What killed smooth jazz radio? Why aren’t there any commercial classical stations any longer? And, why do radio stations have a “format” to begin with? Matthew Lasar joins us to explore these questions about the fundamental organizing principle of most music radio. Matthew is a co-founder of Radio Survivor and the author of three important […]
How do I start podcasting? That’s one of the questions we field most frequently. So we answer it, in this second installment of our “Frequently Asked Questions” series. But first we do some follow-up about phone phreaker ‘Captain Crunch’ Draper (#147) and the nearly 1,000 challenges filed against applications for FM translator repeater stations (#144). […]
Brooklyn, NY has one of the densest populations of unlicensed pirate radio stations in the U.S. As he explained on episode #133 of our radio show, journalist David Goren has been tracking and recording these stations for two decades. Now you can sample his archive of pirate airchecks with the interactive Brooklyn Pirate Radio Map, […]
The Economist features a piece about college radio this week, with the headline How is College Radio Faring in the Streaming Era? – Not Signing Off Yet. It takes a cursory look at the state of college radio, unfortunately recycling stereotypical themes about the decline of college radio and its imagined heyday in the 1980s […]
Did you know that upwards of 350 radio stations were established at summer camps across the United States? Dan Braverman, President of Radio Systems, Inc., joins us to share the history of summer camp radio, including his own experience setting up a camp radio station when he was just nine years old. Still involved with […]
It’s transition time at many college radio stations, as volunteers and staff members from the academic year graduate and pass the torch to new leadership. With these shifts, summer can be a good time for station projects and for making plans for the fall. A couple of fall radio conferences in the Pacific Northwest should […]
On this week’s episode we venture to prison and to a very unusual high school radio station. Members of the artist collective Provisional Island (Heidi Ratanavanich, Eileen Shumate, and Michael McCanne) speak with us about their prison-radio-themed exhibit, An Electric Kite, which is on view at the historic site/museum Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia through […]
Broadcasting to a minuscule potential audience of around 130 people during the dark days of winter, Ice Radio has much in common with my own college radio show that beamed into my school’s cafeteria at mealtimes. Similar to a college radio station in the pre-internet days, the community radio station at McMurdo Station in Antarctica […]
Inspired by an episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, we travel all the way to Antarctica to learn about mysterious community radio station, Ice Radio. Sadly, we learned of Anthony Bourdain’s death on the day that we recorded this episode. Ice Radio is the latest iteration of a radio station that began more than 50 […]
Monday, June 11 was the day the FCC’s repeal of the Open Internet Order took effect. That means federally mandated network neutrality is over. Internet service providers are now free to throttle or block specific sites or services, or to offer paid prioritization to others, with the only proviso being that they disclose it. (For […]
