On page three of the IPO, Facebook mentions its radio interface with Pandora as a key way that the application creates value for developers:

Personalized and Social Experiences. We enable Platform developers to create better products that are personalized and social and that offer new ways for our users to engage with friends and share experiences across the web and on mobile devices. For example, a Facebook user can visit the Pandora website and immediately begin listening to a personalized radio station that is customized based on the bands the user Likes on Facebook.

On page 78 Facebook predicts that companies that traditionally advertise with radio will gravitate to the social networking app:

Television, print, and radio accounted for $363 billion, or 62% of the total advertising market in 2010 according to an industry source. Historically, advertisers interested in generating awareness of and demand for their brands have heavily relied on these offline media to reach their audiences at scale. We believe that these brand advertisers will increasingly dedicate a portion of their advertising dollars to Facebook because the broad audiences they are trying to reach are active on Facebook on a daily basis, because we can reach their desired audiences with precision, and because they can spark word of mouth marketing through Facebook. In December 2011, an advertiser could reach an estimated audience of more than 65 million U.S. users in a typical day on Facebook. By comparison, the 2011 season finale of American Idol was viewed by an estimated U.S. audience of 29 million people.

It’s evident that Facebook sees itself as a provider of every possible kind of media, and an attractor of every possible kind of media advertiser. Radio is part of the equation. With 845 million active users, how could it be otherwise?

On December 1, 2011, KGO’s parent company, Cumulus Media, fired most of its on air-talent and other valuable staff without warning. This sends a message that large corporations do not care about progressive and free media in the Bay Area. Let’s band together to send a message to Cumulus and other media monopolies that this is not OK with us.

Former Listeners has a Twitter page, too: Ex KGO Listeners. The second Facebook group has come up with an equally to-the-point title: Occupy KGO. Here’s its statement of purpose:

“Occupy” KGO’s social media, phone lines and mail expressing outrage and disappointment in KGO management’s decision to change the station’s formatting to all-news, most of the time! No tents required. We enjoyed current on-air personalities, but those left are victims of this change as we the listeners walk away. Our primary objective is to drive listenership down significantly and encourage major sponsors to pull-out of KGO. Our ultimate goal is to devastate Cumulus Media, Inc. using these techniques to the point the company needs to re-invent themselves yet again. By doing this, we will have proved that Cumulus’ original business decision of re-formatting to all news, most of the time was, in fact, NOT what the majority of listeners wanted.

Occupy KGO also has a Tweet account: @OccupyKGOAM810 and a live chat room (which seems to work best in Google Chrome).

Ex KGO Listeners is focusing on a market walkout; Occupy KGO, on the other hand, is taking the hands-on approach. Here’s how its “phase 1″ event, held on Monday, played out:

Let KGO and its parent company Cumulus Media, Inc. know that you will not tolerate its blindsided changes, taking away the Bay Area’s open news talk forum and replacing it with over-saturated, regurgitated news.

We invite you to express your frustration in a respectful way and encourage you to stand firm with committing to tuning out of the news during times talent took the stage.

During this two-day phase, please chose one number to call each day. Both numbers are listed below. After your call, please post on our page who you talked to, how it went and the response you got.

**As a result of good discussion in the page forum, it should be noted that you should express your disappointment in a firm, but respectful manner! We’re not here to hurt others, just express ourselves.

**

Cumulus Media, Inc: 404-949-0700

KGO Listener Line: 415-216-1050

If you experience any trouble with these numbers, please post any corrections you encounter.

Good luck occupiers!

While you are wondering what “phase 2″ will look like, Twitter users are creating a variety of accounts as shout-outs to their lost talk radio heroes. Among the most creative, the Where Did Ray Taliaferro Go page. Last tweet: “We lost Ray Taliaferro, John Rothman, KGO as well. Those SOBs never cease being EVIL. http://t.co/FlhNVsSB.”

Second to last: “The only thing left at the KGO online profile for Ray Taliaferro is a Porsche ad.”

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle has a insightful op-ed piece about the format change, written by long time talk radio host and author Peter Laufer.

“The surprise silencing of KGO’s talk shows may make budget sense for the radio station’s absentee owners, but pulling the plug is bad news for civic discourse,” Laufer writes.

The demise of most KGO talk shows is not the end of the world as we know it. But it is another incremental step in our alienation from one another, and an important one. Don’t believe the argument that the Internet allows for so much interaction that radio is inconsequential. We choose about what and with whom we interact online; online we exist in special-interest neighborhoods. Nothing wrong with that.

But local talk radio – especially when we’re faced with long commutes alone – helps create and define us. Ratings spike when there is a crisis. We want to be in touch with each other, guided by a familiar – if flawed – “host” such as the local celebrities fired last week as if they were of no special value to the community KGO is licensed to serve.

“A viable community needs a common curriculum of knowledge, otherwise we cannot share the joys and concerns of our neighbors,” Laufer’s commentary concludes. “If we’re isolated from one another, we’re much less likely to care about each other and to work together for common goals.”

Clearly that “viable community” is so important to KGO listeners that they’ve turned to Facebook—and each other—in a bid to bring it back. Good luck to them.

