flickr.com/photos/kimli

Back in 2006, Microsoft released their first MP3 player: the Zune. It was supposed to be the iPod killer with its large screen which lets you play movies. It had a built in radio, which let you tune into your favorite FM radio stations.  It also had one unique feature which let you send other Zune users songs, so basically you could share music with each other. It was a great idea, but Zune was never as popular as the iPod. With 30 gigabytes of storage, the Zune was a really good mp3 player; there was only one problem with it: it was bulky—like a brick.

In 2008 during my senior year of high school, I got a Zune through a Microsoft promotion where you had to earn points by playing mind-numbing flash games for hours before you could spend them to collect your prize—Club.bing.com, I think it was. I told my friends about it, and they were skeptical, saying that it wasn’t legitimate. I went with it anyway, and surely enough it came.

Whenever I take out my Zune, at least one person will look at it—either out of disgust or surprise. I think it’s because mp3 players have evolved so much that the current standards require it to be thin, have a touch screen on it or a phone—not a brick with a clicking wheel on it. The new iPods look really nice; I used to try to stay up to date on mp3 players, but eventually, I decided that it wasn’t worth it.  I feel that companies just make minor improvements to the models, making it a little bit thinner or nicer without any real improvements. Sure, the new iPods can browse the internet and watch youtube videos online, but in the end, the devices’ purpose is to play music. My Zune does exactly what it was created to do: play music and movies.

Today when you look at any kinds of commercials, they try to sell their products to you by addressing one thing they know will hook you: individuality. They focus on this point, because a majority of us were raised being told we’re special—and how else can we stand out from the crowd if not buying things we don’t need? How many people do you see on the bus with an iPhone out, or a really fancy iPad (I don’t have anything against Apple products, really—I have two iPods)? How many people do you see really big-shiny pick-up trucks that are completely mud free? How many people do you see wearing a certain kind of shoes, because it’s the new “in?” Because of this craving to be unique, ironically, everyone ends up being the same.

There was a really good quote by comedian Louis C.K. and it goes along the lines of this, “Rich people don’t know what it’s like to be poor, but poor people know what it’s like to be rich—they know exactly what it’s like, because they fantasize about it constantly. Every poor person has their whole rich life planned out.”

He’s right; going to extravagant places, buying things we can’t really afford—a lot of people want to stand out, but they’re doing it the wrong way. Buying nice things to make up for a lack of personality doesn’t make anyone unique; the attention you get might be jealousy or even rage. I want a lot of stuff in my life—but now I always stop and ask myself: Do I really need this? And not surprisingly, the answer is usually no.

My Zune does its job of helping me get my music fix, but I’m at the point where I rarely use mp3 players anyway, since it shuts you off from the world. When I do, however, it stands out in its own weird way; maybe because it’s an obsolete product that everyone’s forgotten, or maybe it just looks like I’m holding a brick. Whatever the case, my Zune hasn’t failed me after all these years of wear and abuse, so I’m not going to abandon it for something new and shiny.

My Imagining Silicon Valley box

I grew up in Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of “Silicon Valley,” and my entire life has been shaped by the ever-advancing technologies being invented in my childhood backyard. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the death of Steve Jobs yesterday has hit me in ways that I wouldn’t expect.

It was a source of pride for many of us that the founders of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were locals who grew up in the same surroundings that we did (they both went to my junior high and high school). Parents of elementary school friends worked at Apple in the 1970s and I first got my hands on an early Apple computer in 1978 or 1979 when I took my first computer programming class in elementary school. Probably using the BASIC programming language, we learned how to translate code into graphics that ended up looking like a boxy needlepoint display of letters on the computer screen. But it was magic.

The first computer that I bought was an Apple and my first smartphone was an iPhone. Although I’ve eschewed online music, I can’t ignore the fact that iTunes changed everything for the music and radio industry. Before its launch I worked at a start-up that tried to figure out how to use online playlists for music discovery; but it wasn’t until iTunes that the masses truly understood digital music’s potential.

