Six years ago Jennifer Strange signed up for Sacramento station KDND-FM‘s “Hold your wee for a Wii” contest and lost her life as a consequence. The mother of three followed the game rules, drinking almost two gallons of water without urinating. She died of water intoxication soon afterwards. Although a nurse called in to warn […]
Author Archive | Matthew Lasar
FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai’s AM radio revitalization agenda
Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai spoke at the National Association of Broadcaster’s Radio Show gathering on Friday. He talked up AM radio “revitalization,” a topic suddenly hot now that The New York Times explored it earlier this month. Here are some of Pai’s ideas (some firm; others more tentative): 1. Repeal the FCC’s “ratchet rule” […]
ASCAP/Pandora war notes: is online radio really still “new media”?
By now everybody knows that Pandora has prevailed, at least for the moment, in its legal effort to win the right to stream all content from the ASCAP repertory. The Southern District of New York has ruled that efforts to limit what Pandora can play violated a consent decree between the online streamer and the […]
Louisville arts Internet station will apply for Low Power FM license
Happy birthday to ARTxFM in Louisville, Kentucky. The Internet radio station has just finished celebrating its first year of streaming. Now its General Manager Sharon Scott writes to tell us that the non-profit will apply for a Low Power FM license this October. Scott was responding to my essay on “Hybrid Highbrow” radio. “While the […]
Pandora ponders competing with AM/FM for local advertising
I’m eyeballing Pandora’s latest Security and Exchange Commission risk filing, which notes that the Internet streamer has yet to significantly penetrate local markets like conventional radio stations do. Seems like the company is thinking about the challenge, though. “Radio advertising has traditionally attracted primarily local advertisers, and we are still at an early stage of building […]
Hybrid Highbrow: the history of a forgotten radio format
Many years ago I invented a phrase for a peculiar kind of radio format: “Hybrid Highbrow.” I cooked up the term to describe listener supported KPFA in Berkeley, California, which in the 1950s broadcast classical music, opera, jazz, and folk music in the spirit with which Matthew Arnold understood “culture” in his book Culture and […]
College radio’s summer of chillwave
I’ve been following the CMJ and Spinitron charts of late, noting the popularity of Washed Out’s “Paracosm” with college radio deejays. The album topped Spinitron for much of August and these first two weeks of September. It only dropped to number two on Spinitron last week, and was still just three spins behind Neko Case’s […]
![My Hybrid Highbrow plug.dj room; nobody but me there so far [sniff].](https://www.radiosurvivor.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/plugdjhybridhighbrow-250x125.gif "When does YouTube become radio? When it’s on plug.dj")
When does YouTube become radio? When it’s on plug.dj
Everybody knows that YouTube competes with broadcast radio for music listeners. A Nielsen survey posted a little over a year ago reported that more teens listen to music through YouTube than through AM/FM radio, 64 and 56 percent, respectively. Most of that YouTubeing isn’t an audience based affair, however. It is listeners creating their own […]
Turntable.fm: goodbye Piki; hello SoundCloud
Turntable.fm has announced that it is sunsetting Piki.fm, which the company described as a “laid back” alternative to its better known social networking service. Here’s from tt.fm Billy Chasen’s latest blog post: “I’m also sad to announce today that we are going to shut down Piki in a couple weeks. We poured ourselves into it […]
Rough notes: Pacifica radio’s 7,200 person governance system
Last week The Village Voice posted a good piece on WBAI which identified overgovernance as a primary source of Pacifica radio’s woes. It credited me as someone who helped craft Pacifica’s by-laws, but I obtained a correction. I’m also cited as suggesting that around 2,200 people “are directly involved in the voting process” at Pacifica. […]