It’s been quite some time since I can recall the FCC imploring a U.S. Attorney to issue a warrant to shut down an unlicensed FM station. In fact, it’s quite a rare action, usually reserved for long-running stations that either have been utterly unresponsive to administrative notices or have operated for a long time out in the open in civil disobedience. However, on May 13 the FCC got Boston area U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz to issue a warrant for the seizing of the transmitting equipment used by “Dat Hitz” at 99.7 FM. While the press release issued by the U.S. Attorney in Boston (PDF) might give the attention that the bust was the result of swift action, the opposite is actually true.

Though I hadn’t heard of the station before, it appears that the broadcasters have been on the air for at least four years, and made no attempt to be underground, maintaining a frequently updated website and twitter feed. The website still features the FM frequency prominently. As evidence for the station’s longevity I find published complaints about “Datz Hitz” interfering with a commercial station on 99.5 FM going back to 2007. Interestingly enough, the twitter feed has continued unabated since the May 13 raid, the only difference being that on May 12 they were advertising the FM frequency, while on May 14 they were only promoting a web stream.

The FCC’s press release names none of the persons behind the broadcast. Two separate Forfeiture Notices issued on May 17 (1, 2) seem to be for the same station, listing the same 99.7 FM in the same neighborhood as “Datz Hitz.” An earlier Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL) from October, 2010 issued to the same individuals fill some of the backstory left out of the FCC’s release.

FCC agents first investigated the station in October, 2009, and when they found it they were allowed to enter the building where they saw an unlicensed transmitter and left a Notice of Unlicensed Operation (NOUO). Strangely, two men then contacted the FCC and invited agents back to the station’s location and admitted to operating the station. The agents then issued the men two NOUOs personally and the men agreed to shut down the station.

Then, several months later in February 2010, FCC agents acted on complaints and again investigated the station, finding it operating from the same address. This time the broadcasters did not answer the door. It then took the FCC until October to take further action, issuing the NAL. After that, apparently the operators got a little wiser and moved operations. It’s that second location that was the site of the May 13 bust.

The story of this particular station serves as almost a textbook case of how not to run an unlicensed station. First, don’t advertise your station as if it were a licensed commercial station. Second, when the FCC shows up, don’t let them into your building or studio. Three, if they do leave a notice at your studio, don’t call them up later to invite them over and admit to running it. Finally, if the FCC does show up to your studio and leave a notice, don’t wait over a year to move the station.

Of course the Commission is going to play up this action to give the impression that it’s tough on pirate broadcasters and to scare off other unlicensed broadcasters. But the truth of the matter is that the FCC is really not equipped to be an enforcement agency. It’s bureaucracy and procedures are designed to deal with people and organizations that are licensed and want to keep their licenses, more like the FDA than the DEA. Note that in this particular case how months passed between FCC actions, and that the first action seems to have taken place around a full two years after complaints were published in the local newspaper.

This is not to say that the FCC cannot or will not take action against an unlicensed broadcaster. Rather, the simple truth is that the Commission is best at hitting sitting ducks, whether those ducks are sitting due to complacency, an ethos of civil disobedience, naïveté or simple ignorance.

Worcester, Massachusset’s unlicensed Flava 105.5 has received some mostly positive press coverage recently for its focus on underserved Caribbean populations in the area. Probably not coincidentally, about two weeks after it appeared in the local newspaper the FCC issued the station a Notice of Unlicensed Operation (NOUO) ordering it to cease broadcasting immediately.

In a follow-up story reporting on the Commission’s action that appeared in the News Telegram on Saturday the station’s general manager said that “We’re no longer on the air. … We’re not in business.” However, the paper’s reporter noted that the station was still on the air as of Friday night.

Every FCC field office prioritizes unlicensed stations differently. Sometimes a station operating as openly as Flava 105.5 might go unbothered for months. Other times the Commission will act quickly once a station gets noticed. A significant variable in this is how loudly local licensed broadcasters complain and bug the FCC.

In this case it looks like the Boston field office has been hitting unlicensed stations all over its geographic area of responsibility since February. Scanning over the Enforcement Bureau’s recent field actions it looks like quite a few Massachusetts stations were on the radar. The Boston field office issued NUOUs to another Worcester station, along with stations in Hartford, Webster, Boston, Norwood, Boxford, two stations in Mattapan(1, 2) Springfield and three stations in Brockton (1, 2, 3). Additionally, the Boston field office sent NUOUs to four stations in Rhode Island and three in Connecticut over the same period.

