Clear Channel unloading four silent radio stations to minority non-profit; 846 to go
It was definitely a feel good moment last week when Clear Channel announced that it plans to donate four radio stations to the Minority Media Telecommunications Council. The MMTC says it will work with the National Association of Broadcaster’s Leadership Training Program to “use the stations for training and to incubate new minority and women […]
Even the Most Passionate Young Music Lovers Eschew Commercial Radio
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 […]
Young People and Radio: Listening and Participating
There’s been some chatter this week about whether or not the youth of today are listening to radio. The standard cliche is that youth have abandoned radio and Monday’s Boston Globe article “Young Listeners Tune Out Radio in Search of New Music” repeats that refrain, quoting teens and folks in their 20s who report that […]
Slacker is crash free on Blackberry Curve (after SD card installed)
The great Blackberry/Slacker crash crisis was solved today after I took the generous advice of Radio Survivor commenter ilikepizza and installed an 8GB Micro SD memory card on the device. That gave my Curve 8330 the cache it needed to run smoothly. As I mentioned in my earlier post, Slacker was crashing the OS. Clearly […]
Channel 6 Radio Backdoor No More Lucrative than Plain Old Commercial Radio?
Last month I wrote about a few legacy analog channel 6 low-power TV stations operating as radio stations, taking advantage of their audio program butting up against the low end of the FM dial. One of the pioneers is New York City’s Pulse 87. However it seems as though the backdoor to the FM dial […]
Noncommercial Leaps Past Commercial with Public Radio Player 2.0
I’m actually amazed at how noncommercial radio has become the site of so much innovation in the medium in the last decade, and how commercial radio is getting left in the dust. On the music side we have Seattle’s indie rock KEXP and New Jersey’s freeform WFMU which both have significant internet listenership along with […]
Slacker radio does The Crash on Blackberry Curve
Problem solved! See update to this story. Drat and double drat, I said, following the considerable amount of time it took to put Slacker radio’s app on my Blackberry Curve. It took about 15 minutes for the whole shebang to download and install, and then what? It played a tune for about a minute and […]
Hey radio pirates, think twice before you invoke emergency authorization
There’s another pirate radio station on the loose: FCC Free Radio in San Francisco. Jennifer Waits wrote a nice piece about it here on Thursday. I’ve been streaming the outlet for the last few days and it’s a fun signal with a big sense of humor. But I’m getting a little tired of these unlicensed […]
Don't Call them Pirates: San Francisco's New LPFM FCCFreeRadio
The San Francisco Bay Area has been home to a wide range of radio pioneers and renegades, from the very early days of broadcasting with Doc Herrold’s experiments 100 years ago to freeform radio in the early days of FM in the 1960s to pirate radio advocates like Stephen Dunifer of Free Radio Berkeley. And […]
Does the FCC short change rural radio?
A small band of reform groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to rethink how it allocates radio licenses in rural areas. They argue that the current system allows big broadcasters to grab suburban/rural signals on the edge of large metropolitan regions, in some instances knocking out smaller stations. The license seeker, they say, doesn’t […]