America's rural radio stations are vanishing
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We're going to eventually look back and wonder how much damage the rise of private equity and modern finance has done to so many things that were once of such high quality. Financial engineering is distorting the original intent of market forces and leaving more and more consumers with an inferior product.
Keynes seems to have been right about the problems of "saving beyond planned investment." It seems to create even more problems than he imagined. A little of it does end up finding interesting important ventures but most of it is big dumb money that chases bubbles or gets parked in socially destructive rent seeking operations. Money is made for some investors but the overall ROI for civilization is a net negative; making money by destroying wealth.
It will keep inflation away until it doesn’t, as some day the consequences of printing money will be felt. One of the most negative influences of civilization has been people hoarding wealth, and we’re reverting to an environment that empowers that.
http://artbrock.com/blog/magical-power-objects-and-sociopath...
These days, running AM or FM radio is inefficient and a waste of power. It doesn't take kilowatts and microwave links to blanket an area with coverage. I think the failure is not coming up with a viable digital replacement that works on cell towers. I know that streaming works fine, but there's no centralized system, or parallel representation that's freely broadcast from cell towers. This would have been a prime opportunity for the FCC to force cell companies to provide a certain number of free broadcast channels (that work even without cell service) to serve the community. Just like how they force TV and radio stations to play community service shows on Sunday morning.
Though to be honest, I don't even know what brings listeners to radio these days -- the only radio I listen to is 20 seconds in the morning before my car's infotainment system finishes booting and connects to my phone and then I can ask it to play just about any song/genre/playlist I want to, or ask for a news briefing, or the weather, etc. I used to listen to the station with the best traffic reports, but I don't even need that since my phone map will tell me about traffic backups ahead and even reroute me around it automatically
Really, where? When it comes to super-local specific, curated information, I find it really hard to duplicate what you used to get from local radio stations. You certainly have all the different bits and pieces, but IMO not in a way that curates it to a consistent view, and sense of community, the way radio used to.
My hometown paper publishes their police blotter online, that includes pretty much every police call including car breakins and kitten rescues.
The paper also publishes also publishes local interest stories, interviews, etc.
They don't publish the paper every day any more and it's in tabloid format now instead of broadsheet, but the online site is up to date.
Google maps gives me real-time traffic updates, Waze will tell me if there's construction or a dead animal on the road ahead.
So it's not all in one place, but it's all on my phone, and available on demand, I don't have to wait until the top of the hour to find out if there's an accident on my route to work.
I can get the information on demand 24x7 from anywhere in the world, that seems more useful than having someone read it to me at scheduled times on the radio where if I don't happen to be listening at that time, I miss it.
If I have to work through the high school football game (or am out of town) and want to know the score when I come home, I can pull up the school's webpage at 11pm to see the score, I don't need to tune in at 7am the next morning to hear the local news.
If there's a water leak and school is closed early, I don't have to be listening to the radio all day to hear the announcement or wait for my child to call me, I'll get an SMS (and/or phone call or email or app alert) and I can already be on my way home to meet her.
Too much information is just as bad as not enough
This is a rural area, my typical hometown police blotter column includes 4 or 5 incidents (including the occasional kitten rescues and lost cow found wandering downtown). That's hardly too much information. And back when they did read this information on our local AM station, they included the same information (our family dog made the police report on the radio when she was reported on the local highway and returned home by police)
Nowadays you can get all of that information off you smart-phone, but what about people that have no Internet access, no cable, no smart phone, and no regular access to any information services other than broadcast media due to cost?
I have an aunt (by marriage) that can't afford a computer, can't afford a cell phone beyond a very basic feature phone, can't afford mobile data, couldn't afford the Internet even if she had a computer, and certainly can't afford a newspaper subscription. She listens to the local radio station for her small town to keep informed about what is going on, and occasionally goes to the local library to check her email to talk to her nieces and nephews who seem to be calling less and less lately because "everybody has a smartphone and Aunt Connie can see what they're doing on Facebook".
There is a significant section of the population that relies on broadcast media to get information about their community. The fact that you do not does not mean that locally-owned, locally-focused broadcasters are a waste.
I never said they were a waste, I just pointed out that they (like newspapers) are much less relevant to most people than they used to be, which is why they are dying and getting bought up.
The low-income people that can't afford a cell phone or home internet, are not the kind of listeners than can support an advertising supported radio station.
