Late night has always been a special time for radio, ever since station owners decided not to turn off the transmitter at midnight. Now that it’s no longer necessary to have a live human being operating the station during all the hours it’s on air, commercial late night radio is mostly a bland mash of […]
Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the Dr. Demento show began in 1970 on Los Angeles freeform station KPPC as a “rarities” show. By 1974 the popular radio program, which specializes in a mix of music and comedy, moved into syndication all over the country. Hosted by former college radio DJ (at the Reed College […]
As a proud thirty-eight year-old member of Generation X, I have become just a little disturbed by a trend I’ve noticed in the last few years. One might call this trend the “indie-rockification” of public radio. As my fellow grunge-survivors and I, raised on the so-called “first wave” of alternative rock and derided by boomers […]
For as much as I love radio I have to admit that there’s very few programs that I might consider appointment listening. Sure, I tune in to NPR daily to catch up on the news with Morning Edition and All Things Considered, but they’re pretty interchangeable to me. If, for some reason, the BBC News […]
Today the Kaiser Family Foundation released its latest report about media consumption among young people. The study, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, indicates that youth are consuming more media than ever before and that this trend is largely due to the increasing availability of mobile media and the tendency for […]
The Future of Music Coalition has a small boatload of classy crossover music groups sending letters to the Federal Communications Commission in support of tougher net neutrality rules. They include R.E.M., the woodwind quintet Imani Winds, and the Kronos Quartet. Here’s an excerpt from Kronos Artistic Administrator Sidney Chen’s letter to the FCC: “From the […]
As I said in my introduction to our subjective and opinionated review of radio in the 2000s, I still think it was darn near impossible to predict how the medium of radio would end up at the beginning of 2010. Sure, the seeds for satellite radio, HD radio, low-power FM, internet radio and MP3s were […]
Today I spotted an article from this weekend’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer that extols the virtues of a Sunday night hip hop show called Sunday Night Sound Session on commercial station KUBE in Seattle. The show runs from 10:45pm to 12:15am and plays music that isn’t normally heard on the station. The piece points out that the […]
Music listening has changed dramatically in the past decade in large part because of the rise of digital music. Following the explosion and shut down of illegal file sharing service Napster (1999-2001), a variety of digital music companies attempted to profit from the burgeoning interest in music delivery via the Internet. Some focused on music […]
Although college radio as a rule is much more diverse than commercial and public radio stations, there’s been a trend in the past decade for many stations to create a more focused identity surrounding a specific style of music. In some cases this is done with the help of professional consultants and paid staff members; […]