Oddly enough I heard about Steve Job’s death over the radio. I’d been glued to the TV and radio all day yesterday, following the manhunt for the disgruntled worker who shot 10 people in Cupertino. My family still lives in the house on the Cupertino/Sunnyvale border where I grew up and the gun-toting mass murderer was on the loose very nearby. As I listened to KCSB for the latest word on his whereabouts, I was shocked when the radio announcer casually stated the news that Steve Jobs had died. I wasn’t expecting it and it seemed even more surreal since Cupertino was the focus of so much news attention that day already. It’s only natural that both events would lead me to reflect back on a childhood in the suburbs.

By the time that I was a teenager, I thought that Sunnyvale was boring. I was drawn to the East Coast for college, in large part because I felt that there was more history there. But after college I became fiercely protective about Sunnyvale (and Santa Clara Valley)’s hidden history. All of my life, remnants of the past (orchards, farm houses, feed stores, lumber yards, etc.) and signs of the area’s history were being torn down and replaced by modern structures and office parks.

Places like Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Atari were lauded as tangible examples of the Silicon Valley brain trust. Yet, I also thought it was important to remember the ghosts of Santa Clara Valley, from the one lurking in the Toys ‘R Us of my youth, to Sarah Winchester (of Winchester Mystery House fame), to a long-gone train store in my neighborhood. For a graduate school project I wrote a paper, built my first web page, and created a shoe box full of memorabilia all around the idea of “imagining my suburbia and searching for ghosts.” As I pulled out that shoe box today, not only did I find my college application essay and a printout about the demographics of Cupertino, but I also found a scrap of paper that said “Jobs & Wozniak” and another that read “work hard = success.”

Everyone has hometown heroes and Jobs was certainly the most famous of those heroes to emerge from the community where I was raised. But I don’t think it was until the last decade that the true impact of Steve Jobs was felt. iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and the iPad helped to elevate Apple to a whole new level as they continued to innovate products that touched even more aspects of the daily lives of people everywhere.

Paul has already pointed out some connections between Apple and radio and I’d have to agree that iTunes and the iPod have presented challenges to the radio industry. But at the same time, iTunes and the iPhone have also facilitated both the discovery of terrestrial radio stations and have allowed for new ways to listen in. Some have likened the iPhone to a modern day transistor radio, since it can be held in one’s hand and can stream radio stations.

As I continue to process the news of Jobs’ death, I also realize that his “local” status has always been a big deal for me. In Silicon Valley, many people are transplants, having migrated here in order to chase their dreams. As a local gal, it’s somehow reassuring and comforting that someone who shared similar experiences as a kid was able to have such a huge impact on the world. I’m just sorry that he didn’t have the time to realize even more of his dreams.

I’m sure most Radio Survivor readers have already heard about the passing of Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. Jobs will be rightly celebrated for how his company’s products, directed by his unique vision, changed the way most of us make and consume media. This includes radio.

Whether intentionally or not, the introduction of the iPod and iTunes in 2001 almost instantly created a fearsome challenge for traditional terrestrial radio. As the first elegant and user-friendly portable digital music player, the iPod helped create a perfect storm for the commercial radio industry, especially the nation’s largest radio owner, Clear Channel.

It’s easy to forget that at the turn of the century Clear Channel was riding high with mammoth profits brought on by its program of aggressive consolidation whereby the company vacuumed up stations, fired staff, and consolidated operations and programming in order to drive down costs. By 2001 the public had started to become wise to the fact that their local stations no longer sounded the same, with more repetition and fewer recognizably local personalities. As listeners started to tune out, Jobs’ Apple stepped in with a desirable alternative, the iPod.

Sure, folks had mobile CD and cassette players for years before the iPod. And many models of MP3 players had been on the market since the late 90s. But for most people the iPod offered the first user-friendly device that could supply 1,000 songs in a pocket-sized package.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent podcasting, but the integration of podcast management with iTunes in 2005 made the new medium accessible to new listeners who might never have sought out a specialized “podcatcher” application. The iTunes store almost instantly became the default directory for finding audio programming from across the web, which otherwise required many Google searches to sniff out.

While the iPod and iTunes are not exclusively responsible for the declining fortunes of commercial radio–I’d argue the industry deserves most of the blame–the impact of these technologies cannot be denied. So today I remember Steve Jobs for how he changed the landscape of radio and audio programming for the better, by making it easier and fun to find and listen to programming from around the world, helping to foster a whole new medium that sounds a lot like radio.

