Decades before the invention of the MP3, the audiocassette, along with the home dubbing deck and four-track tape recorders, put the power to create and distribute recordings into the hands of anyone with the will to record. No longer reliant on record labels or the capital investment needed to rent studio time and press records, […]
Journalism professor John Anderson has been tracking the FCC’s enforcement of unlicensed radio for 20 years, and has seen the agency have little success, despite the periodic uptick in policing the airwaves, such as we’re seeing now. He suggests there are common sense approaches to managing the FM broadcast spectrum that would address the underlying […]
I just discovered this fascinating piece of video tape on YouTube, likely dating from the 1970s, documenting a pirate radio and television station operating in my neighborhood, Sunnyside, in Portland, OR. It’s part of an archive of tapes from an archive of The Video Access Project, digitized by the Oregon Historical Society. It’s truly a […]
While we mostly celebrate non-commercial radio here at Radio Survivor, that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate commercial radio when done well. The problem is that in the 20 years since the 1996 Telecom Act grossly deregulated radio ownership, the quality of most commercial radio dropped precipitously, leaving many stations with very little local programming, with […]
At the end of 2015, it looked like the University of Nevada-Las Vegas might hand over the keys to its radio station, KUNV-FM, to Nevada Public Radio. More than a year later the situation reversed course, with the university deciding to keep the station and increase student involvement. Our college radio watcher Jennifer Waits learned […]
While trying to find the Wave Farm Radio feed on TuneIn this afternoon, I stumbled upon “NAISA – New Adventures in Sound Art” and tapped play. What I heard fit the bill of what I was looking for, but from a different source based in Canada: transmission and sound art akin to what Wave Farm […]
Transmission arts organization and community broadcaster the Wave Farm celebrates its 20th anniversary this Saturday with an event at the Fridman Gallery in New York City, titled, “Wave Farm 1997–2017: Twenty Performances for Twenty Years.” From noon to 10 PM, 22 sound and transmission artists will perform, including Wave Farm artistic director Tom Roe and […]
The local service of radio grows enormously in value when disaster strikes a community. This is what we’ve seen with the wildfires that have swept through the Northern California counties of Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, Lake and Solano beginning last week. Fast moving and unpredictable, these deadly fires also took out communications infrastructure like cell towers, […]
Ajit Pai was just renominated and confirmed as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and there are a number of pivotal policy items ahead on his agenda. Our resident FCC watcher, Prof. Christopher Terry from the University of Minnesota, joins to help us understand what’s in store and what the stakes are. First, he […]
We are very happy to announce that our weekly radio show and podcast is now available for broadcast to all non-commercial broadcast and internet radio stations. The show is available at no charge every week for all qualified stations, including college, community, public and LPFM stations as well as non-commercial internet-only stations. You do need […]
