Radio Survivor

Next Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission will reveal the entirety of its National Broadband Plan, over a year in the making. Required by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which authorized $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus spending, The Plan will weigh in on about a thousand broadband related subjects—how to help more people get it, how to help industries provide it, ways to encourage innovations that the FCC hopes will stimulate more broadband adoption, like IP video.

The chances are, though, that it won’t have much to say about radio

Oh yes, it will talk about “radio” spectrum a whole lot—in the sense of licenses from 500 KHz to 2.5 GHz that licensees use to transmit video, voice, text, audio, and whatever. But unlike every other broadband related medium, from social networking through web video, almost no one has anything to say on a policy level about radio delivered over high speed Internet, either through desktops, laptops, netbooks, or smartphones.

Indirectly, however, the National Broadband Plan will no doubt have an impact on both Internet and broadcast radio. Here are my speculations as to why and how. But nota bene, this is strictly thinking out loud stuff; as the saying goes, ‘I’m just talking.’ (more…)

As someone who dislikes long commercial breaks and hearing the same songs over and over on the radio, I’ve always had an interest in finding alternative ways to discover new music. Since it has now been a few years since I began this quest, I’ve decided to list some possible alternatives to “mainstream” radio (in no particular order).

Internet Radio

I absolutely love the concept of Internet radio, although my experience has admittedly been limited to Pandora Radio and Last.fm.  Summarized, they’re customizable radio with limited commercials (that you can mute if you feel the need). Awesome, yes?

Since I’m studying multiple languages for graduate school, I’m constantly searching for what I consider to be “good” music from other countries in an attempt to assist with my learning process by increasing my exposure. To test the effectiveness of these websites to help with this goal, I searched both websites for three different bands that perform in three different languages: a Japanese metal band named Dir en Grey, a German band named Wir sind Helden (We Are Heroes), and a French artist named Yelle.

I was thoroughly impressed by the fact that Last.fm not only had each group that I searched for but also managed to remain in the same genre and, almost always, the same language, including a limited amount of similar music in English. Pandora appears to be less conducive to expanding one’s international musical horizons, failing to provide any music for Wir Sind Helden and initially returning only English results.

That said, here are some general notes: I like that Last.fm provides you with a list of recent songs and radio stations while Pandora only allows you to look at recently played songs for a currently playing radio station (the history is cleared if you switch). I was  surprised to discover that Last.fm allows you to maintain a “library” of tracks that you’ve listened to, although I suppose the trade off is that users are unable to pause (as far as I can tell) songs (the alternative is to leave the radio station) and can only structure their stations around entire bands as opposed to both songs and bands (Pandora allows both options). I’m more familiar with Pandora, which is probably why I prefer its layout. I also like having the option of structuring a station around a song as opposed to an entire band because occasionally you stumble upon those amazing songs from, unfortunately, horrible albums that you really don’t need to subject your ears to again (Ex: Matt and Kim’s “Daylight” and most music from the ’80s, like this). (more…)

I don’t listen to the radio much anymore, because there’s nothing on that I can count on either enjoying or finding interesting. And so far as the Internet can create your own channel services, like Pandora or Slacker, they seem to me oddly impersonal and somehow too predictable.

But now I’ve found Shirley and Spinoza Radio. It’s a source of almost endless delight to me. The more creative part of humanity’s bubbling unconscious seems to have found a portal here, and its stuff is all queued up and pouring out now: German disaffected acoustic romantic ennui more sentimental than anything heard in America! Chinese instrumentals on instruments I’ve never heard, with a startlingly new timbre. And suddenly, in front of such music, dialogues that sound like Samuel Beckett on a humorous brew of unseemly drugs. Like this one, with a male and a female voice taking turns repeating stuff like this:

[ Ambient Debussy is in the background, alternating with slightly troubling Hitchcock: ]

—Do you have any suggestions for the more efficient use of our equipment?
—No.
—Think before you speak. A brief description of your reactions, please.
—I don’t remember. It seems to be interesting. They were making a loud noise. Are you in charge of this department?
— Let us put that theory into practice.
— What are they planning to do now?
—Consult the directory.
—It might take too much time.
—Keep to the right. Follow the signs. Dial the number. I shall welcome any questions or suggestions you may have. I shall be there.
—He does not know.

(more…)

Already some of us have been listening to live streaming internet radio on our mobile devices, like iPhones and Blackberries. But, as I argued last month, the experience still doesn’t quite add up to true mobile internet radio, especially because when you’re using cell data like 3G it saps the heck out of your battery. My experience streaming live radio on my iPhone gives me a little more than an hour before I’m nearly out of juice. The new Apple iPad looks to be a great mashup of an iPhone and netbook, which are both decent devices for listening to internet radio on the go, but also have their drawbacks.