One solution could be for the government to subsidize local broadcast stations, though I think a better solution would be to subsidize internet access (or even smart phones) because those without internet connectivity miss out on a lot more than the highschool football scores, and no subsidized radio station will improve that.
If Live Nation and CBS radio didn't buy up all the radio stations in the 90s, they probably would have vanished one by one as people moved on to iPods and CDs for consumption.
Both Apple Music and Spotify have playlists of every conceivable genre and of every mood you could possibly be in. Want to listen to bad elevator cover songs? You can find it! There shouldn't be any problem with music discovery at this point. I'm constantly finding new music from all kinds of artists.
For everything else, DJs in the morning, shock-jocks, talk radio, those are served by Podcasts. Once again, every possible genre, from murder mysteries, to local news, it's all there. Maybe your small community doesn't have a replacement podcast yet, but that doesn't mean it can't exist. The barrier to entry is so low that I imagine it's only a matter of time.
Back in the late 1990's, I worked for a rural radio station -- they were in the process of moving to full automation, and was working on getting the country station in full automation: I had a background in Audio/Video Productions (and computers/electronics), so, I spent a lot of time working on the automation (old Harris Automation System, vs the rest of the cluster using AudioVault from BEI).
There was someone in the studio from 5AM Until Midnight (sometimes later if there were west coast ballgames) Monday-Friday: We'd do the news at the top and bottom of the hour (each station in the cluster got sent back to network audio at different times -- 4:15, 6:00, 6:30 after the hour, which required some really good pacing and reading skills to not let the other stations know you're pushing something back to network), cut live and recorded weather for other stations, and then answer the phone/distribute faxes/etc.
I learned a lot about RF and Broadcast engineering during this time, and it honestly was the catalyst to push me into electrical and computer engineering (admittedly, restoring a VAX/VMS with the station engineer was the biggest driver).
I can identify a "Satellite" station from a mile away. The liners sound different -- if they even match up -- the clocks at the top and the bottom of the hour are sync'ed with :30:00 and 00:00.
Sunday mornings was religious programming (the "hangover" shift), and we'd do Friday night Football for High School and Saturday/Sunday College and Professional Football games, and Basketball games during the winter months. Add in some NASCAR and Indy racing (on the country music station), and there were plenty of weeks where I had 50/60/70 hours (at 17, I thought I was financially set -- lest I know that I was completely wrong!)
To this day, the group of stations that I grew up with are still using split ownership to get past FCC rules about station clustering (but, all ran out of the same building).
I still dearly miss the stations of my youth, which were crucial venues for hip hop culture (HOT97) and alt rock (KROCK, WFNX, ... ) in a way that youtube and soundcloud and bandcamp just aren’t.
For you. My daughter finds new non-pop music just fine.
Apart from high-quality spoken-word content (like Radio 3 and Radio 4), most radio stations are playing music which I could listen to elsewhere, in higher quality, when I want, and then they add some super low quality filler chat in between. Plus adverts!
What do you miss from them? Just that was the only way to access music back then?
Independent radio stations have DJs and a culture around them that foster new music and support independent musicians.
To pick an example, Hot97 was _the_ voice of the bronx (literally, in the case of angie martinez) and the east coast hip hop scene from more or less the beginning. DJs would meet or be introduced to or know of local artists, get their demo tapes on the air, and launched major careers as a result.
that probably makes me a grouchy old man, but the fragmentation and personalization of music does actually lead to a dilution.
This just feels like one of those “things are different” situations where nothing is better or worse, but simply not the way it was.
The legendary John Peel of BBC Radio 1 being a good example.
I still listen to BBC Radio 6 these days for the same reason, good way to find new music and to be introduced to genres you may never be exposed to by an echo-chamber algo in your favourite music app.
Lack of local news has done tons of damage to the US, since it greatly reduces the accountability of politicians, and awareness of local issues.
Of course I could also listen to my own music back then: play a mix tape or some records. I could get records at the library which I subsequently taped. While not comparable to the width and breadth of choice offered by official and 'pirate' online options now it still was a form of choice. It is just that, sometimes, it is nice not to have to make a choice other than switching the thing on, turning down the volume when some song comes by which doesn't pass the muster.
There were more programs like this: "Het Betonuur" ("beton" means concrete, they played hard rock etc.), "Stampij" (also hard rock), "De LP show" (a prosaic name which means "The LP (record) show", playing tracks of newer prog/symphonic rock/experimental artists), "Superclean Dream Machine" (even weirder music hosted by an ever weirder person), etc. I often had my tape recorder at the ready to record anything worthwhile.
