I’m awed by all the radio enthusiasts, collectors, historians, and scholars out there; so I’m going to try to feature some of my favorites on Radio Survivor in a new feature called Radio Obsessives. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my interview with Garrett Wollman about his fascination with radio towers is what […]
I just learned about a soon-to-be-launched online radio station in Taiwan called Oh! Zone that will be programmed entirely with foreign content from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. What’s cool to me is that the station is picking and choosing specific programs from college radio stations in an attempt to […]
It’s time for my annual rant about the Princeton Review college survey! Every year they survey college students from all over the land (at 371 colleges this time around) in order to learn more about campus life for their “Best Colleges” guide that they market to high school students. 300ish students on average are surveyed […]
I love reading stories about radio and every time I run across a college radio mention in a book, my interest in piqued. In the months to come I’m going to work on compiling a list of college radio “must reads,” from the academic to the autobiographic. My first pick: Kill the Music. Kill the […]
There’s been some chatter this week about whether or not the youth of today are listening to radio. The standard cliche is that youth have abandoned radio and Monday’s Boston Globe article “Young Listeners Tune Out Radio in Search of New Music” repeats that refrain, quoting teens and folks in their 20s who report that […]
Fandom is an amazing thing and thanks to the Internet it’s easier and easier to find like-minded obsessives who share one’s passion for the most obscure objects, idols, and idiosyncrasies. Radio is no exception. Loads of websites document radio history, with nostalgic archivists collecting ephemera, airchecks, and reminiscences from San Francisco to Boston. Various forums […]
Wow. A childhood musical hero has died. My Twitter, Facebook, and email accounts have been buzzing with the news of Michael Jackson’s death today and my Generation X agemates are understandably freaked out. As MTV said this afternoon, he was the “soundtrack for a generation.” Many of us remember spending hours of our childhood watching […]
In his excellent post yesterday, Matthew talked about the latest news on the Performance Rights Act. Just as an addendum to that, I wanted to point out some of the specific concerns that college radio stations have over this proposed legislation. An article yesterday on WKOWTV.com, “Radio Stations Threaten to Switch to Talk, Shut Down,” […]
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 […]
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 […]