Soon you can listen to This American Life and tweet about it at the same time. How will you get anything else done?

As an iPhone user I can say with full knowledge that one of the things that holds the device back when it comes to listening to online radio is the lack of multitasking. While the iPod app allows you to play your audio files in the background while surfing the web or using other apps, you can only use third-party apps one at a time. Since listening to online radio, Pandora, last.fm or Slacker requires a third-party app, there’s no reading facebook or playing video games.

This restriction is sort of tolerable on a small mobile device like the iPhone, but it’s far more annoying on the iPad. Imagine if your laptop or netbook wouldn’t let you listen to streaming stations while word processing or web browsing. In fact, for work I use a Palm Pre which does permit multi-tasking. I do occasionally listen to Pandora on the Pre while answering emails, even though it kills the battery more quickly.

Wired’s Gadget Lab has a sneak preview of a beta of the forthcoming iPhone OS version 4. Top on the feature list is real multitasking. When the new OS drops later this summer iPad and iPhone 3GS users finally will be able to run their favorite streaming audio app in the background while using other apps. You might even be able to run two audio apps at the same time to test your bandwidth and tolerance for cacophony.

Unfortunately multitasking will not be available for first generation iPhones or the 3G. I guess our puny little processors can’t handle it.

#2 in our series on radio trends of the decade

Although today’s New York Times claims that “Internet Radio Stations are the New Wave,” a look back at the past decade makes it very clear that Internet Radio’s growing influence is hardly revolutionary news. In fact, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the Internet and Internet Radio during the last 10 years.

The radio landscape has changed tremendously and much of that had to do with the adoption of both the Internet and streaming media by the mainstream.

According to the decade-spanning report, The Infinite Dial 2009: Radio’s Digital Platforms, by Arbitron and Edison Research, in 1999 only 50% of Americans had online access compared with 85% in 2009.

Beginning in 2006, the majority of Americans with at-home Internet access had a broadband connection; making it easier to download and stream audio content. By 2009, approximately 42 million Americans listened to online radio weekly (twice the number who did in 2005).

Although this massive growth of Internet radio happened in this decade, the first attempts at streaming radio started in the early 1990s. The very first terrestrial radio stations to begin broadcasting online were college radio stations WXYC (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and WREK (Georgia Tech University) in 1994.

Always ahead of the curve, many college radio stations embraced webcasting, online playlists, blogging, podcasts and broadcast archives well before these technologies were adopted by their commercial counterparts. Tech-savvy students were often the instigators and developers of the technology (as was the case at WREK). Commercial station KPIG claims to be the first commercial radio station to broadcast online with its first webcasts in 1995.

Early online-only radio (and broadcast) ventures emerging in the mid to late 1990s included Broadcast.com (later acquired by Yahoo), Spinner (which started in 1996 as TheDJ.com and was later acquired by AOL), NetRadio, Imagine Radio (purchased by MTV), and online radio network Live365.

According to a study by Arbitron and Edison Media Research, in 1999 13% of Americans reported listening to Internet radio. This was a huge jump in listeners over the course of a 6-month period and they speculated at the time that:

“…adoption of audio online has occurred far faster than other historical new audio technologies such as AM or FM radio, CDs, cassettes, etc.”

By 2000, Arbitron and Edison reported that 20% of Americans were listening to online radio and by 2001 they found that among those listening to online radio, more than 50% said that they mostly listened to stations from their local area. In 2003 the percentage of Americans who had ever listened to online radio grew to 40%.

Online radio encompasses not only terrestrial radio stations with webstreams, but also the variety of online-only offerings including the now-defunct community-based interactive streaming service Echo that launched in 2000, the DJ-less recommendation-engine Pandora (our #5 trend), and a number of companies that hosted a range of genre-specific stations such as Radio@AOL and Live365. By decade’s end, Apple was also hosting radio streams and providing a directory of stations through iTunes.

Along the way, there were bumps in the road, especially when it came to working out all of the details about copyright and royalty payments for online broadcasts. Protests about royalty payment rate hikes led to 2007′s Internet Radio Day of Silence (our trend #7 ) and there’s still ongoing debate about payment schedules.

Before taking their own broadcasts online, commercial radio stations felt the sting of competition from the wide range of radio offerings available online. By the end of the decade many learned that the best response was to create their own online streams and increase the variety of programming that they aired.