The fact that some iPad models offer 3G wireless data connectivity out-of-the box, for a very reasonable $30 a month without any contracts make it a great candidate for mobile internet radio listening. It won’t necessarily be any better for the car than an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone. But in other mobile circumstances it shows distinct promise.

So the question is, will the iPad bring us one step closer to truly mobile internet radio? Based on early specs, and having never touched it myself, the answer is a distinct maybe.

The first important factor is battery life. If the battery poops out after only an hour, then it’s only good for short trips. But if you have a longer train or bus commute, or are outside away from a wi-fi connection you probably want at least two good hours. While Apple specifies that you get 10 hours of active wi-fi use on a charge, no 3G batterly life specs are published. With a much bigger battery than an iPhone one would expect that constant 3G use would go longer, but we’ll have to wait until the first longer-term reviews come out.

The next big issue is sound quality. I currently use my iPhone, netbook or MacBook Pro to stream audio in a variety of circumstances, including home and when away in hotels. They’re all fine for using with headphones or external speakers, though the iPhone is the clear winner for fidelity. But I don’t always want to use headphones or lug around speakers. In a pinch the iPhone’s speaker is better than nothing at all (sounding like a pocket radio), and the netbook is barely any better. My MacBook’s speakers are the best in this category, but at the same time it seems wasteful overkill to use this powerful laptop computer just to listen to radio. My hope is that it will sound at least as good as a MacBook Pro, which itself is on par with a portable radio the size of a paperback book. We’ll have to see how the iPad’s speakers measure up against these competitors.

The final big factor is multitasking, and on this measure we already know the answer: there is no multi-tasking on the iPad. This is important because all of the streaming radio apps are not made by Apple, and you can only run one non-Apple app at a time. So you want to listen to a live feed of a Cubs game while Tweeting? No can do. Catch a live feed of the State of the Union while reading the New York Times online? Also a big no. So, unless Apple decides to add the ability to listen to live streams to the iPad’s iPod app–which is allowed to multitask with other apps–this is probably the biggest count against the radio capabilities of the iPad.

At least as far as mobile internet radio is concerned, the iPad looks like a tiny step forward. If the 3G battery life and sound quality are up to snuff, then it’s a bigger step. But without multitasking where you can listen to a live stream while using other apps, the iPad is not the next big thing in mobile internet radio.

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez’s radio/TV program Democracy Now! is, without question, the most successful media vehicle in the history of the United States Left. Launched at Pacifica station WBAI-FM in New York City in the mid-1990s, it is now an independent venture, subscribed to by over 800 radio, TV, and Internet stations around the world. From the perspective of this media historian, Democracy Now! exceeds all previous attempts to spread an explicitly social justice oriented message via broadcast and/or print. No prior effort, starting with the The Masses at the beginning of the  20th century,  has ever come so far in terms of influence and reach.

I listen to Democracy Now!’s one hour broadcast on a regular basis because it is fast paced and timely, racing to wherever the action is—Haiti, Copenhagen, Washington, D.C, or Honduras. I don’t always agree with the program’s perspective, but I appreciate the effort DN makes to host debates and discussions within the Left about how to move forward, such as its recent debate about how to respond to the Obama adminstration’s health care initiative. The vast majority of community radio style public affairs programs, within and beyond Pacifica, simply ignore these disagreements and tout one line or another, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. DN has far outpaced those efforts in part because of its willingness to embrace a broader perspective.

Here is some of what I wrote about Democracy Now! in my second book on Pacifica, Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War.

When she chanced upon WBAI in New York, Amy Goodman had just graduated from Harvard College and returned to the city. She had been raised in Bay Shore, Long Island, by a family of activists; her mother had spent much of the 1980s working for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze. Her father, an ophthalmologist, had been a civil rights advocate in the 1960s, taking a stand for school integration in a predominantly white suburb.

“I would go to the night meetings,” Goodman later recalled. “A thousand people would be screaming, and I would watch him stand his ground. There were death threats, but he just went on. I think that very much shaped my feeling about what was just in the world.” Now out of school and on her own, she had just finished a series of articles for Ralph Nader and Alan Nairn’s Multinational Monitor on Depo-Provera, the controversial birth-control shot. Goodman was about to enroll in Hunter College for graduate classes in biochemistry when a course on radio production caught her eye. WBAI’s Andrew Phillips taught the class. At the time Phillips hosted a show called “Investigations,” a program dedicated to what radio producers call “actuality” – the sounds of people talking and doing things on tape, speeches, demonstrations, street interviews. Goodman sat in on the first lecture, then talked with Phillips afterwards. The latter knew a true believer when he saw one. He asked her if she wanted to apprentice for him at WBAI. She protested that she had no radio experience. “That’s fine,” Phillips replied. That evening the two walked the mile from Hunter on the East Side to WBAI’s West Side headquarters. Phillips put his new student to work editing tapes for an upcoming program on the fortieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. “And I never left,” Goodman later explained. (more…)

I need a good laugh about once every twenty minutes, especially these days. So I listen to Onion Radio News.

