It’s been a few years since the FCC reached consent decrees with CBS, Citadel and Clear Channel over illegal pay-for-play schemes, so you think that the major broadcasters would have learned their lesson. Apparently the warning didn’t get translated into Spanish. Yesterday the FCC released a new consent decree [PDF] with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision which requires the company to pay up a cool million dollars.

In a press release [PDF] the FCC says that “Univision radio stations or their employees secretly accepted payment from a record label in exchange for the radio stations giving more frequent airplay to the label’s artists, without making the disclosures to listeners required by section 507 of the Communications Act.” The Department of Justice coordinated with the Commission on the decree and accepted Univision’s plea on criminal charges that were to be filed.

Amongst the violations alleged by the government are several cases where program directors at Univision stations in El Paso, San Antonio, Los Angeles and Sacramento submitted fake invoices to Univision Music for supposed services that were never rendered, and then kept the proceeds. Univision Music Group was sold off two years ago by the broadcaster to the Universal Music Group.

Spanish-language broadcasting is one of the growth sectors in commercial radio broadcasting, and is also quite consolidated with most of the largest radio owners having a stake. For its part Univision owns 70 stations nationwide. While that doesn’t quite hold a candle to Clear Channel, it’s not too shabby either, giving the company a foothold in sixteen of the top Latino markets like Los Angeles, New York, Miami, San Jose/San Francisco, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix. So it should come as no surprise that the same slimy shenanigans would happen in this growing market. Latin music is big business and indie labels and acts pretty much no better chance of commercial radio airplay than their English-language counterparts.

One would like to think that this consent decree might result in a little more indie music hitting the Unvision owned stations, but I doubt it.

It was 1975. I was 20 years old. I had just left home. I worked and went to college in Manhattan, and lived with my girlfriend in the Bronx.

Meanwhile, Kool and the Gang’s hit tune “Jungle Boogie” jumped to one of the most requested songs on the radio. Transcriptions of the lyrics to this enduring hit don’t really do it justice, but here goes:

“Get down, Get down, get down, get down, get down, get down . . . .
Ahhhhhhhhhhh !
Jungle Boogie
Jungle Boogie
Get It On
Jungle Boogie
Jungle Boogie
Get It On”

I did not experience the lines as such. Here’s my version of the chorus:

JUNGLE BOOGIE
(deedly-up! deedly-up!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(squawk! squawk!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(deedly-up! deedly-up!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(squawk! squawk!)

Anyway, you get the idea. I saw Jungle Boogie as the archetypal Disco song with the archetypal Disco message. Forget the Sixties. Forget all that Woodstock crap. Just dance, wiggle, screw, then dance some more. Be yourself. Be your identity, no matter what it really is. Don’t be afraid. Just be.

Most political types I knew in college strongly disapproved of Disco. They thought it wasn’t radical enough or something. Gay people, black/Latino people, and women loved it—especially if they fit into all of those categories. As for me, I did not have the New Left sophistication to resist Disco’s charm, although I more often listened to classical music at the time.

Back in those days, to get to a train into Manhattan, I took a bus that ran from the northern Little Italy area where I lived through the South Bronx. This was quite an experience. The latter region was falling apart. Landlords and tenants took turns torching their residences. Drug use skyrocketed. The place was a mess. (more…)

I was listening to Regina Spektor’s very sad song “On the Radio,” which I’ve never actually heard on the radio. The tune includes the following lyrics:

“On the radio
We heard November Rain
That solo’s really long
But it’s a pretty song
We listened to it twice
‘Cause the DJ was asleep”

Guns ‘N Roses’ November Rain is also a pretty song—although I’ve never heard it on the radio either, come to think of it. Anyway, I was listening to both of these pieces on Youtube.com, and thinking how great it would be if there were a music radio station in my vicinity where the DJ actually fell asleep and accidentally played the same piece twice.

Does anybody ever do that on the radio (deliberately or accidentally)? With the widespread use of programming software, is it even possible any more?