Radio Survivor

Paul and Matthew each wrote a piece (click here and here) on songs about radio. Here are a few more suggestions:

1) Alkaline Trio “Radio“: Not really a song about radio, but it does discuss “radio” as an object in an interesting break-up song.

2) American Hi-Fi “Hi-Fi Killer”

I gotta disappear

Don’t wanna hear that sound on the radio

Yeah, we could all hum along

‘Cause it’s the same old song

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While digital HD Radio in the US generated some light interest during January’s Consumer Electronics Show, the BBC was sharpening its hatchet in anticipation of taking a few whacks at its digital radio service. The UK has had the Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) service since the mid-1990s, predating HD radio in the US by a good half-decade. Unlike HD Radio, which broadcasts alongside analog signals, DAB uses a different set of spectrum dedicated exclusively to digital radio.

Although arguably superior to HD Radio’s IBOC system, both due to greater available bandwidth and not causing interference to analog stations, DAB isn’t necessarily doing any better in its home countries. As UK radio blogger Grant Goddard reports, many European countries are scaling back or ending their investment in rolling out DAB.

At the beginning of March the BBC confirmed rumored plans to shut down two of its DAB stations, the Asian Network, which serves South Asian communities, and 6 Music, which is a popular modern rock station. The 6 Music shutdown, in particular, has generated a significant outcry from listeners, with nearly 8,000 complaints filed with the BBC as of last Friday.

The 6 Music closure appears to hit a nerve because it was the BBC’s attempt at creating a cutting edge rock music station featuring more variety and up-and-coming bands than other BBC or commercial stations. Music celebrity hosts like Jarvis Cocker, Bruce Dickinson and Bob Dylan have had their own shows. When it debuted in 2002 it was the first new national service from the BBC since 1970. 6 Music was also intended to be a showcase for the new DAB service, supposedly taking advantage of the service’s enhanced digital fidelity.
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Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski did his best to sell the agency’s upcoming National Broadband Plan to country music and country radio fans this week—both on and off the ‘Net. The Plan is due to be released this Tuesday—a blueprint for how to speed up high speed Internet adoption across the country.

“What will the National Broadband Plan mean for this marketplace of artists, radio station owners, Internet entrepreneurs, and music lovers?” he asked at a meeting of the Country Music Association’s Board of Directors on Wednesday. The answer is that it will get more rural country music lovers on line.

One thing is for sure, Genachowski had a good time delivering this pitch . “You thought I was going to say something about my wife leaving me, my dog and my truck, didn’t you?” the FCC’s boss asked the Board.

Relevance needed

But seriously folks, the meat and potatoes of the talk was that the venues for selling country music are going to the Internet. The challenge is to get the country music market to the ‘Net too, Genachowski explained: (more…)

Experience Music Project in Seattle

Last week’s Intercollegiate Broadcasting System conference (IBS for short) kicked off the music and radio convention season and there appears to be no end in sight for broadcasters and music lovers over the course of the next few weeks.

If you’re hoping to immerse yourself in music, bond with broadcasters, or geek out about the intricacies of specific music genres; then there’s at least one conference or festival for you in the next 4 weeks.

Here are some options:

SXSW in Austin, Texas (3/12-3/21/10):

This massive music festival in Austin has expanded in recent years to include a film festival and interactive conference. If you want to see tons of bands, sessions about music, and hear about the latest in technology, then you’ve got to get to Austin. Radio stations from all over the country also flock to Austin to do live broadcasts and to host showcases, including college station Radio K (Minneapolis) and community radio station WFMU (New Jersey).

From March 17-20th, 7 different college/public radio stations (KCRW, The Current, KEXP, KPFT, KUT, KXT, and WXPN) will be participating in live daytime music showcases at The Day Stage Cafe. You can even catch a short film, Peter in Radioland, in which old-school radios have a starring role.

College Broadcasters, Inc. (CBI) Convention in NYC (3/14-3/16/10):

If you are working in any form of college media, from radio to television to journalism, then this is the convention for you. It’s held in conjunction with College Media Advisers (CMA). To get the full scoop about what’s in store, take a look at my interview with the folks behind CBI and the conference.

International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Conference in New Orleans (4/9-4/11/10):

This is THE conference to hit if you are a music academic or simply enjoy dissecting the intricacies of music, musicians, or genres. Over the years I’ve seen fascinating presentations about Japanese noise, the history of turntablism, and the connections between metal and classical music. Usually there is a paper or two related to radio.