In the first article on Flava 105.5 a local online radio director was quoted saying she’s “heard of a lot of Haitian radio stations popping up in the Boston area.” This pattern looks a lot like the unlicensed activity in the New York City and South Florida areas which also have significant Caribbean and Latino communities who are otherwise not well served by licensed stations, commercial or noncommercial.

I was actually surprised at the number of notices the Boston field office sent out this year (20!). That number alone represents a lot of unlicensed broadcasting. But if you take into account the likelihood that there are many other stations that haven’t been identified by the FCC or just haven’t been contacted yet, I’d say there’s a pretty big pirate scene going on in southern New England. The Commission doesn’t note the kind of programming aired on the stations it contacts. But just looking over the names of the persons identified in the notices there seem to be what look like a lot of Latino and Hatian names.

The takeaway from this is that there are still a lot of communities and groups who are not well served by licensed broadcasters, leading a significant number of people to take to the air without a license to fill the void. This is especially true in big metropolitan areas, like greater Boston, where low-power FM licenses have not been available in the densest population areas. I think it’s fair to say that even if LPFM licenses to become available there will not be enough to go around, and not much of a dent will be made in the number of unlicensed broadcasters.

Finally, I must note that all the Boston office has done is sent out warning letters that say the equivalent of “we’re pretty sure you’re broadcasting without a license and you better cut it out!” That letter alone is enough to scare a lot of unlicensed broadcasters off the air. But it’s a long way from the NUOU letter to a real fine, and then collecting the fine or taking a station off the air by police force.

While LPFM provided a very needed avenue for many different populations and communities to obtain broadcast licenses, the service is not and will not be enough to make up for the lack of diversity on the majority of the radio dial. While the FCC may have hoped LPFM would hold back the tide of pirate radio, a decade later there’s no evidence that happened. There may be fewer outwardly political pirates like Free Radio Berkeley, but that doesn’t mean today’s stations aren’t there for important reasons.

My pal John Anderson at DIYmedia.net alerts us to a new group blog written by some fellow radio survivors who intend to hold public radio’s feet to the fire, called Keeping the Public in Public Radio (KTPIPR). Featuring the contributions of public radio supporters, authors and broadcasters, the site is covering the changing landscape of public radio which often mirrors commercial radio in emphasizing national programming and ratings over local service.

The site’s bloggers hailing from Boston and Austin are focusing on changes happening at the public stations in those cities, WGBH and KUT, respectively. Concerns over KUT, owned by the University of Texas, stem from July 2009 changes in which three long-time DJs had their roles reduced while the station’s playlist became more “structured.” More recently the site has been critically following plans for the station to take over the university’s on campus bar and music venue, the Cactus Café.

For WGBH complaints arise from the station’s December, 2009 decision to go all-talk, canceling long-running folk and blues programs. A growing priority on news and information programming has been happening at public radio stations nationwide for well over a decade, with many long-running local music programs coming to an end. Even back in 1997 when I attended the CPB’s Public Radio Program Directors conference the emphasis was on research indicating that moneyed listeners valued keystone syndicated programs like All Things Considered more than local programming, especially music. Since then the trend has only grown.

KTPIPR isn’t only focusing on Boston and Austin, it’s got at least four other stations on its radar for regular coverage, along with keeping a wide angle lens on the national scene. The site also takes aim at NPR for the network’s support of HD Radio, calling it the “Huge Debacle.”

KTPIPR has been going strong for about a month and a half. I’m always supportive of informed and critical coverage of radio issues, so I’m hoping the site’s authors can keep it up.

For rock music fans over the age of 30 the call letters are often drilled into memory: WNEW in New York, WMMS in Cleveland, KSAN in San Francisco, WBCN in Boston and WXRT in Chicago. At the beginning of 2009 only WBCN and WXRT remained on air in a form with any semblance to their former glory. As of last Thursday WBCN had joined the off-air list.

WBCN's last analog FM logo

WBCN DJs from the late 80s

Ad for Little Walter's show on WBCN during the 1970s.

