Radio Survivor

If you’ve ever wondered what kind of music your Facebook friends listen to on Pandora, the online streaming Internet service now has an app for that. Linking your Pandora account to your Facebook account enables you to survey the channel tastes of your Facebook friends.

After months of “furious activity,” the feature is now ready, Pandora says.  “Now your friends can be a daily source of inspiration for new stations and music discovery,” explains Pandora founder Tim Westergren on his blog. “I’ve been testing out the service while we were developing it and I have to say it really brings a wonderful new human dimension to the listening experience.”

The new app isn’t hard to access (instructions here). In the lower right of Pandora’s homepage you’ll see a box that says “Friends’ Music.” Click “check it out,” and then “Connect with Facebook.”

So I did that. And the next thing I knew, I had a complete list the Pandora channels accessed by my Facebook friends. But you know what? I’m not entirely sure that some of my Facebook buddies want me to know that they have a Lady Gaga channel, or they dig a band named Audioslave, or they listen to Lily Allen’s hit tune ”Fuck You.”

Don’t get me wrong. My friends are a pretty cool bunch of people. But do they know I’ve got access to this information now? (more…)

Bertolt Brecht (source: wikipedia commons)

I am rereading portions of German composer Bertold Brecht’s famous 1932 essay “The radio as an apparatus of communications,” and I am confused. Is he really talking about radio?

The medium, Brecht wrote, “is one-sided when it should be two- . . . ”

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

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a guy who is talking about the Internet, not radio. Or at least that’s what he seems to want. Given how distant the reality of the ‘Net was to 1932, however, he probably meant something along the lines of community radio. Brecht thought little of schools and other institutions where people go to receive an “education” that “leads nowhere and has come from nothing.” He loved the interactivity of the theater—his career at its height with the Weimar era release of his and Kurt Weill’s masterpieces: Three Penny Opera and Mahagonny. (more…)

Wow. A childhood musical hero has died. My Twitter, Facebook, and email accounts have been buzzing with the news of Michael Jackson’s death today and my Generation X agemates are understandably freaked out. As MTV said this afternoon, he was the “soundtrack for a generation.” Many of us remember spending hours of our childhood watching music videos in the 1980s and Michael Jackson’s were particularly iconic. Hearing songs of his from a particular era will always fill me with nostalgia for junior high roller skating parties.

So, I suppose, many of us will now remember when we heard of Michael Jackson’s death, where we were, and how we heard about it. I found out on email (how retro!) from a fellow college radio DJ. Our radio station’s staff email list is actually the place where I’ve gotten the first word about many music-related deaths.

From the posts I’ve seen on Facebook, it would seem that many people heard about the news via that social networking site. And, I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter has functioned the same way today (after all, it’s the new college radio!).

But what about radio? Did any of you find out about Michael Jackson’s death today on your local radio station? On your college radio station?

In the days to come, radio will be the place where fans might congregate to celebrate Michael Jackson’s life in song. If you have special programming planned, post it here. Also, I’d love to collect stories about how people heard about his death and if radio played a role in spreading the word.

I’ve got to go now and settle in for MTV’s Michael Jackson tribute tonight at 9pm EST to memorialize the King of Pop.

When I was a kid in the 1970s my parents would try to pry me away from the television, warning me that it was going to “rot my brain.” Yet, my dad also admitted to me that his parents made the same pronouncements to him about the dangers of listening to too much radio. Each generation seems to fear the latest technology and it’s almost cliched when parents demonize TV, video games, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, and texting, when in fact these are all just new ways to communicate the same old stories, news, and entertainment.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Twitter and Facebook are the new “radio” for the younger generation. It’s almost hard to believe that way back when we got our breaking news from the radio because today radio is often overlooked as a news source.

WHRC Studio 1987

A few weeks ago I was at my college reunion and revisited the campus radio station WHRC. During my visit I talked to a lot of people about the station and the role that it played on campus in the 1980s. Everyone had bits and pieces of nostalgia to pass along, but what really amazed me was that several people had distinct memories of first hearing about the Challenger disaster in 1986 while listening to WHRC. At the time the campus-only station was piped in to the dining center and, in fact, the main WHRC audience was during meal times. So all of the people who I talked to were probably eating lunch in the dining center when they heard the news together about this tragedy.

Similarly, when Kurt Cobain died in 1994 (another defining tragic moment for my generation), the first people to mention it around my office had heard the news over the radio. However, this was also the first time that I remember hearing that the Internet was actually breaking news, as it was buzzing over word of Cobain’s death. This was during the early days of the Internet (I’m not even sure if we had email at my office yet), when those participating in online communities like The Well were trailblazing true hipster geeks. I’m pretty sure it was my friend’s sister who worked at Wired (a hip magazine about technology? Crazy!) who was getting some of these early reports on Cobain and passing the news along to those of us in technologically-deprived offices. (more…)