“Why does your radio station post so many things on Facebook and Twitter that I don’t care about?” the listener asks.

Because “we just hope that you’ll provide us with more listening occasions,” the DJ explains.

“I just wanted to be a part of the station and feel that I belong,” the listener responds. “When you asked me to like you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter, I thought you cared about me. Why do you ask me to do all these things if you don’t really respond to my comments and ideas?”

“Because my boss makes me,” the DJ confides. “He says everyone is on Facebook, so we should be too.”

“But when you don’t acknowledge me socially, you make me think you don’t care,” the listener protests.

“We kind of don’t,” the DJ bluntly explains. “I mean look, we’re busy here and frankly, we’re not used to you having a voice. Try the request line if you have something to say.”

“I did.”

“And?”

“You didn’t answer.”

“Like I said, we were busy.”

The video suggests that Facebook users have audiences too, and they can be tapped for a better brand and bigger market share. What the dialogue doesn’t acknowledge is that radio stations always walk a fine line between making their listeners feel like they’re part of the family, and not empowering them so much that if a personnel or format change is necessary, the station doesn’t wind up with an unmanageable revolt on its hands.

This tension has always been around for public, community, and college stations, but commercial signals have to deal with it as well. Facebook and Twitter make the problem more interesting.

What’s your radio station’s Facebook/Twitter strategy? And if you are a radio listener, do you find following your favorite radio signal on social networking applications a satisfying participatory experience?

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?

I called up my partner (also a Facebook friend) and told her I had taken a look at the Pandora channels she’d accessed. “That’s interesting,” she replied, “since I only went on Pandora once.” So my guess is that Facebook users are automatically opted into this Pandora/Facebook relationship on a default basis. You sign into Friends Music, and you get to see your friends’ music whether they like it or not.

The question then is, how do you opt-out? The friends page says: 

TIP: Facebook features on Pandora are entirely optional. To connect, disconnect or reconnect at any time, click here.

From there you’re given three Facebook check box options: “Always share current song,” “Always share current station,” or “Ask each time.” And you can also disconnect from Facebook, presumably after you’ve signed up with the linking service. But it appears that lots of my friends are automatically opted into the “check-out-your-friends” aspect of this new feature, free of charge, unless they’ve taken the precaution of adjusting their privacy options.

Anyway, sorry to rain on this particular parade. Obviously new music discovery and sharing are a wonderful thing. And I love Pandora dearly. But as I’ve complained before, too many social networking applications automatically opt you into stuff when they shouldn’t. Let’s hear it for new music discovery, when you want your music discovered.

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.

In any event, who or what was going to facilitate this two-way radio reality? The state, Brecht suggested, or at least a future one.

“Only the State can organize this,” Brecht continued. “Its proper application, however, makes it so ‘revolutionary’ that the present-day State has no interest in sponsoring such exercises.”

And the next state (Hitler’s), sure didn’t either, as this subsequent poem suggests:

Radio Poem

You little box, held to me escaping
So that your valves should not break
Carried from house to house to ship from sail to train,
So that my enemies might go on talking to me,
Near my bed, to my pain
The last thing at night, the first thing in the morning,
Of their victories and of my cares,
Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.

Ah, what would Brecht have thought of Facebook? We’ll never know.

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.

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.

Flash forward to today, when breaking news spreads like wildfire through mobile devices, online, on Twitter, and through social networking hubs like Facebook. It kind of makes you wonder if these tools are supplanting radio in some way. An interview with Cracker’s David Lowery in Glide touches on this, making the point that Twitter and Facebook may even be the new college radio, not just for their ability to break news, but also in that they facilitate music scenes:

I see you’re on Facebook and fans can follow you guys on Twitter.  Quite different from the 80’s…or is it?

Well, exactly.  It’s different from the ‘80’s in that it’s much easier to maintain a grass roots following now.  But we basically tried all of this networking back then, just in a different way.  We collected people’s addresses, we had mailing lists, we had a newsletter.  We went around to the college radio stations, which to us back in the early’80’s was our underground blog.  We would play on the college stations and then do a show in the college towns and there was this belief that we would associate ourselves with like-minded people, which is a lot like the social networking tools of today.

There was something about the popularity of the college radio station back in the 80’s that made music so special.  Students today have no idea what that was like…

I’ll tell you what it was.  College radio in the ‘80’s was very egalitarian…it was about playing pop music for our generation…

Indeed, radio can (and did) bring people together to help spread news, spread scenes, and even spread music out to a wider audience. Although radio’s declining influence is true overall, I do think that non-commercial radio and college radio in particular, is still a powerful force. Even for breaking news. Just this week, in 2009, I got a call during my college radio show from someone following up on news he’d heard on the radio earlier in the day about the death of surf legend Bob Bogle of the Ventures. He asked if I could verify the news for him. It was like the olden days before the Internet, when people would call radio and TV stations to find out things like “was that an earthquake that I just felt?” and “where is the Sonic Youth show tonight?” And it confirmed my strong belief that radio isn’t dead yet.