Yet, the often trend-setting non-commercial radio stations were miles ahead of their commercial counterparts, embracing the range of opportunities available to them by taking their broadcasts online. Since my personal focus is on college and indie radio stations, here are a few of the ways that these stations have adapted and evolved due to online radio:

1. Some college radio stations chose to go web-only, either because administrations took away their terrestrial signal (see trend #11) or because they no longer saw the relevance of using older methods like campus-only carrier current (and even FM!). For stations with college-age listeners, computers were often more common in dorm rooms than radios; so terrestrial broadcasts seemed a bit antiquated (we’ll see if this changes as FM radios are incorporated into iPods and iPhones).

Notre Dame's online-only WVFI

2. Many college and public radio stations adopted multiple web streams for different types of content. Some college stations aired different content over their terrestrial signals than they did on their online streams, whereas others crafted online-only stations specifically for training purposes.

3. Students who were eager to start up college radio stations on campus were now able to easily do so by launching online-only radio stations, without having to go through the laborious process of applying for an FCC license for a terrestrial signal (which they would have little chance of getting anyway).

4. Pirate radio stations had more options to share their community-oriented programming. Stations like East Village Radio opted to shed its unlicensed past when it went online-only and has attracted a wide following. Similarly, when the FCC came knocking at Pirate Cat Radio in San Francisco, the station decided to abandon the FM airwaves for the safety of an online-only signal.

5. Audiences for stations with weak terrestrial signals have the opportunity to grow exponentially through streaming which allows listeners to tune in from all over the globe.

In another 10 years we’ll probably be amused by the distinctions that we now make between terrestrial radio, satellite radio, Internet Radio, HD Radio, podcasts, etc. As technologies converge, these categories may matter less and less. It’s already the case that one can purchase Internet radio tuners that can dial up any station that’s online and broadcast it to your home much like a classic radio would. And with iPods and mobile phones now incorporating FM tuners, some have speculated that they may be the new transistor radios.

In any event, Internet Radio is here to stay, bringing with it endless variety, thousands of stations (from commercial to college), and every subgenre of music you could dream up. It’s hard to imagine the world without it.

#3 in our series on radio trends of the decade

Music listening has changed dramatically in the past decade in large part because of the rise of digital music. Following the explosion and shut down of illegal file sharing service Napster (1999-2001), a variety of digital music companies attempted to profit from the burgeoning interest in music delivery via the Internet.

Some focused on music subscription services (such as Rhapsody and eMusic), others turned toward music recommendations (like my former employer Uplister, which had hoped to turn the playlist into the “next unit of global music consumption”), and the legal descendants of Napster (from Apple to Amazon.com) became purveyors of MP3 downloads.

The timing of the digital music explosion couldn’t have been better; as many radio listeners were turned off by the increasingly consolidated commercial radio landscape that appeared on the scene as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which reduced limitations on the number of stations that could be held by one owner.

A direct result of the reduction in the number of station owners was less diversity on radio, with shorter playlists and fewer artists represented. As a 2002 report by The Future of Music Coalition pointed out, music fans were not pleased by this and stated that they actually “want longer playlists with more variety,” flying in the face of commercial radio’s own survey results.

So, it’s no surprise that services like Rhapsody and iTunes, where music fans could select their own playlists of music from a menu of choices would resonate so strongly with folks who had turned away from radio. Portable digital music players appeared on the scene just before 2000 with MPMan and the Diamond Rio, followed by Creative Lab’s Nomad Jukebox in 2000 and the Apple iPod in 2001.

The iTunes Music Store was launched in 2003 and the first mobile phones to incorporate MP3 players arrived in Asia the same year. MP3 players became increasingly common in many mobile phones and again Apple was a leader in popularizing their use with its introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (which had music features of the iPod built in to it).

A report issued by Bridge Ratings in 2006 pointed out that in their survey sample, young people were turning to MP3 players vs. terrestrial radio. According to the study, “12-24 year olds substantial increase in time spent with their MP3 players has significantly reduced their use of traditional AM/FM radio.”

