(chris’s) blog

I believe most people listen to the radio on their commute; the popularity of MP3 players has likely taken a bite out of at-home radio listening. And if you haven’t heard the politics of radio lately, this isn’t your grandfather’s radio.
Radio programming, that is, the particular choices of what and when for music shows and talk shows on the air have shifted dramatically over the years: with the popularity of the television, radio dramas (audio-only theatre, exactly like television shows except without the picture), once a staple of radio programming as families gathered around the radio to adventure in far off lands or solve crimes on the streets of the city, began disappearing from the radio programming schedule, replaced instead by music.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, radio was a useful tool to explore the diverse world of music; though unlikely now, one could keep their hands off the dial in the mid-seventies and, in a single half hour period, hear psychedelic rock, folk, funk, disco, and jazz, all seamless and belonging to one another. However, with the onset of the 1980s and the increasing power of the corporation, radio companies were bought and sold and eventually consolidated until a few big companies such as Clear Channel owned thousands of stations across the nation, and like any good business, made deals with record labels to increase airplay of some songs over others, effectively turning radio into an advertising platform. Indeed, when corporation mergers began in the late 1970s, it is the opinion of many then-employed radio DJs that creativity on the airwaves was a dying notion, and, to the surprise of many people today, the radio DJs you now hear on the radio often do not choose the music at all. Instead, tried and true songs, meant to keep listenership at a maximum, are played in heavy rotation along with whatever new songs are available from labels with exclusive deals with the stations. Enter radio’s third era:
The Congress of the 1940s foresaw the eventual mega-companies that would one day control the radio landscape, and allocated a piece of the then-new FM dial to be available for non-commercial use only: out of the reach of big companies, and openly freely mainly for the purposes of allowing community radio stations, that is, radio stations owned and operated within the same town they were heard, with citizens from that community sharing their thoughts and music, and discussing local politics and concerns. The plan has largely failed however, as the US government classifies religious radio to be non-commercial, despite their business-like ability to turn a profit. Though there’s nothing inherently wrong with religious radio, the budget a religion has to work with is near impossible to compete with for small community groups that wish to run their own radio stations, and with only a handful of numbers on the dial available in the non-commercial spectrum, religious radio has almost expanded and pushed out all community radio across the country. It doesn’t help that the FCC allows groups to bid for licenses, that is, the richer group has a better chance of obtained the license to broadcast in a certain area on a certain frequency.
While college radio and some community stations have managed to stay alive in this commercialized, religious radio landscape, the laws are not changing and the solutions are few and far between. Increase the radio spectrum? Unlikely, as technology would have to be replaced across the board, and the radio spectrum is increasingly being bought up by cell phone companies hoping to increase the number of bars on your phone. All fine and good. Classify religions as commercial entities and keep them out of the 88-92 FM non-commercial band? Can you imagine the uproar from the gentle, well-meaning religious communities around the nation? Impossible.
Enter the fourth age of radio: squeezed out from conventional broadcasting entirely, this new age of radio has nothing to do with radio at all, at least, nothing to do with the physical concept of broadcasting audio over electromagnetic waves (aka radio). Instead, as sudden trends tend to have, an unexpected technological breakthrough has saved the freeform, artistic, community radio ethos: Internet radio and podcasting.
The world of Internet radio and podcasting has already grown in numbers to hundreds of thousands of shows and DJs and millions of listeners. Magazines like Scientific America are suddenly able to produce their own radio show, featuring interviews with scientists and researchers and discuss the topics of their magazines, without having to sign into an agreement to broadcast at all; in fact, they don’t have to worry about where to broadcast at all. Podcasting solves it all.
The podcast has removed the radio station from the radio program, allowing our radio shows, our artistic expressions, to float freely on the Internet and arrive only at the computers of those interested. Now, even with a dated computer costing only a few hundred, one can record, edit, and produce a radio show about whatever they want, and using free Internet hosting, upload it and make it available for the world. Thankfully, podcast directories (websites that act like yellow pages for podcast programs) are numerous and free, including the mega-popular iTunes podcasting list, easily accessible to every owner of an iPod. (It should be mentioned that though the words iPod and podcasting are similar, podcasts are not exclusive to individuals who own iPods - they can be downloaded to computers and MP3 players that are not Macs and not iPods, any individual with any type of Internet connection and audio player can listen in.)
And this new age of Internet is already under attack. Internet radio recently became taxable per song per listener, and new rates about to go into effect put the taxes in excessive of the profit, indeed, in many cases, the taxes are in excess of the total income of the station. SoundExchange, the tax collection agency hired by the government to collect these taxes, who have much say on the new rates, erroneously claims their new taxes will push only a small percentage of Internet radio stations off the market, when the reality is that most Internet radio is small, and SoundExchange’s rates favor the big corporations that want a piece of the Internet radio spectrum. Podcasting is currently, and thankfully, untaxed.
Regardless of the politics, radio has come a long way from Buck Rogers rocketing off into space, and from professional DJs (that is, professional music listeners) of the 1970s giving us artistic and diverse radio programming. In short, through what appears to be a combination of governmental oversight and corporate ignorance or corporate greed, the radio spectrum has been forced to change. Even in the face of these new taxes, threatening to ruin the fertile new medium of Internet radio, one thing is for certain: the desire to produce and listen to free, artistic, public radio, quite literally by the people, for the people, is as strong as ever.