The celebrated Austin City Limits music festival has come and gone, and Pandora streaming radio was there “soaking in the sounds and talking with the artists,” as Pandora blogger Kevin Seal put it. The online service did a lot of interesting, chatty interviews with various ACL artists. They’re fun conversations, conducted by Pandora staffer Ryan […]
Author Archive | Matthew Lasar
How the KPFA Morning Show almost killed me (and why I want it to live)
About a year ago I was driving to work along the 17 freeway, which winds through the mountains of Santa Cruz, California, and listening to Brian Edwards-Tiekert on listener supported KPFA-FM in Berkeley’s Morning Show. He was interviewing someone about the political situation in Turkey, and how politics in that country affects women. It was […]
![By Universal Studios (Frankenstein promotional photo) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Frankenstein%27s_monster_%28Boris_Karloff%29.jpg "Fear the mobile device mandate monster, now with HD Radio too!")
Fear the mobile device mandate monster, now with HD Radio too!
I stand in awe at the sheer number of features the National Association of Broadcasters and its members want mandated on cell phones. First they’re proposing that Congress pass a law hotwiring an FM radio chip into every mobile. Broadcasters are also talking about a TV tuner requirement. And now they also want HD! Here’s […]
Those Sirius XM “qualified entity” channels – who wants them?
After two years of kicking the can down the road, the Federal Communications Commission has finally established rules for allocating those “qualified entity” Sirius XM channels. Quick history: back in July of 2008 the FCC approved the merger of Sirius XM satellite radio, but with lots of conditions. One of them was that four percent […]
Pandora offers fix for Droid X glitch (it works, too)
The other day I tried to fire up Pandora on my Droid X, and to my dismay, I got dialogue box saying that the feature was experiencing “unexpected technical difficulties.” When I clicked the “OK” button, it came up again. So I wound up force quitting Pandora from the “settings” feature. But to my double […]
Last.fm posts twin word pop band tags
Last.fm staff are a creative and unpredictable bunch. When the online radio service’s interns aren’t categorizing last.fm tunes by age and gender popularity, their database programmers deploy regular expression scripts to dive into the server’s postgreSQL database and dig up every band named with the same word twice. As in “The The,” “Talk Talk,” “Duran […]
Pirate Cat in fundraising mode to buy radio license
Pirate Cat radio says that the operation has “two FM stations that it has the option of purchasing,” but it needs $60,000 to do so. Hence a fund-raising drive on the Kickstarter site. The Kickstarter campaign has until October 21 to raise the money. San Francisco’s Pirate Cat has an interesting history. For a while […]
Save KPFA declares victory in KPFA-FM board elections
In what is hopefully the last subscriber/staff board election that Pacifica radio ever has, the Save KPFA slate says it has won the majority of delegate seats on Pacifica station KPFA-FM’s Local Station Board. “I believe that the results here indicate that the listener-members do not want an explicitly sectarian station,” declared Save KPFA’s Mal […]
Want to piss off your radio audience? Talk about P2P file sharing
Man, my student Jacob Margolis got himself into a deep tub of digital hot water the other day over at KPCC-FM public radio in Pasadena, CA. Jacob took my telecommunications history class up at UC Santa Cruz and now he’s an intern down there. His crime? Explaining the mechanics of P2P file downloading on one […]
Google TV will include Pandora
Pandora the online radio feature announced today that it will be included in the upcoming Google TV service: “Today we’re expanding again and we’re thrilled to announce that Pandora is coming to Google TV. Google TV combines the best of the web with the best of TV in one easy to use entertainment experience, giving […]