Of course, at decade’s end we’re seeing massive convergence to such a degree that devices like the iPod may not necessarily be as big of a threat to traditional radio as they once seemed. Some portable music players and phones actually contain FM radios and may serve to draw in new listeners, whereas many others allow for the streaming of radio or the playback of broadcast archives.

As a radio DJ and indie radio fan I still have a preference for expertly curated radio playlists vs. iPods on Shuffle, but the lines keep blurring. Some lazy college radio DJs just plug their iPods into the board instead of hand-selecting CDs and pieces of vinyl to play over the airwaves and some iPod owners lovingly craft playlists that would be the envy of any college radio fanatic.

And then there’s commercial station RXP in New York City, which actually has an on-air feature called “Spin Matt Pinfield’s iPod,” in which listeners chose a number between 1 and 8000 in order to hear a random track from the morning show DJ’s iPod; thus bringing the whimsy (and breadth) of an iPod’s library to the commercial airwaves. So who knows, perhaps the iPod (and certainly consumers’ preference for massive choice in music) will help to spice up commercial radio yet.

#4 in our series on radio trends of the decade

Like so many innovative ideas, podcasting is quite simple. It’s not like there weren’t online radio programs prior to 2004. The A-Infos Radio Project has been providing free hosting for independent and grassroots radio programs since 1996. Live365 made live webcasting broadly available back in 1999. But what podcasting brought to the party was a way to make finding and downloading online programs easy and automatic.

Prior to 2005 if there was a online radio program you wanted to listen to you had to check its website on a regular basis to see if a new program was available. Or if it was a live program you had to make sure to tune in to the stream at the right time, just like conventional radio. If you didn’t check in with your program’s website, then you wouldn’t know if there was a new episode.

At its essence podcasting is just an extension to an earlier innovation known as RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask. Developed in the late 1990s and finding popularity with the emergence of blogs in the early 2000s, RSS provides a site summary to a “feed reader” which allows you to know when blogs and other sites are updated, rather than having to check back.

Podcasting resulted from the simple addition of the “enclosure” tag which tells a feed reader or “podcatcher” to download an audio or video file. This little addition to the RSS specification meant that you could now use a piece of software to periodically check your favorite radio sites and download new programs as soon as they became available.

What really caused podcasting to take off was when Apple added podcatching functionality to its iTunes application. When that happened iPod users no longer needed to manage separate programs to find and download podcasts. Using iTunes they could do it all using the same application they used to sync and manage their iPods. But make no mistake, podcasting existed before Apple’s embrace. In fact many early adopters chafed against the obvious iPod reference inherent in the podcasting name. Nevertheless, the name stuck.

It’s fair to say that the emergence of podcasting revitalized online radio, and even audio programs in general. In the same way that TiVo and PVRs breathed new life into television, podcasting suddenly gave listeners the ability to mold their intake of audio programming to their own schedule. At the same time, RSS podcasts feeds made it much easier to index podcasts and create easily searchable online directories organized by genre and keyword. It’s that innovation which stimulated an onslaught of podcast production.

And thus did thousands of podcasts bloom. Of course, they varied in quality from the brilliant to the moronic to the mundane. But any radio lover cannot discount the importance of thousands of people suddenly embracing the production of audio programming at the same time the commercial broadcast radio industry was busy gutting itself. Producing your own podcast became so popular that within a couple of years a score of new USB microphones and podcast production kits became available to give the budding podcaster better tools than a $9 headset microphone.

Flashing forward to the end of the decade podcasting is now something we take for granted. It’s also largely been robbed of its counter-cultural “pirate” cred. Like blogs before it, podcasting has largely been co-opted by the mainstream media giants. Looking at the iTunes Music Store’s top 20 podcasts, the vast majority are produced by major broadcasters–including NPR–or other big media companies. Only two out of 20 might be considered independent by comparison: The Onion’s Radio News and Mondo Media’s Happy Tree Friends. This mainstream corporate dominance doesn’t mean that there aren’t still plenty of radically independent podcasts out there. There are also quite a few successful and not-so-radical podcast enterprises built outside the mainstream media. It’s just that when it comes to popularity they’re no match for the promotional power of Sony Pictures, or even National Public Radio.

