The commercial radio industry’s reaction to last week’s Boston Globe article reporting on the relative dearth of young listeners can be fairly summed up, as “Nuh uhhhh! Not true!” Despite radio’s collective denial, I had this reality reaffirmed for me this past Friday. I had the opportunity to speak with a group of high school […]
There’s another pirate radio station on the loose: FCC Free Radio in San Francisco. Jennifer Waits wrote a nice piece about it here on Thursday. I’ve been streaming the outlet for the last few days and it’s a fun signal with a big sense of humor. But I’m getting a little tired of these unlicensed […]
The San Francisco Bay Area has been home to a wide range of radio pioneers and renegades, from the very early days of broadcasting with Doc Herrold’s experiments 100 years ago to freeform radio in the early days of FM in the 1960s to pirate radio advocates like Stephen Dunifer of Free Radio Berkeley. And […]
A small band of reform groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to rethink how it allocates radio licenses in rural areas. They argue that the current system allows big broadcasters to grab suburban/rural signals on the edge of large metropolitan regions, in some instances knocking out smaller stations. The license seeker, they say, doesn’t […]
Every day I learn something new about radio and today I was really surprised to discover that there’s an entire radio service called BusRadio that is piped in to school buses and reaches a million kids. They tout themselves as “a superior, age-appropriate alternative to AM/FM radio programming.” According to an article in the Denver […]
A look at radio licensing trends in the United States over the last five years shows an interesting pattern. While the number of commercial AM and FM full power licenses has declined or remained flat, there’s been a big expansion in educational FM stations. Lets’ review the stats in QA form. Q. How many Federal […]
The relevancy of the Billboard Top 40 singles chart seems to have faded over time in concert with the splintering of genres and audiences, and so the final broadcast of Casey Kasem on American Top 20 this past weekend seemed to garner only the barest of media notices. Perhaps that’s because Kasem handed off the […]
Ever since John McCain made his disastrous decision to pick Sarah Palin as his running made in ’08, I’ve been saying that the winner of that election was her. It was only a matter of time, I told my circle of friends, before she ducked out of her gig as Alaska’s governor and cashed in […]
The four major organizations that represent public broadcasting say the Federal Communications Commission shouldn’t count public radio and television station board members as the “owners” of the license in question.
The irony would be so delectable if it weren’t for the 1033 unfortunate drivers whose cars were stuck in the mud, many of which were totaled and not returned for over a week. As Jerry Del Colliano reports at Inside Music Media, a Clear Channel station in Grand Rapids, MI threw its annual B93 Concert […]
