This week the National Association of Broadcasters convention takes over Las Vegas. To kick it off, the lobbying group’s top man, Gordon Smith, took to the stage Monday to set the tone. And the tone was this: Hey, FCC what about us broadcasters? Leading off Smith’s list of complaints is the FCC’s effort asking TV […]
If you subscribe to our weekly newsletter, you’ve got access to Paul Riismandel’s summary of the latest salvos between musicians, radio stations, and Pandora over performance royalties. Paul notes that everything in this debate is contested, including how much musicians should be paid for each Pandora “spin” of a song, how to calculate those payments, […]
This week is the annual National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, which brings thousands of broadcasters, manufacturers, producers and journalists together to talk about and see what’s next for broadcasting. Radio tends to play a very quiet second fiddle to television and video at this show. But this year radio’s own second fiddle, […]
Inside the radio industry there has been quite a bit of hand-wringing about the AM dial. Though conservative talk stations and sports stations in big markets continue to generate ratings and revenue, there’s an increasing recognition that other AM stations aren’t doing as well. Many blame overcrowding on the dial which leads to more interference, […]
Underwriting represents a very modest percentage of the budget of most Low Power FM radio stations in the United States. So reports the Prometheus Radio Project in a filing to the Federal Communications Commission. The latest data comes from a 2011 study conducted by Prometheus in collaboration with Keith Brand, Associate Professor of Radio, Television […]
Yesterday 28 members of the House of Representatives, led by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski [PDF] urging the Commission to ensure there is space reserved in urban areas for new low-power FM station licenses. They observe that the nation’s largest urban markets “have lacked access to new noncommercial […]
In his “From the Editor” column Radio World’s Paul McLane takes up Matthew’s recent calculation finding that pirate radio generates a half-billion dollars worth of jobs. Recall that my esteemed Radio Survivor colleague was riffing off a recent study sponsored by the National Association of Broadcasters that claimed $135 billion in economic output is attributable […]
I have often wondered how many jobs “unlicensed” media produce, be it P2P file sharing sites or pirate radio stations. A new study commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters inspires me to attempt a rough cut of the pirate radio question. Based on my guesstimate study, broadly modeled on its methodology, I think that […]
Talk about a nailbiter. After languishing for months in the Senate due to a series of anonymous (then outed) holds placed by republican senators, followed by gridlock over the tax bill, it was starting to look like the Local Community Radio Act was never going to make it to a vote. But thanks to the […]
It’s certainly easy to understand the sentiment expressed by a commenter to my last LPFM post: If the NAB is for it, you can pretty much guarantee that it is to the detriment to LPFM. And while the LPFM bill passed by the House yesterday, HR 6533, does contain compromises agreed to by the NAB, […]
