One of the more frustrating peculiarities of our system of broadcasting here in the United States is that over-the-air radio stations don’t have to pay performance royalties to artists, while Internet and satellite stations do. If this wasn’t enough, in March of 2007 the Copyright Royalty Board announced what most streamers experienced as pretty steep […]
It was the summer of 2007. Not moments after the Republican far right triumphed over President Bush’s hated immigration reform law than Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, introduced a rider to a budgetary bill in the House that would forbid funding for the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the Fairness Doctrine. The bill overwhelmingly […]
Today there are close to 1000 more noncommercial, locally-programmed community radio stations on the air in the US than a decade ago. The reason for this is the low-power FM radio service created by the Federal Communications Commission in 2000. While Congressional intervention cut the new service off at the knees at the end of […]
At the start of the decade the nation’s largest owner of radio stations, Clear Channel Communications, was flying high with a stock price over $90 a share in January, 2000. While public interest advocates and media reformers continued to batter the company with criticism over its tactics, Wall Street was still in love with the […]
As the decade draws to a close, economic woes are a resounding theme in the radio world, especially in the non-profit realm of college radio. Universities are as strapped for cash as anyone else and are on the lookout for ways to cut costs. Increasingly these budget-cutting eyes are fixated on college radio, which has […]
Everybody knows the fate of over-the-air radio over the last ten years. “On Demand Killed the Radio Star,” as Boston Globe Media put it in 2005, going so far as to ask whether terrestrial radio is on the way out. Consolidation led to poor broadcasting choices like over-advertising and de-localization, the story goes. MP3 players […]
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; […]
#14 in our series on crucial radio trends of the decade.
Myself, I can hardly believe that another decade is coming to a close. It seems like just yesterday we were stockpiling canned goods, bottled water and batteries in anticipation of the Y2K global computer meltdown. Of course, on every millennial survivalists’ compound shopping list was a good battery-operated radio. Now, ten years on, radio has […]
