Radio Survivor

John Bergmayer of Public Knowledge has a great interview with Ken Freedman, station manager of WFMU-FM in Jersey City, New Jersey. WFMU is a trailblazing radio station which was in the forefront of both the free form and dot.com eras. The dialogue is a terrific read, because it encapsulates all the dilemmas facing Internet radio right now.

“The way the Internet is built right now, there’s a catch 22, which is that the more people who use it [online streaming radio], the less well it works,” Freedman says. “And that’s just not the case with FM, or broadcast television, or cable. But, the Internet doesn’t have to be like that, but I don’t see much realistic hope for changing that.”

The economics on broadband streaming are “just terrible,” Freedman adds, “which is very frustrating to me because that’s where all the market is going. And at this point now, my radio station WFMU has twice as many people listening online as we do over FM, whereas it was only two years ago that we had finally crossed that barrier, where we had more people listening on the Internet than we had listening over FM. Now, two years later it’s twice as many.” (more…)

It seems like I can barely go a fortnight without mentioning New Jersey’s greatest radio station. But here I am again posting about freeform music station, WFMU. This time it’s because the record collector magazine Goldmine has produced a short video all about the station’s amazing record library.

I’m a vinyl enthusiast myself, having never given up on the format since buying my first record some thirty years ago. Whenever I fill in a music shift on WNUR I make a point to spin some vinyl from the station’s library. Unfortunately, space constraints prevent ‘NUR from maintaining a library as expansive as WFMU’s. Nevertheless I’m quite happy to have an impressive array of great albums to choose from.

Fellow Radio Survivor Jennifer Waits always checks out the record collections at the college stations she tours on her own blog Spinning Indie in addition to writing about vinyl’s continued use in radio here at Radio Survivor. I find that the college student DJs at WNUR are very enthusiastic about playing LPs. It seems like any hour I walk into the station I’ll find at least one turntable spinning or ready to start. Hitting play on a CD or MP3 will never have the visceral experience like cueing up a record and hitting start on a Technics 1200.

As we reported back in January, all the big radio hoopla at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show as about the incursion of internet audio services like Pandora into car stereo systems. Things have been quiet on that front until I noticed an article in the New York times last week that asks “Will the Internet Kill Traditional Car Radio?.” It looks like writer John R. Quain is one of the first press reviewers to have his hands on one of the new Pandora-equipped car receivers, the Pioneer AVIC-X920BT.

Quain reports that the sound was not quite CD quality, but better than some satellite stations. Tethered to his iPhone he noted that

AT&T’s 3G wireless service is notoriously patchy in New York City, so there were occasional dead spots when the music dropped out as the cellphone searched for a signal. Furthermore, the software will not let you create or add new Pandora stations, a nod to concerns about distracted driving.

His is the only review–such as it is–that I could find, though it does look like the Pioneer is shipping.

For everyone else who doesn’t yet have Pioneer’s top-of-the-line car receiver, listening to internet radio in the car still means connecting it via a cable or bluetooth and messing with your smartphone’s controls. And, certainly, 3G data coverage is going to be one of the most limiting factors, especially outside major cities or off major interstate highways.

Until a critical mass of car receivers will interface smoothly with smartphones and wireless broadband is more consistently available, traditional broadcast and satellite radio are going to be the choice for most folks who want to listen to something besides their own CDs and MP3s.

While there are quite a few streaming radio apps for all the major smartphone operating systems, I’m quite doubtful that too many listeners will be clamoring to listen to a local or distant cookie-cutter active rock or adult contemporary commercial station over their smartphone instead of just scanning the radio dial. I’m guessing that services like Pandora, specialty internet-only stations and unique non-commercial broadcast stations like KEXP or WFMU will end up being the winners when mobile internet radio becomes truly practical.

If it’s possible to have a crush on a radio station, then I have a crush on WFMU. The eclectic, freeform non-commercial New Jersey community radio station was an innovator in online streaming, offering on-demand show archives years before the word podcast was ever coined. In 2007 the station initiated the Free Music Archive as a curated library of audio and music available for free download and use.

On Thursday WFMU announced that the FMA has received a major grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Jason Sigal, managing director of the Free Music Archive, says

We’ve come a long way since our beta-launch last April, but we have even bigger goals for this project. I’m honored that the MacArthur Foundation shares in our vision. This is good news for everyone who likes free music, especially for artists with music to share, curators in need of an online platform, and producers in search of quality audio for their creative projects.

What’s most unique and interesting about the FMA is that it’s not a music-sharing site, nor is it an open archive like Archive.org. The curated aspect of it is important, with the artists and musicians featured being asked to contribute by an array of curators, such as radio stations WFMU and KEXP, record labels ESP-Disk and other cultural institutions. The idea isn’t to create a comprehensive archive so much as an archive of interesting and compelling music that is not just free to download, but also pre-cleared for reuse, typically under a Creative Commons license.

Back in July 2008 when the FMA was just getting off the ground I interviewed WFMU station manager Ken Freedman about the project and its goals. You can listen to the interview at the mediageek radioshow website.

Well, the geeks are getting ready to flee Austin to make way for all of the radio folks streaming in for the music portion of this massive festival of technology, music and film that is South by Southwest (SXSW).

As in years past, radio stations have both a visible and audible presence; hosting shows, doing live broadcasts, and sending contingents of DJs to check out up-and-coming bands and blog about the proceedings.

