What would Paul Whiteman say about the Performance Rights Act?
The National Association of Broadcasters is happy today because five more members of the House of Representatives have announced their opposition to the Performance Rights Act, which would require over-the-air radio stations to pay musicians for broadcasting their recorded tunes. They’re now signators to the NAB backed Local Radio Freedom Act, a resolution that opposes […]
Hot Tip: Small Market Radio – Buy!
Sometimes you have to hand it to the financial press, there’s nothing like a little money to make them believe in old fashioned values, like localism, again. Any keen observer of the commercial radio landscape knows that right now the nation’s largest radio station owners are certainly not making money. But, as the Wall Street […]
College Radio DJ Archetypes
Those who make pronouncements about radio are always saying that it’s a personality-driven medium. I’m not so sure that I agree with that when it comes to non-commercial radio (especially college radio stations that are focused more on the music than on the DJs); but there’s no doubt that listeners are often drawn to and […]
McDowell cooling off on Fairness Doctrine war?
Everybody and their mother who watches Federal Communications Commission politics wrote up pretty much everything proposed FCC Chair Julius Genachowski said at his Senate Commerce Committee nomination hearing on Tuesday. But a lot less got written about the comments of the other nominee: Republican Robert M. McDowell, he up for a reappointment. And even less […]
Should the FCC investigate charges that radio stations censor pro-Performance Rights Act musicians?
Here’s an interesting skirmish that has already gotten lost in all the growling over the Performance Rights Act. This month the Federal Communications Commission received a Petition for Declaratory Relief (PDR) from the MusicFIRST Coalition. The charges that it levels are pretty serious. MusicFIRST says that broadcast radio stations are pressuring artists to oppose or […]
Who will get those Sirius XM minority channels?
Sirius XM radio has a tricky task ahead of it. The satellite broadcaster still has to figure out who is going to get those “qualified entity” channels that it promised to lease out to minority broadcasters when the Federal Communications Commission gave its two halves permission to marry last July. The FCC is supposed to […]
Is Twitter the New College Radio?
When I was a kid in the 1970s my parents would try to pry me away from the television, warning me that it was going to “rot my brain.” Yet, my dad also admitted to me that his parents made the same pronouncements to him about the dangers of listening to too much radio. Each […]
Analog TV Is Alive. It’s Radio.
A couple of weeks ago I was scanning the FM band as I made my short commute from my far-north Chicago neighborhood to WNUR in Evanston for a station meeting. At the bottom end of the dial I encountered a fading station playing a steady stream of smooth jazz with no DJ. I’d never heard […]
Radio, Apparently, Is Not Part of Chicago's Media Future. But It Should Be.
This past Saturday I attended the Chicago Media Future Conference, which was an unofficial follow-up to the Chicago Journalism Town Hall held in February. Both events intended to address the current perceived crisis in journalism as evidenced with the closure of papers, reporters getting laid off and a sharp decline in ad revenue. One attendee […]
The Holy Grail: getting Internet radio into your car (Part I)
Everybody knows that the trick to getting Internet radio past the early adopter crowd and into the ears of Ma and Pa Kettle means getting into it into cars. Commercial broadcasting seems ready for that to happen. How do we know? The National Association of Broadcasters sent us a profile of Autonet Mobile. Autonet calls […]