Still, I contend that podcasting gave a shot in the arm to the art of audio programming, and therefore, also radio. Note that while public radio programs like This American Life are also some of the most popular podcasts, you don’t see any major commercial radio programs quite so high on the list. Good audio programming transcends medium, whether it’s on your radio or your iPod. Even if they couldn’t reach Car Talk-sized audiences, podcasting gave independent producers an opportunity to reach a bigger audience than before podcasting. That alone is a valuable, lasting legacy.

iPod Nano, now with radio!

Apple's making sure the iPod Nano won't kill music like home taping.

I think the radio in the iPod Nano was today’s biggest surprise since Jobs and other Apple spokespeople have scoffed at the idea in the past. Back in 2005, Apple’s iPod division head told the Apple Expo in Paris that,

in Apple’s experience, customers just don’t want radios on their iPods. “Believe it or not, we don’t get a lot of requests from customers” for a radio, he said. “We’re very hesitant to add new features unless we feel a significant portion of the customer base want it.”

It is true that Apple introduced the iPod radio remote back in 2006, although it seems no longer to be available. Perhaps it was killed in anticipation of the new radio Nano.

I’ll be curious to hear reviews and reports from radiophiles who get their hands on the new Nano and evaluate how good the reception is. A truly decent portable headphone radio is actually difficult to find. While $150 is a bit much to pay for one–especially one that only has FM–when combined with an 8 GB iPod and a video camera (!), it’s not a bad deal. I just wish Apple would have put the radio in my iPhone 3G, since listening to internet radio over the 3G data network kills my battery in about an hour. By comparison I have a ten-year-old RCA brand pocket radio that runs over 100 hours on two AAAs.

If we see radios with live-pause show up in the next generation iPhone or iPod Touch. Then we can anoint Mr. Jobs as St. Steve, savior of radio.

Sometimes the reformers even get their way. AT&T had to pledge to honor net neutrality rules for at least a couple of years to get their merger with BellSouth past the FCC in late December.

Now that XM and Sirius satellite radio want permission to marry, the reformers have returned. The good folks at Public Knowledge have filed comments with the FCC on the union. They want conditions for merger to include a requirement that the new entity reserve five percent of its resources for “non-commercial educational and informational programming over which it has no editorial control.”

It’s a very reasonable suggestion, but I’m going to play dreamer this time. I say let XM and Sirius die. Then turn all of satellite radio into a listener supported, non-profit service.

XM and Sirius say they need to merge because they’ve still got a long climb to get to a sustainable plateau. Lots of smart people doubt that they will ever get there. Business Week offers a bleak prognosis under any circumstances, noting that neither firm has yet to earn “a penny of profit.”

“Whether or not Washington lets XM Satellite Radio Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio merge seems beside the point,” a recent column on the proposal begins. “Even if they get the nod, there’s no guarantee the six-year-old business model will survive.”

The problem is that when the FCC launched its satellite Digital Audio Radio Service in 1997 (SDARS), it did not allow for the technology to go through what I call its natural non-profit period.

“The American consumer can now look forward to an exciting new radio service,” the FCC’s October 1997 press release on SDAR’s promised, forgetting that when telecommunications technologies first surface, their founders often do not know how to make money from them.

That was early radio’s story. As the historian Susan Smulyan notes in her terrific book Selling Radio, so uncertain were early broadcasters about how to monetize their industry, that in 1925 one radio magazine actually held a contest for the best essay on how to make radio profitable.

This dilemma goes all the way back to the early days of telegraph, when its investor deprived inventor Samuel Morse pleaded with Congress to take over the technology. And it appears more recently with the Internet, which functioned as a tool of universities and the Defense Department long before it morphed into America On Line.

Somehow the framers of our satellite radio service thought that they could skip this natural non-profit phase. In retrospect, their decision seems naive. FM radio struggled for decades with the same obstacles that satellite faces today: a potential audience that needed new receivers to access the service, and a new juggernaut competitor, television, that sucked away listeners and turned them into viewers.

Satellite’s competing juggernaut is not TV, but the Internet, which links to a veritable smorgasbord of terrestrial stations that I can access via my wireless laptop and a pair of good speakers. And in the battle for freeway commuters, satellite still has to trounce terrestrial radio, which, remarkably, continues to hold its own despite a drop in listeners and an overall decline in quality.