The NAB Show in Las Vegas (4/10-4/15/10):

The big National Association of Broadcasters event in Las Vegas includes a number of mini-conferences as well as an exhibition floor. There’s a Broadcast Management Conference, radio luncheon, as well as sessions geared towards digital media professionals. If you want to be a fly on the wall for free, take a look at Spinning Indie for a complimentary pass to the exhibition floor.

Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference in Seattle (4/15-4/18/10):

This annual conference (which is FREE) is a chance for academics and music journalists to bond over their love of popular music. This year’s theme, “The Pop Machine: Music and Technology” lends itself to discussions of radio; with far more papers about radio (including a few topics related to radio history, a paper on Mexican radio, one on radio as an instrument, another about radio commercials) being presented this year than I’ve ever seen at this conference. There will also be presentations about Lady Gaga, girls’ rock camps, cassettes, vinyl, Pandora, auto-tune, and the Vocoder (to name a few).

Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Convention in Las Vegas (4/15-4/17/10):

A conference for broadcast media educators and practitioners, this definitely has an academic slant to it. This year’s research symposium focuses on papers about the intersections between sports and media. They also have a Festival of Media Arts, which includes a student media competition. Here are some of the winners in the “audio” category. There are also panels related to student radio, sessions geared towards careers in radio, and some that look at specific stations both in the U.S. and abroad.

Even with kids hearing new music from blogs and TV commercials, rock ‘n roll and radio are still inextricably linked. Last July Matthew ran down some of his favorite songs about radio, including The Ramones’ “Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio,” and The Clash’s “Radio Clash.” This week the guys at one of my favorite radio programs, Sound Opinions, did a feature on their favorite songs about radio:

Jim DeRogatis:
Wall of Voodoo, “Mexican Radio”
R.E.M., “Radio Free Europe”
Donna Summer, “On the Radio”
Nirvana, “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”

Greg Kot:
ZZ Top, “Heard it on the X”
The Replacements, “Left of the Dial”
Indeep, “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”
Public Enemy, “How to Kill a Radio Consultant”

“Radio Free Europe” and “Left of the Dial” are certainly on my list and “Mexican Radio” is one of my favorites, too. But I’m kind of partial to the heavy metal cover by the Swiss band Celtic Frost:

Some of my other favorites share a certain theme, like Rage Against the Machine’s “Guerilla Radio” and Mojo Nixon’s “Pirate Radio” (language NSFW). And then there are some moldy classics, like Steely Dan’s “FM” and Rush’s “Spririt of Radio.”

What are some of your favorite songs about radio? Anything more unusual or obscure?

Each week I’m going to post a few songs, music videos and websites that  have caught my eye at some point. I should mention that many of the links to “songs” will probably be on youtube (aka they may include videos that I don’t consider to be particularly good) and that I’ve chosen the “music videos” based more on the music video than the audio track, although I will try to pick catchy and/or relatively “good” music. Enjoy!

Songs

1) Patsy Cline’s “Crazy“: I know that music like this tends to elude my generation, but Patsy Cline is, in my opinion, simply amazing.

2) Boys Like Girls’ “Love Drunk“: Just another pop/emo catchy track. I don’t know how mainstream these guys are now, but their self-titled album was pretty good.

3) 3Oh!3’s “Don’t Trust Me“: This song is admittedly pretty catchy, although I have to say that the thing that caught my attention was the phrase “Do the Helen Keller.” Intrigued (I normally am by new “hip” phrases), I decided to run a search on Urban Dictionary which managed to spit out a few definitions that I’d rather not retype. Feel free to check it out here.

Music Videos

1) OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass“: I honestly can’t think of a better way to describe this video than the word “awesome.”

2) MGMT’s “Kids“: Having listened to this song LONG before seeing the music video, I became quickly surprised by how disturbing the video was. Regardless, it’s a song that I enjoy.

3) Saturday Night Live’s “I’m On A Boat” featuring T-Pain: This is almost a year old, so it’s sort of fallen out of popularity, but I still find it amusing.

4) Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance“: If you haven’t seen this yet, you might as well do it now. I doubt that it will be going away anytime soon. I’ve actually read some very in-depth articles on this video, like this, which have actually somewhat improved my opinion of her.

Websites

1) xkcd: This is easily one of my favorite webcomics. I particularly enjoy the strip’s physics comics, such as this and this, but all of the comics tend to be consistently humorous.

2) One of my friend’s posted this on facebook a while back (I think that it might have been Nigel?), and I found the video to be quite interesting. The video is a recording of a lecture given at Yale University by Professor Shelly Kagan titled “How to Live Given the Certainty of Death.” It’s admittedly somewhat morbid (it IS a discussion of death), but I strongly suggest taking the time to watch it.

