After touring at least 30 different radio stations, I’ve amassed a small collection of photos and have begun to obsess about the different categories of objects, personalities, and oddities that I’ve spotted while on my field trips. Although I’m running a bit late with the “12 Days of”… theme, is it ever really too late […]
OK, I know this is just a shameless marketing blitz for the new Muppet Movie. But as a child of the 70s and 80s, the Muppets are a treasured memory. I’m certain that I wore out my LP of the original Muppet Movie soundtrack, and the Muppet Show first exposed me to the likes of […]
The answer: a leaked sex tape. It’s been making the rounds of the blogosphere this week. And if you keep your NPR affiliate on all day long, or load your iPhone up with This American Life and Planet Money podcasts, then this is the sex tape you’ve been waiting for. Or not. OK, it’s not […]
Beer advertising is certainly a staple of any radio station aiming at a mostly male demographic, and beer companies sponsor many concerts and radio events. But how many stations actually have their own beer? I was sitting in a nice Chicago tavern that features vintage beer cans displayed on a shelf circling the room. I […]
Lurking around WFMU-FM of New Jersey’s great website, I’ve been stumbling across all kinds of fun blog posts about anti-hippy songs. The most famous of these, of course, is Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” but a 2008 post mentions others, including Ed Faucet’s “Hippy Stomp,” Alvie Self’s “Hippieville,” and Johnny Bucket’s “Hippy in a Blunder.” […]
Those graphics loving geeks over at Last.fm are at it again. Remember the flower power experiment? Now Last.fm staffer Andrew Clegg describes how he’s grabbed a pile of the online music service’s user tags and combined them with data from the Echo Nest’s million song dataset. Then he brought the whole goulash over to the […]
This weekend, Radio Survivor embarked on the Terrible Twos. On June 11, 2009 we posted our first story on Low Power FM radio. Jennifer Waits, Paul Riismandel, and I have been blogging away ever since. 24 months later, our mission is the same. We see ourselves as critical advocates for participatory radio—community, public, college, Low […]
You’ve seen the bumper stickers, and today at least it’s true for Family Radio. Their website has been unreachable all day, likely due to being overloaded with traffic. So that’s also made it difficult to get their online radio stream. So I tuned in to Family Radio’s shortwave station WYFR this afternoon (at 13615 Khz) […]
Not long ago I was driving down the San Francisco Bay Area’s Highway 280 and listening to Foothills Junior College’s KFJC-FM, and some really weird music came on. I tried to get what it was from the deejay’s back-announce commentary, but got distracted by traffic. Anyway, it sounded like Karlheinz Stockhausen’s piece for String Quartet […]
This past Saturday I celebrated Record Store Day by dropping in to the Numero Group’s pop-up store in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. Numero is a record label specializing on archival re-releases of forgotten treasures, especially regional records from small labels from Cleveland to Belize. They hosted a one-day record store inside Stop Smiling press’ storefront […]
