Last Friday Nashville Public Radio paid the cash necessary to finalize its ownership of WFCL Classical 91.1 FM, once Vanderbilt University’s vibrant student run radio station. I, a classical music/classical radio lover, decided to tune into the signal today and look the website over.
Here’s my review: Zzzzzzzzzz.
Yes, just what the world needs, another classical/public radio clone. You get your predictable playlist during the day, followed by PRI’s Classical 24 syndicated service after six PM. The schedule mentions four local deejays, one of whom is also with Classical 24. You get your Metropolitan Opera Broadcast on Saturday and the New York Philharmonic concerts on Wednesday. Plus you get your NPR in the morning and evening.
That’s about it, as far as I can tell. In other public radio news, This American Life says it’s going to distribute its show via PRX.org instead of PRI.
“All the other things a distributor does – selling underwriting, encouraging stations to put our show on at better times – we’ve hired people to do for us,” Ira Glass notes. ‘Radio – and the technology of moving audio over the Internet – has changed so much that at this point, there’s little a distributor can do for us that we can’t do on our own.”
Apparently Sirius/XM gave them a call: “They asked how much money it would take to get me to quit public radio completely, to abandon terrestrial radio the way Howard Stern did, and play exclusively on Sirius-XM. So flattering! But of course, no chance of that happening. For better or worse, I seem to be a public radio lifer.”
Meanwhile KBOO in Portland, Oregon has announced the premiere of its Steam Radio Syndicate Broadcast: “a 4-hour extravaganza of sounds and stories, all broadcast live from the decks, holds, causeways and crevasses of the 150′ steamship. Over 50 artists come together to create a live multimedia soundscape with slam-poetry, fiction, music, oral histories and found sound.”
Not sure I get what this is, but maybe that’s the point. In any event, it’s happening on Friday and sounds like fun.