If, like me, you are fixated on radio, here’s a guide to some of the terrestrial radio stations who will be on the scene this year. Times are all CST. (If you know of more, please let us know in the comments section.)

Wednesday, March 17th:

KEXP broadcasts live (and hosts bands) from the Gibson Studios:

11:30am – Fanfarlo
1:30pm – The Middle East
3:30pm – Best Coast
5:30pm – The Crayon Fields
7:30pm – Title Tracks (more…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This past week I visited San Francisco. In addition to finally meeting my co-bloggers Matthew and Jennifer in person, I also made my pilgrimage to one of the best music stores in the country, Aquarius Records in the Mission.

The oldest music store in the city, Aquarius is not big, and it’s far from comprehensive in its selection. If you want the latest Black Eyed Peas or Bon Jovi albums you’re probably better off going to Ameoba. Instead, Aquarius specializes in arcane, experimental music, including obscure heavy metal. For most people the store would be inscrutable; to me, it’s heaven.

But it’s not just the inventory that makes Aquarius great. It’s that every CD and record in the place appears to be careful chosen, even curated. For a store its size quite a bit of space is given over to employee favorites and new releases. And every single one of those new or favorite albums has a paragraph-long write-up on the front describing the artist and album in loving detail.
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I started reading the Professor’s detailed travelogues of his AM and shortwave radio band excursions back when he was writing for WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. After he quit contributing to BotB I learned that he was keeping things going at his own Radio Kitchen blog.

The Professor belongs to a group of radio enthusiasts who record what are known as “airchecks,” which are simply off-air recordings of radio stations. Usually created as a form of historical record, air check recordings serve as an often valuable capture of what is an otherwise mostly ephemeral medium.

In the analog era airchecks were mostly recorded on boombox style radios with built-in cassette recorders. Enthusiasts often traded copies of these tapes with folks from other parts of the country or the world. You see before the internet that was the only way to hear what local radio sounded like somewhere else without traveling.

In the digital era you’d think that recording and sharing radio airchecks would be much easier, given the near ubiquity of digital audio and video recording devices. But while radios with built-in cassette recorders were omnipresent at any electronics or discount store in the 1970s through the 1990s, there are few digital equivalents in existence in the 21st century. Although Apple recently included limited FM radio recording capabilities into its newest iPod Nano, it only records up to 15 minutes, and has no AM reception. So what do you do to digitally record hours of AM or shortwave radio?

The Professor recently took up that very question. One solution one might consider is connecting your computer’s audio input to a radio. The big problem there, however, is that computers generate a ton of RF interference which can seriously mess up AM and shortwave reception. iPods and other MP3 devices wreak similar radio havoc.

In his long, but worthwhile and info-rich, post the Professor gives an overview of the state of recording radio digitally, giving a nice user review of C. Crane’s CC Witness radio, which includes an MP3 recorder.

Aside from recording my own radio programs (usually direct off the studio board), I’ve only dabbled in recording radio airchecks over the years. In the 20th century I also mostly used cassette recorders. Due to sloppy labeling practices I’ve mostly lost all of those tapes over the years. I’ve also done some recordings in the 2000s, primarily to capture source material off shortwave for unfinished audio art projects. I did most of those recordings on minidisc recorders which seem to be very well shielded compared to other digital recorders, injecting almost no noise into the signal. The last Hi-MD models let me upload the recordings directly onto my computer for sharing and manipulation. Hi-MD is also how I recorded my mediageek radioshow for podcast distribution up until last year.

I’m not sure that I will ever record enough radio airchecks to merit spending $179 on a dedicated digital radio recorder. But I sure am glad that such a device exists, keeping alive a hobby that documents the rich history of broadcasting that otherwise would just dissipate into the ether.

Those of us who call ourselves radio fans are increasingly a small and devoted lot and the same can be said of radio scholars. It’s for that reason that I was super excited to find out about the international radio conference known simply as The Radio Conference.

This year’s event, The Radio Conference 2009: A Transnational Forum, was held in Toronto, Canada in July and featured academics from all over the globe talking about a wide range of topics including radio history, commercial radio in Canada, pirate radio in 1960s’ New Zealand, African-American CB Radio Culture, liberal implications of This American Life, and the impact of the British invasion on college radio in the 1980s.

I wasn’t able to make it to the event, but radio scholar and college radio DJ Nick Rubin wrote an excellent summary, which is posted on my Spinning Indie blog.

The commercial radio industry’s reaction to last week’s Boston Globe article reporting on the relative dearth of young listeners can be fairly summed up, as “Nuh uhhhh! Not true!” Despite radio’s collective denial, I had this reality reaffirmed for me this past Friday.

I had the opportunity to speak with a group of high school and college age interns at an independent music promotion agency here in Chicago on the topic of the music radio. More so than any random grouping of teenagers and young adults, this was a group that is passionate about music and the artists that create it.

Yet, when I asked the group of about twelve interns if they listen to radio, only five rose their hands. Of that group a few of the older ones said they listen to public radio, primarily for the news. A couple said they listen to Chicago’s most well-known and widely respected commercial AOR station, WXRT, and one said she listens to a couple of the pop stations on occasion.

When I asked why they listen to little or no radio the answer was pretty similar to what we’ve been hearing in the press. They said there’s too much repetition, not enough music that they care about and way too many commercials. A few also said that none of the stations they’ve heard are diverse enough for their tastes. They don’t want to pick a station that only plays hip-hop, rock or dance music; they like their genres blended.
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