I can now play the music which I heard back then at a moment's notice by using any of the online venues available to me. In many ways this is an improvement, but...
Imagine walking over a beach and finding a diamond in the sand. That would be an amazing discovery, something you'd remember for the rest of your life. Remember when you found that diamond back then? Remember what you were doing, with whom you were doing it, what came after?
Now imagine walking over a beach where there is no sand any more, only diamonds. They're everywhere, littering the streets, hiding under the thrash can. You pick one up and look at it: a diamond, big deal. You drop it and walk on...
I've even learned enough Dutch to understand the NOS news segments at the top of the hour.
For my sake, don't also lose your own radio. The separation of station from broadcasters is quirky and unique, but likely the reason it's still actually good.
Being able to play whatever you want, whenever you want, is indeed fantastic. I'm not sure I'd want to go backwards from here either. But we've solved availability, I don't think we've solve discovery - I don't think algorithmically generated playlists replace John Peel. They seem to solve "everyone else has found X and you haven't", they don't solve "X haven't been found". So we end up back in this trap of "finding" the music the labels have decided to promote, rather than the artists that deserve to be found.
It wasn't the only way to access music back then. You had recorded media and live music.
I'm not actually from around that time but I've been playing around with a Walkman recently. For me it started as retro foppery but I noticed a few distinct differences:
- You're not in total control of the radio. You can pick the station you like but you can't reorder the playlist, select specific tracks, rewind, or repeat anything. This evokes a feeling of surrender, of "letting go." While listening to the radio, you're freed from the responsibility of curating your own collection and selecting the best music for the occasion.
- Much more than the targeted algorithms of services like Spotify, you're at the mercy of the DJ. Compared to the algorithm, there's absolutely more of a connection there. If you enjoy what's on the radio, then you're sharing that enjoyment with the DJ. It's a direct analog precursor to the "space of flows," a pleasurable social bond formed between two people who don't share physical space or even traditional spoken word conversation.
- You're off the grid. The radio doesn't track your favorite artists or your location. It doesn't correlate your listening habits with your recent purchases. This makes the experience feel more elective. When you can decide to turn something on, that means you can decide to turn it off. It's different from our always-on, always-connected everyday experience.
- The endless sea of digital media sometimes induces analysis paralysis. The bigger your MP3 library, the more mental resources you must dedicate to mentally searching for the music most appropriate to your mood and surroundings. Narrowing your selection to a handful of radio stations, each one playing only a single song at a time until it ends, frees up a lot of mental resources.
- Paradoxically, being exposed to music you don't like actually refines your taste. Further, suffering through a bad song on the radio heightens your anticipation of the next song, and if you end up enjoying the next song it's a huge, satisfying relief. Compared to Spotify where you can skip past an unsatisfying song, or be reasonably sure the next song will be more to your liking based on whether you just skipped, the emotional experience is more varied and granular. It's more exciting. It's also closer to reality: contrary to what the countless ads and offers claim, you can't always get what you want and you won't always be satisfied. Annoyance, boredom, dissatisfaction, and disappointment are going to find you eventually. There's nothing better for practicing acceptance of life's unpleasant, unskippable moments than suffering through a terrible song on the radio.
Do we really need to practice for that? I would say that you are right that we can’t always have what we want, but at least in streaming music we are quite close to that (depending on tastes, some genres are quite underrepresented).
Personally I prefer to keep small isles of life without unpleasantness.
Hip hop culture exists on Instagram today, but it’s become a sociopathic mix of Wall Street values, luxury brand product placement and gang violence. Gucci has transformed gang wars into product sales that make rappers rich. Getting rich is the only goal.
As a child I remember radio being the same 11 songs and a ton of ads.
I completely agree.
In fact, IMO, Sirius is the savior of radio. It's where all the really good radio talent went when terrestrial radio was mostly turned into garbage. Most of the biggest names in radio from the 60's through the 90's are there.
People balk at paying for Sirius, but there is real quality entertainment there. It's not an iPod pretending to be radio like streaming services. It's actual radio, with on-air talent, and an ever-expanding library of original content.
Even on what you might think are low-interest channels like the 40's channel, or the Sinatra channel, or the Jimmy Buffet channel, or Tom Petty channel, there are new shows made daily, live concerts, and all kinds of things that "real" radio used to do, but gave up in favor of automation.
