Thanks to James Cridland at Podnews, I was reminded that today, July 9, 2023, marks the 20th birthday of the first-ever podcast recording. As James notes, this was the day that Dave Winer – author of the enclosure tag added to RSS to make it possible to automatically download an audio file – recorded the first episode of […]
FCC policy has left media ownership diversity at “obnoxiously low levels,” especially considering that more minority and women ownership is one of the desired objectives. That’s what Prof. Chris Terry from the University of Minnesota tells us on this week’s show. The Commission may be headed to the Supreme Court to defend its diversity policy, […]
As we enter our second decade of everything-digital-on-demand, the desire for tactile media only seems to grow new buds. By now the vinyl resurgence is old news, and while mainstream publications still gasp or tsk-tsk at the cassette revival, I think we can safely say the tape medium has retaken a beachhead, too. Today is […]
Matthew Lasar starts off this episode by declaring that this was the year that his undergraduate students stopped listening to broadcast AM/FM radio. Then he admits, he’s nearly stopped, too. Find out why in this lively rundown of what was significant to radio in 2019. On the other hand, our resident college radio expert Jennifer […]
The Sony Walkman celebrated its 40th birthday on Monday, July 1. While portable audiocassette recorder/players that you could connect to headphones had been around pretty much since the invention of the medium, the Walkman was the first one designed specifically for stereo playback on the go, for personal listening, without even a tiny speaker. Although […]
We’ve talked a lot about archiving and preserving radio here at Radio Survivor, especially on our podcast. Inevitably during these discussions I’ll open my big mouth and muse about how I should archive my own work somewhere it’ll be in safe hands, like the Internet Archive. But up to now, it’s just been talk. Now, […]
As I’ve written before, I’m in the process of archiving my collection of audio work that’s on audiocassette and minidisc. It’s a process that has unfolded in fits and starts over the last few years, but I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m nearing my last couple dozen tapes […]
If you’re at all like me, you’ve got boxes upon boxes of audiocassettes, minidiscs and CD-Rs filled with air checks, interviews, and all manner of audio detritus that you may have produced or just recorded over the years. Sometimes this motley collection feels like nothing but an albatross that I move from domicile to new […]
As Radio Survivor’s technology editor, I have to come clean as the biggest audio nerd here. That’s why I’m seriously geeking out over this Pop Chart Lab poster of the “Advance of Audio Apparatuses.” If their marketing strategy was to get audio nerd bloggers like me to link to it for free publicity… well, it […]
Minidisc is an audio technology that never quite took off in the US the same way it did in Asia, and especially Japan. After enjoying a brief period of mainstream popularity just prior to the introduction of the iPod, many people are probably surprised to learn that minidisc is actually still around now. However, Sony […]