“A giant 6-year old devastates a local ant community!” announces ORN’s hard nosed reporter, Doyle Redland. “Ant-hill scouts reported today that a mammalian destructo-beast some ten thousand ant-links in height smashed a nearby ant-hill and left thousands scurrying to rebuild.”

The kid was caught on tape, Redland continues, “using a Stone Cold Steve Austin action figure to pummel the colony flat.” Though reports from the scene are sketchy, “all stress that The Queen is unharmed,” Redland emphasizes. “Repeat. THE QUEEN IS UNHARMED.”

At a time when so much on line humor is about being snarky or trashing people, ORN somehow finds a way to be laughing-out-loud funny without being mean. The service succeeds in this by making whimsical fun of nobody in particular, just mythological figures , crash test dummies , “area” women and men, and recently deceased animals, often with salutation names. Redland’s but-seriously-folks voice is provided by the actor and cartoonist Pete S. Mueller.

“If there’s a Ferret Heaven, an area woman’s dead Ferret is in it!” Redland disclosed in an April 15, 2008 exclusive. The breaking story (and one of my favorites) boils down to an interview with former ferret owner Kelly Isgold, who says that if a ferret heaven exists, “her recently deceased pet Mr. Slinky has been given a gold halo” and a full pass. (more…)

I first heard about the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP) when I moved to Chicago in the spring of 2008. For all intents and purposes the project grew out of the former incarnation of Loyola University’s WLUW-FM which operated as a community radio station from 1997 to June 2008. In 2001 Loyola announced that it would no longer fund the station and called in Chicago Public Radio (CPR) to operate it. During this time it featured eclectic indie-rock focused programming, supplemented by local specialty shows of type familiar to community radio listeners. But at the end of that run the university took back full control of the station with plans to make it more student-run and student-focus as part of Loyola’s revitalized School of Communication.

Chicago radio veteran Shawn Campbell was WLUW’s program director during the CPR days, and after the hand-over became a prime mover behind the effort to create CHIRP as a true community radio station serving the city. I interviewed Shawn on my former radio program back in Oct., 2008 just as the organization was getting off the ground.

After more than eighteen months of organizing and fund raising CHIRP finally went online this past Sunday, Jan. 17. Although it’s online-only right now, CHIRP plans to operate like a regular broadcast stations with live DJs spinning indie-rock oriented programming focused on the particular taste and music scene in Chicago. The approach is not unlike a Chicago version of Seattle indie-rock powerhouse KEXP, especially since public affairs programming is not currently in the plan.

But in many ways an online station is a stopgap measure for CHIRP while its volunteer staff waits for the Senate to get to work on the Local Community Radio Act, which passed the House in December. You see, there are no open spots for new FM stations of any kind in the greater Chicago dial. But there’s hope that if LPFM is restored to its original specifications there will be an opportunity for some new low-power community stations in and around the city. When and if that happens, CHIRP will be poised to apply for its own space on the FM dial.

While the station’s volunteers worked hard to build its studios in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood, they also helped lobby on behalf of LPFM expansion alongside groups like Free Press and the Prometheus Radio Project. As a result the project received attention from the New York Times back in December.

With a real studio, a staff of volunteer DJs and an online presence it looks like CHIRP will be in a good position to hit the air running if it’s able to get a LPFM license. In the meantime it will be interesting to see if an online station can be regarded as a community station even without a broadcast signal. CHIRP has made a very good start of it, maintaining a strong public presence at cultural events across the city over the past year. The station is starting off with an unusual amount of momentum for an online station, so it will be interesting to see how it grows and develops during its first year.

I’m not aware of any other online-only stations operating as a fully human-staffed community stations elsewhere in the US. If any of our readers know of any, please tell us about them in a comment to this post.

If we get into the wayback machine and set it for 1996 we’ll find that it was a time before MP3s, when online video was nearly an oxymoron and broadcast radio was, by-and-large, a healthy and profitable business. Online audio, including live streaming, was a new technology relying on high degrees of compression in order to force the stream over a 56kbps modem connection. If you were listening to online audio back in 1996 it’s most likely you were using RealPlayer to listen to RealAudio.

Although the company behind this platform, RealNetworks, is now considered an also-ran in the world of online media, back in the 90s the company was a pioneer led by CEO Rob Glaser, who suddenly announced his departure from the role this past week.

