What Turntable.fm accomplished
Turntable.fm‘s latest blog post reached my inbox on Friday. It focused on Turntable Live, a new feature in which Turntable room participants interact on a real time basis with bands. Then came this last distressing paragraph: “As much as we all love turntable.fm, we have decided to shut it down to fully concentrate on the […]
Commercial classical radio: a long view
After reading our story about the end of a commercial classical music radio station in North Carolina, Fred Krock sent us this reflection on his career working in radio. I began working for a major market commercial classical music station in 1953. All major markets and many smaller markets had a commercial classical music station […]
Bakersfield Burrito! 21 Low Power FM license applications to watch
Perusing through the Federal Communications Commission’s database of pending new Low Power FM applications, I see many worthy contenders. But I would like to be a fly on the wall when the FCC considers the following organizations. What caught my eye are their names: The Global Service Center for Quitting Chinese Communist Party is among […]
College Radio Survivor: Numerous Colleges Apply for LPFM Licenses
I begin this week’s installment of College Radio Survivor with the great news that many colleges and universities took advantage of the recently opened LPFM window and applied for new LPFM licenses. I’m still sifting through the data (there were nearly 3,000 total applicants), but I was thrilled to see that several college radio stations […]
50 Years Ago Today Student Radio Broke News of JFK Assassination
As people are reflecting back on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago today, many of them may remember hearing the news over the radio. College radio stations were among the media outlets breaking the news on this tragic day in history. The WMUC archives actually contain audio from the University of […]
Watch out Beijing: VOA Radiogram working on Chinese text broadcasts
Looks like the Voice of America radiogram project is super busy these days, running lots of trials with text messaging via short wave streams. When last Radio Survivor checked in on the initiative, we stopped to admire a 1938 Philco radio console rigged by a short wave operator to pick up VOA radiograms. Now there’s more […]
Losing Winamp and Shoutcast is bad for internet radio
The news last night that AOL is shutting down its Nullsoft division, which makes the venerable Winamp music app, hit me like a ton of bricks. Now, I haven’t used Winamp regularly in at least 7 years, so the loss of this software won’t have an immediate effect on my daily life. But what’s not […]
Official count of LPFM applications lower than some expectations
I just heard from Peter Doyle, chief of the FCC’s Audio Division, that there were 2,819 filings for low-power FM licenses during the application window that closed last Friday. The applications are publicly searchable in the FCC’s database. The release of this data is just a tad bit earlier than yesterday’s estimated release time, but […]
Farewell to Psychic, Radio and Television Personality Sylvia Browne
I was saddened to hear the news that celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne died yesterday in a San Jose hospital at the age of 77. A mainstay of numerous television shows and the host of her own Internet radio show, Browne was a master of broadcast media. I remember seeing her regularly on the San Francisco-based […]
The consequences of all-digital AM: an amateur operator’s view
As of this writing, almost no comments have landed in the Federal Communications Commission’s docket on AM reform, save the interesting ones of amateur radio operator Nickolaus E. Leggett. Some of his remarks focus on the consequences, as Leggett sees them, of converting the whole AM system to a digital operation. There is “a specific […]