As of the third quarter of 2008 total HD radio sales totaled 600,000. Being very charitable, let’s say that even 1 million HD radios are out there by the end of this year. How many of those are in Boston, and then how many of those Boston-area HD radio owners are likely WBCN listeners?

WBCN’s winter 2008 Arbitron ratings gave the station a 2.1 share, making it 15th in the market. With a metro population of 3,912,000, that gave WBCN an average audience of 82,152. Obviously it’s not market leading, but not too shabby either.

For argument’s sake, let’s say Boston has as many as two per-cent of all HD Radios out there–making it a little more HD-radio-rich than it’s proportion of the population would suggest–and that there are as many as 800,000 HD radios in the US. Then it’s plausible that there could be 16,000 HD radios in the Boston market. Even if every single one of them is tuned to WBCN, that’s a loss of about 80% of its former analog audience.

Well, you might ask, what about the online audience? It’s a little harder to crunch the numbers since the ratings for individual stations don’t get released in any systematic fashion. The best we have right now are ratings for whole radio groups. By that measure, CBS Radio, WBCN’s owner, looks pretty good, ranking number one with a cumulative listener base of 4.4 million. But those millions of listeners are spread out over hundreds of online streaming stations. According to the company,

In addition to CBS RADIO’s nearly 200 stations and custom channels, the company also powers AOL Radio’s 200+ stations and Yahoo! Music Radio’s 150+ stations. …

Averaged out, that’s 8,000 listeners per station. Of course it’s unlikely that the distribution is anywhere near that even. Nevertheless it illustrates clearly how going online-only means a massive step down in audience size for WBCN. Since audience size determines ad dollars, it’s a pretty big revenue drop, too.
And since revenue pays for programming and air talent, I’m betting that means the digital-only WBCN will experience a loss of staff, too.

The essence of progressive rock radio was always people; passionate programmers and DJs picking music that resonates with them personally and with their audience, often interacting directly with the artists themselves, whether local or touring. I sincerely doubt that much of that essence will be retained at WBCN in the coming months and years.

Instead WBCN will become another Chrysler K-car version of rock radio. Like the K-car became a sports coupe by slapping on some fancy trim and a classic name, the digital-only WBCN becomes progressive rock by sprinkling in some of the trademark artists and leaning heavily on a storied past. Just don’t expect that strategy to work out any better for WBCN than it did for Chrysler.

WLS Radio Tower Photo Copyright 2004, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Fandom is an amazing thing and thanks to the Internet it’s easier and easier to find like-minded obsessives who share one’s passion for the most obscure objects, idols, and idiosyncrasies. Radio is no exception. Loads of websites document radio history, with nostalgic archivists collecting ephemera, airchecks, and reminiscences from San Francisco to Boston. Various forums also exist, like those on Radio-Info.com, allowing listeners and industry types to talk shop and share current radio gossip.

And then there’s Garrett Wollman. I recently ran across some of his photographs of radio towers and was fascinated. As part of his work with The Archives @ BostonRadio.org, he’s been traveling around the country meticulously photographing every radio tower that he can find. Sometimes he even ventures into radio and television stations; but for the most part it’s the outside architecture and landscapes that he finds so compelling.

In order to learn more about this project, I contacted Garrett to get the scoop about his love for radio towers and his work to help document the history of radio and television. I was surprised to find out a couple of things: 1) Garrett’s a young guy—a rarity in radio history circles and 2) He’s not a big fan of current radio offerings. After chatting with Garrett, I also was made aware of pursuits like DXing and county counting, making me realize that there’s so much more to the radio scene than I ever realized. On to the interview:

Jennifer: Can you tell me about the background and purpose of BostonRadio.org? And the Archives?

Garrett Wollman: The Archives @ BostonRadio.org (originally The Boston Radio Archives) is, so far as I know, the oldest broadcasting-history Web site on the net.  Scott [Fybush] and I started it in January, 1995, with a simple listing of information about the stations in the Boston market…Scott was already writing his New England RadioWatcher columns (now NorthEast Radio Watch)…and I started to archive them.  I also started creating radio and TV dial pages for other markets in New England, and I think around that same time we started writing histories of all the stations…Eventually, the dial pages became too hard to maintain, and other Web sites (like Chip Kelley’s original 100000watts) were doing it better, so I dropped them, but kept the histories.

