Amazon.com Widgets Reading Jennifer Waits’ excellent history of Internet radio, I’m pondering the same question everyone else is these days: How am I going to listen to it? Just go to Amazon.com and you can choose from an amazing assortment of streaming audio receivers. But before we look at some of them, I’ve got an […]
Author Archive | Matthew Lasar
Twitterers call and pray for Rush Limbaugh to die, live, not die, or all of the above
As everybody in the radio world knows, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh is in a Honolulu hospital, recovering from chest pains. Meanwhile, something of a referendum on his fate is being conducted on Twitter. “Please, Rush Limbaugh, DIE NOW!” tweeted Chuck69dotcom not too long ago. “oh pleez oh pleez oh pleez let Rush Limbaugh […]
NPR calls for Congress to create "common public media waiver"
As we’ve reported, National Public Radio has been filing comments with the Federal Communications Commission a lot these days, talking up its localism initiative, Android app, and new mobile site. NPR’s latest commentary to the FCC on its National Broadband Plan reiterates all these points. But here’s the paragraph in the filing that got our […]
The decade’s most important radio trends: #5 The Age of Pandora
It’s difficult for me to write about the Internet radio phenomenon without disclosing my personal investment in the subject. I listen to the Pandora radio service most every day that I work at my computer. Pandora has saved classical music radio for me, and, I’ll bet, for tens of thousands of others. I love classic […]
The decade's most important radio trends: #7 Internet Radio's Day of Silence
One of the more frustrating peculiarities of our system of broadcasting here in the United States is that over-the-air radio stations don’t have to pay performance royalties to artists, while Internet and satellite stations do. If this wasn’t enough, in March of 2007 the Copyright Royalty Board announced what most streamers experienced as pretty steep […]
The decade's most important radio trends: #8 The Great Fairness Doctrine Panic
It was the summer of 2007. Not moments after the Republican far right triumphed over President Bush’s hated immigration reform law than Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, introduced a rider to a budgetary bill in the House that would forbid funding for the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the Fairness Doctrine. The bill overwhelmingly […]
The decade’s most important radio trends: #12 National Public Radio keeps growing
Everybody knows the fate of over-the-air radio over the last ten years. “On Demand Killed the Radio Star,” as Boston Globe Media put it in 2005, going so far as to ask whether terrestrial radio is on the way out. Consolidation led to poor broadcasting choices like over-advertising and de-localization, the story goes. MP3 players […]
The decade's most important radio trends: #14 Pacifica radio democratizes itself
#14 in our series on crucial radio trends of the decade.
Could the wireless spectrum crisis resolve the Sirius XM/WCS radio band interference crisis?
The endless battle between Sirius XM and the WCS Coalition over band interference may see a little more public attention that that the Chair of the FCC says there’s a “looming spectrum crisis” for wireless.
Fairness Doctrine for Stalin on Russian radio?
A Russian radio station is being sued for disrespecting the memory of Josef Stalin. “What kind of bastard would be brave enough to say one word in his defense?” the host asked. Let’s start with Russia’s Prime Minister.