It’s difficult to recall a time when nobody had heard of an MP3. In fact, when the format first bubbled up from the underground in the mid-90s, the poor 100Mhz 486 processor in my Windows 95 PC couldn’t handle the computational horsepower necessary to even play back an MP3 file. Yet it could handle RealAudio files and streams, opening up a new world of online audio to me for the first time.

A lot of commentators are now too young to remember those early days of online media, and to them RealNetworks is remembered more for having an increasingly complex player application that seemed to take over your computer and nag you constantly than for being one of the creators of the online media industry. StreamingMedia.com’s Dan Rayburn takes the youngins to task and gives a bit of an historical tribute to Glaser’s accomplishments.

Another forgotten side to Glaser’s and RealNetwork’s biography is how the company provided an early leg up to get a lot of politically progressive radio programs onto the internet. In fact the company was originally named Progressive Networks with one of its goals being to distribute politically progressive content online. Nationally syndicated community radio programs like Pacifica’s Democracy Now! and FAIR’s Counterspin were made available online by the company, using RealAudio. Glaser himself has served on the board of the progressive muck-raking magazine Mother Jones and contributed funding to Democracy Now!, the National Conferences for Media Reform and Indymedia.

RealNetworks is a very different company now, and it’s fair to argue that it made quite a few strategic mistakes that caused its profile in the online media world to suffer. it and founder Glaser deserve props for giving voice to the internet, a medium that was mostly silent before RealAudio. If Glaser had never introduced RealAudio to the world we’d still be listening to radio online, but who knows how much longer it might have taken. Even then, eighteen months was an eternity in internet time. So the next time you fire up Pandora or your favorite live stream from hundreds of miles away, think of Rob Glaser and the original Progressive Networks.

The biggest news at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show might be Google’s new Nexus smartphone, but that doesn’t mean there’s no space for radio in all the gadget frenzy. Your resident RadioSurvivors don’t yet have the travel budget to jet off to Vegas to roam the show floor in person. Instead, I’m picking through the press releases and news stories (which often are just rewritten press releases) from cold and snowy Chicago.

Although I am not a car owner myself (I traded my old Subaru for a new bike this year–no lie!) the automobile is still the site of much radio listening, and the realm of some interesting tech developments. Internet and iTunes tagging appear to be the radio stars this year, with satellite playing a supporting role. As one of our readers pointed out, Ford recently announced that it would offer a factory-installed HD Radio receiver that includes iTunes tagging. In addition the company said it’s working on integrating tagging with Sirius satellite radio, which will also feature the ability to record and playback up to 45 minutes of satellite audio. Shades of Apple’s “live-pause” in the new iPod Nano?

Sony also offers up a car HD receiver with iTunes tagging (CDX-GT700HD) and Pioneer offers up several new models with the same features. But their new top-end receiver (AVIC-X920BT) goes one better by adding support for Pandora. The catch is that you need an iPhone that connects via a USB cable. Once linked, then you can browse stations on the receiver’s 6.1″ display.

Alpine also takes the iPhone route to offer Pandora in your auto with its iDA-X305S receiver. No to be left out Ford promises Pandora integration along with Stitcher, which is apparently the news/talk yin to Pandora’s yang, and something I’d never heard of before. Yet again, Ford’s approach requires an intermediary, with SYNC project manager Julius Marchwicki promising,

in the future, if you bring Pandora or Stitcher into the car on your phone, it will work seamlessly.

(more…)

One of the most satisfying aspects of putting together our review of the decade’s most important radio trends was the number of comments we received. It appears we touched a nerve or two. And while not everyone agreed with our arguments or conclusions, we did get some thought provoking responses.

Seeing as how we like to encourage some rousing debate about radio, with this post I’d like to highlight a few of them.

Responding to #11, cash-strapped schools turn their backs on college radio, Seth Thornberry points out:

In another example of the spirit of independent radio, the DJs from KTXT got together and created The Llano Idea which has kept up the volunteer run radio (online, at least).

In response to #6, HD Radio launches, but who listens? Who cares? BrianK finds some hope for the service:

Ford announced today that HD Radio is factory installed in their autos and the at least 4X digital power increase for HD radio is on the cusp of being approved which will give listeners stereo reception upto twice as far as traditional auto FM receivers in noise-free and to my ears much better high frequency response

But Greg begs to differ, noting that,

Ford has been announcing that it would add HD Radio since 2007, but it never materialized. Also, Ford is an investor in iBiquity. … BMW even has an HD Radio trouble-shooting guide, and there are nothing but complaints about HD Radio in BMW Forums, so I’m guessing that it will be the same situation with Ford.

And Robert D Young Jr quips:

PS. just one little correction: CD quality is really “seedy” quality.

(more…)