My first tower-hunting trip was to Cape Cod, in March, 1994.  A couple years later — this is still before the days of good digital cameras– I started taking video of the tower trips.  Eventually, digital cameras became good enough, and I bought on in late 2000; that’s when I started developing the photo galleries that you see in the Archives. What you see is, by the way, less than half of what I actually have “in the can” — I have several thousand more photos from 2001 through last month that I have not yet published.

Radio Station Park Photo Photo Copyright 2004, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Each photo gallery involves about 20 hours of work to write and edit, even though the images you see are rarely processed in any meaningful way.  Often, when doing a photo gallery about a market, I will do research in the FCC files, in other reference books like /Broadcasting Yearbook/, and in Web resources like mailing-list archives and Wikipedia, to fill in as much as I can about the history of a facility.

I try to identify the correct callsign, community of license, channel, and station class (FM) or antenna mode (AM) for each station at the specific time the photos were taken.  I want to get more semantic tagging into the photo galleries, so that it would be easier to identify, for example, all the photos (across multiple galleries) of a particular station or tower, but thus far this has been stymied by my rather antiquated, homebrew workflow.

Garrett: Well, I’m not sure that I am.  I’m really passionate about geography, history, and some aspects of architecture, and touring the world’s broadcast sites unites a lot of those interests.  I find much of today’s radio unlistenable and television unwatchable.

On the other hand, I grew up in the 1980s — during the second round of CHR [Contemporary Hits Radio] Wars — at a time when radio still meant something to a lot of people.  It still mattered, when I was going school, what station you listened to; those of my classmates who listened to Q-99 or B-100 were looked down upon by the 95 Triple X crowd, and those of us who listened to Triple X were considered hopelessly bereft of taste by the rock snobs who listened to The Wizard.

By the early 1990s, CHR formats had left me behind (at the ripe old age of 20!), and when I moved to Boston I eventually gravitated to AAA…I learned to listen to — if not always like — some great evening talk hosts, like the late Dr. David Brudnoy on WBZ, and I still enjoy (but don’t listen very much) to the meandering, but usually non-political, Steve LeVeille on WBZ overnights.  Most of my listening today is to the BBC (both World Service, heard here on WBUR, and domestic Radio 4 over the Internet), and in the car to WXRV (92.5B Haverhill), WBZ, and the XM decades channels (particularly 80s on 8 and 90s on 9).

On the gripping hand, I have an engineering (specifically computer networking) background, so I have both an appreciation for the behind-the-scenes work that engineers of all kinds do, and the sort of curiosity that makes me want to know how stuff works, and why, and who built it, and where does it come from.  When I’m not doing this stuff, you’ll find me reading planning documents about a local highway project, or writing a Wikipedia article about a recent Supreme Court decision.

I seem to be running out of limbs here…One final factor is that my parents absolutely refused to pay extra for an FM radio in their cars when I was growing up.  For much of that period, we lived well east of Burlington, Vermont, and thus well out of the night patterns of the AM stations there.  In the winter months, as my father was driving my home from a Scout meeting or other evening event, I would tune the radio and listen to all the other things on the radio — and back then, the AM dial wasn’t filled with satellite talk at night — so we might hear something completely different from anything available locally.

I particularly remember hearing Wolfman Jack on W****N****BC on these late nights.  So I became, unintentionally, something of a DXer as well, and that fed into the geography interest, at least until the AM dial became so filled with indistinguishable satellite junk that there was no longer much interest left.  I joined some of the DX clubs, but eventually dropped out when it seemed that they were mostly interested in yammering on forever about how much better it was in the decades before I was born.  (I’m still a member of the Worldwide TV-FM DX Association, which is a bit less prone to this sort of nostalgic excess.)

WCNK Tower Photo Copyright 2001, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Garrett: Never.

Jennifer: How many towers have you photographed? What states have you visited?

Garrett: I have visited all of the lower 48 except North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Mississippi.  I will fix all of these at some point.  (A friend of mine, George Greene, is a county-counter, so he has actually visited every single *county* — a much more difficult challenge.)  I’ve done five Canadian provinces, all in the east.

On my current camera, I’ve taken about 10,000 shots.  I think I was somewhere close to 3,000 on the old camera.  (What a difference bigger memory makes!)  Of course, many of those pictures are junk, and will never be seen on the Web site.  But given all that, I believe I’ve seen in excess of 3,000 stations, and photographed over two thirds of them.