So it seems unlikely that this version of satellite radio will make it, merged or unmerged. But there is another system for developing the service that better fits the bill: listener supported non-commercial radio (which for convenience’s sake I will acronym LS-NCR).

Most radio listeners have become so accustomed to commercial broadcasting that they regard LS-NCR as a sort of weird, alien protocol. But, in fact, it’s as American as apple pie. We invented it on the west coast of the United States after the Second World War. KPFA-FM, launched in Berkeley, California, in 1949, remains the world’s longest running listener supported radio station. KPFK-FM in Los Angeles followed ten years later.

LS-NCR helped FM grow. Like XM and Sirius, KPFA founder Lew Hill sold receivers to subscribers so that they could listen to his station. A decade later a wave of “free form” radio stations, many of them strong on listeners and lighter on profits, built an even more passionate audience for FM.

In a very real sense, XM and Sirius are listener supported institutions, but they thought that they could build a loyal subscription paying audience from the top down, with auto manufacturers and cable companies as their partners, rather than from the bottom up, with the listeners. They were wrong.

I was talking about this the other day with my friend Bonnie Simmons, who ran San Francisco’s free form station KSAN for ten years. Bonnie pointed out that XM and Sirius recruited many of their deejays from terrestrial radio. Most of them had strong local or regional followings, but have not duplicated that loyalty on a national level. Bob Edwards and Howard Stern have come to satellite with a built-in national cache, but they are not typical of the genre.

And let’s face it, a lot of XM/Sirius isn’t even really radio. It’s juke box; deejayless streams of music that you can put together just as nicely with your own iPod.

Skeptics of my proposal will point to the historic under performance of listener supported radio. And they’re right to be skeptical. Most radio stations that depend primarily on subscriptions have relatively small audiences. There are two reasons for this shortfall.

First, the FCC has allocated only a tiny number of frequencies for listener supported radio stations. This has always forced them to cater to too many different audiences. As a result, “community” radio stations, which run primarily on the listener supported model, often become balkanized exercises in cultural power sharing; difficult for the average radio consumer to listen to on a regular basis.

Second, while the listener supported model sustains a radio station, it rarely capitalizes it. LS-NCR on its own usually keeps the frequency loping along on a maintenance level, but doesn’t provide the money for professional talent and on-going development.

Giving our digital satellite audio service over to a wide field of listener-supported non-profits would address the first problem. A critical mass of LS-NCRs would allow them to diversify: to create sports LS-NCRs, and all-news LS-NCRs, and music format LS-NCRs—from hip-hop to classical, rather than forcing all these tendencies to cram themselves together into a few stations on the bottom of the FM dial. To the extent that terrestrial LS-NCR’s have been able to specialize, they have become much more effective stations.

Second, the FCC, or Congress, should create a matching fund to support digital satellite LS-NCRs. Once the station reaches a threshold of subscribers, the matching fund kicks in with additional money.

And rather than coming from the highly politicized Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the fund should flow from spectrum auction sales or satellite leasing income. I would even look at the FCC’s ever evolving Universal Service Fund as a source.

But even if a steady font of income isn’t immediately identified, converting satellite radio to a listener-supported service will get the ball rolling. Because when all else fails, LS-NCRs run on fanatic power, led by “the little man with a large view,” as FCC consultant and FM booster Charles Siepmann wrote 50 years ago in his book on FM, Radio’s Second Chance.

And in the end, isn’t it always the fanatics who pioneer the future?

So here is what I suggest that the FCC do. Let XM and Sirius run their course. Then open up SDARs in a manner similar to the FCC’s widely anticipated application window for Non-Commercial Educational radio.

Launch an application period for as many digital satellite LS-NCRs as possible. Plug in the usual criterion: only non-profit organizations with accountable boards may apply. They’ve got to prove that they can run the station without income for at least three months.

But add one more requisite to the equation. Partition the matrix of licenses into about a dozen generally recognized formats: news, talk, various cultural forms, from hip-hop to a BBC Third Programme style format, even sports.

Make the applicants pick a format. Don’t let the germinators of this new service fall into the old trap of trying to please everybody who hovers on the margins of our present commercial system of broadcasting.

Trust me. This will work. Ten years from now digital satellite radio will be crammed with passionate, loyal, paying listeners.

Then corporate America will have something viable to ruin.