There are even hyper-niche channels like one that plays Carolina Shag (coastal North and South Carolina music from the 50's and 60's), or the one that's all independent Canadian music, or half a dozen stand-up comedy channels. Or something that I enjoy way more than I'd like to admit: Yacht Rock, which is the kinds of music that you'd imagine that a couple named Chad and Buffy would play on their yacht off the coast of Montauk. Or as the channel describes itself, "Everyone's fifth or sixth favorite soft rock songs from the 70's and 80's."
There's still excellent terrestrial radio, but you have to seek it out. WXRT/Chicago, KCSN/Northridge, KING-FM-HD2/Seattle, and KGFN/Goldfield leap to mind, but there are others.
The rise of Citicasters/Jacor/Clear Channel is what made me quit radio. But these few holdouts (some even corporate-owned!) are still producing quality radio, and if you can't find something to listen to on Sirius, then I don't know what to say.
/ Worked for 10 years in radio on-air and behind the scenes
/ Happy Sirius subscriber
What's almost UNpalatable is the audio quality: my Audi has the Sirius decoder, and it's notably awful. 17-32k stream according to Wikipedia. I guess some of the XM radios have higher rates. It's awful.
Plus I get dropouts in south metro Denver area on Sirius and never on Spotify using Verizon.
If my car had a satellite receiver, I'd probably subscribe to it for my commute.
But there seems to be a large segment of population that just want to listen to a playlist with no interuptions.
I still feel that the DJ and radio are the best form of music discovery especially on Sirius where they can stray away from the top 100
That means there is nothing. No daily/weekly newspaper, no radio. Just Jesus and a clear channel affiliate playing a national soundtrack. (And they are fiscal timebombs too.)
Basically, you live in a different country if you aren’t in a top-50/too-100 market. That’s one of the big drivers of reactionary politics.
Though the best rock station around (90's/00's) was the NJ college station 89.5 WSOU, Seton Hall's Pirate Radio. Hard Rock, Punk, Hard core, Metal, etc. Awesome station if you could receive it, almost impossible to listen to in a car. I listened via hooking the roof antenna to an FM amplifier and then to my Harmon Kardon receiver I rescued from the trash and repaired. I'd to tune in, run a cassette on record and mix down the songs I liked later on. Another treat used to be this DJ, a woman with a thick european accent who played black and death metal on monday nights, Monday Night Mayhem. Discovered so many great bands from that station. Never got old, never played out the same damn metallica song like Krock. Instead you got Pantera, Meshuggah, Megadeth, Gwar, Gojira (Back when they were still Godzilla), Sick of It all, Life of Agony, and a ton more. Then at some point I stopped listening for one reason or another, there was also a big format change too. It's still around though haven't tuned in for years.
Now I just keep the radio tuned to WQXR, the public classical radio station. No ads but the pleas for donation can get a bit annoying at times. Though I have donated. Then I get my fill of weird music from roaming around peoples bandcamp profiles. You can find all sorts of stuff on there. Rock, metal, noise, electronic, you name it.
Just realized it was when napster came about plus the format change eliminated a lot of the metal so I got bored with it. Plus I discovered so much more music on napster and even got a bit more into industrial and other electronic genres.
That's far more variety than what you'd get from a local radio station.
Youtube gives you almost every song ever made. Soundcloud gives you so many great unknown and indie artists. Bandcamp also gives you a huge & worldwide selection of independent rappers, and will help you discover them via their excellent blog.
And, for hip hop specifically, there's Datpiff and all the other sites hosting mixtapes.
I can understand being nostalgic for the stations of your youth, but it pales considerably compared to what's available now.
I recently had a SiriusXM trial and it seems like all the stations now have a fixed playlist that's limited to around 60 songs at a time, it was very much like domestic radio and it wasn't uncommon to hear the same song played multiple times in the same day.
Granted, it's still significantly better than local radio (RDU MSA doesn't even have a hard rock or modern rock station) I just can't justify spending money on it when I already have streaming capabilities via my phone - but I do miss the curated content of a human actually into the material.
The first time I listened to it the DJ had his 4 year old daughter with him in the studio and during one of the breaks she asked him to sing her favorite song. He obliged and it was some depressing country song, but towards the end she joined in enthusiastically, breaking the tension. It was very heartwarming. That is my favorite radio memory and the kind of radio you don't get from corporate stations.
After that I looked the station up and learned that it was founded to bridge the divide between the Native American and white populations of the region between whom there were significant racial tensions. I can't speak to whether it did or not, but it certainly seems like it has. One year while driving through I caught a live broadcast of a pow-wow which was a delightful surprise.