I’ve only lived in Chicago for two years, but I’ve been listening to WXRT in brief spurts for the last sixteen years when visiting the city. Living in the Central Illinois college towns of Champaign-Urbana, I’d often heard about WXRT from friends and acquaintances from the Chicago area. Inevitably it was the one station that ex-Chicagoans most commonly said they missed. While Chicago has a lot of great noncommercial college stations, all of them only cover a portion of the city and metro area. By comparison WXRT has great signal strength, covering the better part of Chicagoland.

Like a lot of FM rock stations, WXRT’s roots lie in that brief heyday of freeform radio in the late 60s and early 70s. The station’s rock programming began in 1972 as the nighttime portion of a programming schedule that primarily consisted of ethnic and foreign language programs during the day. It went all-rock in 1976 at the same time as most progressive rock stations started to be come more formatted and less freeform, birthing what would become known as the Album Oriented Rock (AOR) format.

XRT remained locally owned until 1995– a year before the Telecom Act triggered the onslaught of consolidation–when it was sold to Westinghouse, which would become Infinity broadcasting, now known as CBS Radio. Yet, somehow WXRT has managed to survive the era of consolidation and avoid becoming a homogenized, voice-tracked, syndication-saturated station. Instead, it remains a Chicago fixture and example of the Chicago approach to rock.
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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…)

Each month the Radio Survivors will count down our most (or least) favorite radio things. Last month we covered our favorite radio programs. This month we’re sharing our favorite commercial radio stations. As regular readers might expect, coming up with this list proved to be more of a challenge. All three of us tend to be big listeners to community, college and public radio…. commercial radio, not so much. Beyond the quality and variety offered by noncommercial radio these days, I think we’ve all been turned off by the homogenization and delocalization of commercial radio brought on by consolidation. Nevertheless, we put our heads together and came up with five stations we can safely call favorites, even if some of them are no longer around.

I’m starting off the rundown with a station that was my favorite as a high school and college student in Northern New Jersey in the late 80s and early 90s. Dover’s WDHA-FM bills itself as “The Rock of New Jersey,” and continues to stand out by refusing to give in to the trends that have ruined so many other rock stations. In an area dominated by New York City stations serving the nation’s largest radio market, WDHA survives by remaining steadfastly local in its outlook.

Where other stations would have brought in voice tracking and more syndicated programming, WDHA is staffed with live local DJs and produces its own specialty programs, like Friday night’s Metal Mania. The metal show has been in that time slot since I was in high school, only then it was hosted by Eddie Trunk who is now the host of VH1 Classic’s That Metal Show and has a show on Sirius/XM. Looking at WDHA’s current air staff I see names I still remember like Terrie Carr, who apparently left to do stints on Sirius and VH1 Classic before returning to DHA. You don’t see that too often in commercial radio anymore.
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KUSF Offices

For me, the main reason that I’m so addicted to doing a radio show week after week is the music. I’m interested in new, independent, underground, and underexposed sounds and artists and the easiest way for me to get access to this music is by volunteering at a college radio station.

I’m lucky that at my station, KFJC, we add as many as 40 items to our library every week. The music that KFJC adds isn’t necessarily new, often the Music Director is adding things that are decades old that may not have gotten much exposure when they were initially released.

Even though I’m at a station with a  massive record library and am exposed to new sounds every week; I still get the chills when I hear an amazing artist on the radio who I have never heard before.

For my #1 Top Radio Show I have to give credit to a college radio DJ at University of San Francisco station KUSF: DJ Schmeejay, the host of Radiodrome every Tuesday morning from 9am to noon. On several occasions while listening to his show, I’ve had to pick up the phone and call to find out more information about the incredible music that I was hearing. A few of the artists that he’s helped me to discover are Vashti Bunyan and Virginia Astley, two women producing ethereal sounds with folk and psychedelic influences.

KUSF

I remember calling to find out about Virginia Astley and he told me that it was a hard-to-find release that he’d picked up at a KUSF Record Swap. Probably that very night I headed up to KFJC and found numerous Virginia Astley LPs in the library and learned that may of them hadn’t been played in over a decade. So I played her music on my show as well, exposing more listeners to the treat that I’d heard on a fellow college station.

What I like about DJ Schmeejay’s show is that he crafts interesting sets of music, with a mix of new and old across a range of genres that make sense sonically. You might hear lovely folky sounds from the 1960s, beautiful atmospherics from the 1980s, or a seriously old school Jimmy Durante piece.

I talked to DJ Schmeejay over email about his nearly 7-year-run hosting Radiodrome and he shared with me some of his thought process behind the program and also how his role as one of the Music Directors at KUSF leads to some interesting finds. Here’s a bit of our conversation: (more…)