College Radio Watch: New LPFMs, Vastly Different Stations at Columbia, Radio’s Role in Music Business + More News
In this week’s Radio Survivor Bulletin (are you subscribed yet?), I wrote an extended piece about college radio in the 1970s. At the time, campus-only carrier current stations were HUGE and some large universities even had multiple stations serving different dorms. The music industry was taking notice of college radio and a 1971 Billboard article […]
LPFM Watch: Snuggle Buddy, UTD Dallas, and a Tribal Nation to Launch New Radio Stations + More News
This week was a little bit busier for low power FM (LPFM) hopefuls. Twenty one groups were granted permits this week and 17 applications were dismissed, bringing the grand total of granted applications to 1,785 from the fall 2013 application window. (more…)
Analyzing Jay-Z’s Acquisition of TIDAL Music Streaming Service
Rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z is throwing his hat into the streaming music arena with his acquisition last week of the Swedish company Aspiro and its two music services WiMP and TIDAL. WiMP is a Spotify competitor only available in Scandinavia, Germany and Poland. TIDAL is a CD-quality lossless service available in 31 countries world-wide, including […]
Review: TIDAL Streams Uncompressed Music to More Devices, but Not Worth It for Everyone
TIDAL–recently acquired by rapper/entrepreneur Jay-Z–is one of two uncompressed streaming music services available in the US. Instead of serving up tracks compressed using so-called “lossy codecs” MP3, AAC or Ogg Vorbis like Spotify, Beats Music or Rdio, uncompressed services stream full CD-quality music for higher fidelity. Deezer’s Elite service beat TIDAL to the uncompressed punch […]
SXSW journal: do young musicians want to get on AM/FM any more?
Take our poll on whether AM/FM radio still helps young musicians. After sitting through the Celebrity Economy in Music panel at last week’s SXSW, which featured economist Paul Krugman and the principals of Arcade Fire, I sat down outside and collected my thoughts. If touring is overwhelmingly the main way that artists make their money, […]
Poll: Is getting on AM/FM radio still important for young musicians?
After reading our post on whether getting on AM/FM radio is still important for young musicians, please take a moment to respond to our opinion poll below. You can check as many boxes below as you like, or submit your own response. Thanks! [polldaddy poll=8757028]
Digital Watch: Congressional & Legal Challenges to Open Internet Order Begin
It’s not like we didn’t see it coming. The FCC is taking flak from Congress about its Open Internet rules passed last month, and this week the first wave of lawsuits has been filed. The United States Telecom Association is the biggest plaintiff, representing the nation’s largest broadband providers. The other suit was filed by […]
Amazon Prime Music Stations Review
In the world of streaming music services Amazon Prime Music is more like the bubble gum in a pack of baseball cards. It’s not the reason you buy the pack, but you’ll probably chew it anyway. Introduced last year, Prime Music serves up commercial-free, on demand music to subscribers to Amazon Prime, which also has […]
Radio and Sound Studies at SCMS 2015
Later this week, the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference kicks off in Montreal, Quebec. This year’s conference is loaded with sound and radio scholarship, which is a great indicator of the state of radio and sound studies in academia today! (more…)
SXSW journal: Paul Krugman, band touring, and the Chipotle Burrito War
I spent last week at the SXSW conference in Austin. This post begins a series of articles about what I saw and heard, and what I think it might mean for radio. I’ll get to radio soon, but first I want to narrate my way through one of the conference’s highlights, a panel titled “The Celebrity Economy […]