A few years ago I was driving through the area and I couldn't pick them up. The next town I got to I stopped to look up the station to see if I had just forgotten the right frequency but it turned out that their transmitter had broken and needed a complete replacement. In the end it took them about a year to raise the funds to buy and install the new transmitter and I think they are still operating at reduced power because their antenna needs to be replaced (which is apparently in part what caused the original transmitter to break). It just goes to show how fragile these institutions that can form the pillars of communities can be.
They do broadcast online, but I find that when I'm not traveling I mostly listen to local stations here in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is almost certainly a beneficiary of the policies the article cites as the cause of the decline of rural radio. Radio here is as vibrant and alive as it's ever been (at least that I've been around). I have 6 different public stations that all have different programming in my car presets and there are many more commercial stations I listen to on occasion. The FM dial is completely packed (I don't think there are any open frequencies right now) and the AM dial is pretty full as well. I just wish this did not come at the expense of my rural neighbors (and I don't think it has to).
I especially love some of the late night DJs...eclectic music tastes that I don't ever hear elsewhere on the radio.
Commercial radio? Given the facility, equipment, antenna, license, electricity, that's just the start. A one-person operation is almost impossible, even if you're independently wealthy and have the technical chops. But if all you've got is automation? the 'community' part is hopeless ... might as well be 'iHeart' (hah!)
'People' radio is unavoidably a people-intensive operation. How do you fill 16 hours a day with sound? That's 4 four-hour shifts. Every. Day. Assume you've somehow found 3 volunteers, each with a personal record collection. How many people will you find to interview in a town of 3000-10000? Who's going to sell quality advertising? Who's going to produce it? Who's going to manage the business side? Climb the tower?
Sad it is, but that model is over. Mr. Lucke is the one fanatic in a town of 3000 - I salute him, Behringer console and all.
But community radio has headed in a different direction, and across the US is finding ways. For anyone interested in what is still working, across the US, check out the Radio Survivor podcasts. (These guys know their stuff.) http://www.radiosurvivor.com/category/podcast/
If you're running an android phone, you should be able to enable a radio with little trouble.
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730323196/one-more-scoop-of-v...
uh, i've got a years old subaru where i just turn on the engine, and by the time i've backed out of the driveway, it is playing music over bluetooth. phone stays in my pocket the whole time.
But in addition to the complexities of licensing if you want your stream to be legal, it seems to me that there's at least one flaw in the design. To receive an uninterrupted Shoutcast stream, you have to have a persistent, unbroken TCP connection with the server. IIUC, this is a recipe for frequent interruptions on mobile. I think that Apple's HTTP Live Streaming and MPEG DASH have the right idea; instead of an actual stream, you get chunks of media from an HTTP server, based on a playlist. In Apple HLS, that playlist is even a variant of the Winamp .m3u format. I understand that these systems are primarily used for video, but I wonder if any radio stations use HLS or DASH for their online streams. Of course, the downside of these systems is higher latency, but that might not be so bad [1].
[0]: One of my first real projects in Python was Supercast (http://supercast.sourceforge.net/), a Shoutcast-compatible server. I was also a DJ on the Internet radio station for which I wrote that server. Not a particularly good one, mind you, but it was fun for a little while.
[1]: Back when I was into Shoutcast, I did think the latency of large buffers was a bad thing. One difference between Shoutcast and my Supercast server was that Supercast didn't send an initial large audio buffer to each listener. But priorities change sometimes, and now I think it's more important to avoid drop-outs.
"streams":{
"hls_stream":"http://c8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609/playlist.m3u8",
"shoutcast_stream":"http://c8icyelb.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609_icy",
"pivot_hls_stream":"https://us.api.iheart.com/api/v3/adswizzhls/redirect.m3u8?url=https%3A%2F%2Fc8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com%2F609%2Fplaylist.m3u8&marketId=51",
"secure_hls_stream":"https://c8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609/playlist.m3u8",
"secure_shoutcast_stream":"https://c8icy.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609_icy"
}That secure Shoutcast stream is an interesting mix of old and new. It has the expected "icy-" HTTP headers, but it's using HTTP/2 and, of course, HTTPS. The fact that it even returns a valid response for an HTTP HEAD request puts it ahead of real Shoutcast and Icecast streams in terms of standards compliance. It looks like iHeart has their own streaming server.