Garrett: Touring radio stations is something that’s normally arranged by my partner-in-crime, Scott Fybush. As a freelance journalist in the trade press, he goes to trade shows and meetings of industry organizations, and knows a lot of people who can open the doors for us at various station groups.  It can be a lot easier to get a tour when you can start your conversation with “I spoke to [name of CEO] at NAB last year, and he said I really ought to see your stations.”  I can’t do that — it’s strictly a hobby for me — so when I travel alone it’s mostly the outsides of things that I see, unless it’s a business day in a small market and I can just walk in the front door and get an impromptu tour.  (Such things do happen!)

We do try to make maps that show where all the studios and transmitters are, also noting any particularly significant historic studio locations. Currently this is all on paper; some day soon, GPS systems will be good enough to assist us in the navigation, although I will probably still want paper maps for my own reference after the fact.  (I’ve been able to piece together photo galleries from seven-year-old photos because I still had the maps and could figure out what route we had taken through a market.)

WHSD Antenna Photo Copyright 2004, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Jennifer: Have you visited any college radio stations? If so, which ones?

Garrett: I’ve seen a good number of college stations from the outside.  As far as inside tours go — and excluding college-owned public radio — I’ve seen WBRU (95.5B Providence) and WREK (91.1C2 Atlanta) this year.  In the past, I’ve seen WHRB (95.3A Cambridge), WMBR (88.1A Cambridge), and a few others that I can’t readily remember.

Garrett: There was the time, back during “Big Trip 2001“, when we were in Floyd’s Knobs, Indiana — across the river from Louisville — and an elderly local accosted us and insisted that we were government agents who had some control over the radiation in his neighborhood.

There was also one time — I forget which year this was — when we went to see the tower of WHPE-FM (95.5C1 High Point), and had the security manager of the chemical plant across the street call us in to the police as suspicious characters.  Thankfully, the rental car was not in my name that trip….

Garrett: Yes and no.  As a medium, absolutely.  There will always be a place for a medium of information and entertainment that does not demand all of our attention at once.  There’s no substitute for radio when driving or doing any number of other, primarily visual tasks.

As a means of delivering prerecorded music, not so much.  Radio programmers and record companies have so segmented the market that there is no longer a mass audience for musical entertainment any more.  The days when a CHR could pull a 25 share are gone, in every market.  With dozens of choices on the radio today, none of which are precisely what I want, why would I set through the endless commercials (or endless fundraisers) when I can get exactly what I want from Pandora or my iPod?

The specific technologies of over-the-air broadcasting are clearly on their last legs in the developed world — I give them another decade, maybe two if the broadcasting industry succeeds in its drive to put non-broadcast radio at a competitive disadvantage (through, e.g., the “Local Radio Freedom Act”, which preserves in law the subsidy regime whereby analog broadcasters can use recorded music for free, but digital broadcasters have to pay).  In the developing world, probably about twice as long, because the economics of broadcast are much more favorable there (traditional analog receivers are small, light, cheap, and battery-powered, whereas transmitters are big, heavy, expensive, and require an external power source).

All this, of course, is reason to go and see these facilities while they are still around.  I almost certainly won’t get to all 14,000 — and some of them really aren’t worth getting to — but I am making an effort to see all the significant sites in all the significant markets while they are still with us.

Garrett: I like non-comm AAA and Americana formats, particularly WXPN (88.5 Philadelphia) and WNCW (88.7 Spindale) of five to ten years ago.  I think a lot of the NPR news and talk programming is excellent, but it honestly doesn’t do anything for me.  The best spoken-word radio station in the English-speaking world, in my view, is BBC Radio 4 — it’s everything that I wish NPR was but could never be.  (What other English language radio station is still commissioning new drama?)  If this were Britain, that would be making a pretty strong statement of my social class, but thankfully it isn’t, and they provide “Listen Again” worldwide for most shows, so I can get my fix of “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” or “The News Quiz” or even the Shipping Forecast at a time that fits my leftpondian schedule.

Most of today’s music formats turn me off.  If I’m stuck in a market where there’s nothing else to listen to, I may find a local Hot AC or Modern Rocker, but I’m just as likely to turn the radio off.

KYCA Studios Photo Copyright 2009, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Garrett: Rarely.  There are plenty of college stations around Boston, and some of them even do worthwhile programming at least occasionally, but they’re never dependable enough, and there are lots of other choices here in market #11.  Some of the smaller college stations, and most of the high school stations, show little evidence of understanding what operating a radio station is about; if they have any listeners who aren’t actually in the studio, it would be a surprise.  Many of them seem to look at it as a glorified iPod, and put little or no effort into presentation.  But there are occasional gems.

I remember about 18 months ago, on the little class-D high-school station in Acton, Mass., hearing a student on the air who actually seemed to have some idea of what a jock is supposed to do; I actually sent him an email complimenting him on his presentation and suggesting that he look for colleges that have a student-run station.  (Of course, he then spoiled the impression by dumping carrier without a legal ID when his shift was over — stations with limited schedules like that really ought to get hooked up with a radio reading service.)

TV Coverage of Michael Jackson's Radio Airplay

I’ve been combing through the web trying to get a handle on how radio has responded to the death of Michael Jackson on Thursday. There’s much anecdotal evidence to suggest that radio listenership was up, as fans sought out his music and news about his death from the radio. However, as listeners turned on their radios and TVs (and the Internet) to hear the sounds and see the images of the pop icon at his best, not all stations were able to deliver great programming from the outset. As Matthew pointed out on Thursday, many commercial stations with automated programming weren’t in a position to provide Jackson-themed music and commentary as the news broke.

However, an article in the Boston Globe today, “Live Radio Takes the Lead: Canned Programs are Set Aside as DJs and Fans Celebrate Michael Jackson,” points out that the Boston airwaves did have some success in terms of satisfying fans. According to the piece:

The death of pop megastar Michael Jackson brought new life to Boston radio this week, as local stations scrambled to capture the moment. Station managers called for all hands on deck, replacing automated voices with live talent to talk about the man and the music, take calls from nostalgic listeners, and saturate the airwaves with Jackson’s hits.

It was a historic day in an era of corporate radio, controlled play lists, and canned voices. At Mix 98.5, DJ Lady D played Jackson tunes and interviews from 7 p.m. to midnight on Thursday, the day of Jackson’s death. Caught in a week when the regular morning team was on vacation…the station called in three of its top personalities from around the clock, who sat together yesterday morning, live on the air.

In cars, living rooms, and offices, listeners set aside the solo experience of their iPods for a day and gathered around the radio to tap into something bigger – memories of college years, albums shared by millions across a range of musical tastes, dance hits two decades old that can still fill a dance club with another generation of fans.

“It’s a good reminder of what live radio can do, of the role that radio can play in bringing a community together,” said Scott Fybush, editor of Northeast Radio Watch in Rochester, N.Y.

Many stations no longer have live announcers, using canned voices for part or all of the day, and so can’t react to a major news event, he said.

Jammin’ 94.5 called back its morning crew for a second shift after the news broke. They talked about Jackson and spun his music until midnight. The pop icon was the only topic of conversation on Kiss 108 yesterday morning, and Oldies 103.3 played nonstop “Thriller,’’ “Billie Jean,’’ and other Jackson favorites all day…

The article also points out that some stations were unable to react, either because they didn’t have live DJs or didn’t have enough music in their collections:

There were some outliers yesterday, stations that did little to acknowledge Jackson’s passing, sticking to their usual focus and format. WBOS 92.9 fired its DJs last year and now features canned announcers between its alternative rock hits – “voice tracking,’’ as they say in radio – all day. It played just two Michael Jackson covers by other artists, said program director Ken West.

Most telling of all is speculation that this sort of communal grieving experience across radio may soon become a thing of the past:

Jackson had more fans across a broad spectrum of listeners than perhaps any pop figure of his generation, radio executives and music critics said. Fybush, the Northeast Radio Watch editor, observed that with more stations abandoning the live, local personalities of the past, “this may really be the last of these moments as far as music radio goes.’’

It’s so fascinating to me that the way that people listened to music on Thursday night may have been a radical departure from the way they listened to music on Wednesday. And, I agree, that it suddenly brought everyone back to the past, when radio was local, live, and communal. Is it possible that this will have any sort of lasting impact on radio?