The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next ...decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. InLow Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the practices of an activist organization focused on LPFM during this era. Despite its origins as a pirate broadcasting collective, the group eventually shifted toward building and expanding regulatory access to new, licensed stations. These radio activists consciously cast radio as an alternative to digital utopianism, promoting an understanding of electronic media that emphasizes the local community rather than a global audience of Internet users.Dunbar-Hester focuses on how these radio activists impute emancipatory politics to the "old" medium of radio technology by promoting the idea that "microradio" broadcasting holds the potential to empower ordinary people at the local community level. The group's methods combine political advocacy with a rare commitment to hands-on technical work with radio hardware, although the activists' hands-on, inclusive ethos was hampered by persistent issues of race, class, and gender. Dunbar-Hester's study of activism around an "old" medium offers broader lessons about how political beliefs are expressed through engagement with specific technologies. It also offers insight into contemporary issues in media policy that is particularly timely as the FCC issues a new round of LPFM licenses.
In recent years, music festivals have grown in significance within local cultural policy, city branding and tourism agendas. Taking the Mexefest festival in Lisbon as a case in point, this article ...asks how, in the digital streaming era, music festivals in urban environments are framed, curated and experienced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, our analysis examines how music festival programmers curate the urban festival experience, for both locals and tourists alike. First, we identify the emergence of urban music festivals in recent decades, and how modern festival programmes have adopted the cultural technique of the ‘shuffle mode’ as an influential principle. Second, we investigate the work of festival programmers through the lens of ‘cultural intermediaries’, and ask how their programming strategies, particularly through digital mobile media (such as music playlists), contribute to an aestheticised experience of the city during the festival. Third, we focus on how the Mexefest festival events are staged in tandem with brand activation by sponsors like mobile phone company Vodafone and their radio station Vodafone FM. In doing so, we highlight the participation of festival-goers through their embodied engagements with digital media, music listening and urban space, and evaluate the heuristic value of ‘shuffle curation’ as a tool for the understanding of music festivals as a distinctly global and networked form of leisure consumption in urban culture.
This book is like a time capsule containing a selection of interviews that aired on Hromadske Radio’s Ukraine Calling show. They capture what people were thinking during a critical time in the ...country’s history, from the July 2016 NATO Summit through to Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s 2019 landslide election victories. Decision makers, opinion makers, and other interesting people commented on events of the day as well as larger issues. Topics range from politics to sports, religion, history, war, books, diplomacy, health, business, art, holidays, foreign policy, anniversaries, public opinion to freedom of speech. Interview guests include Canada’s then Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, writer Andrey Kurkov, Crimean political prisoner Hennadii Afanasiev, who was tortured in 2014, Ukraine’s acting Health Minister Ulana Suprun, American analyst/journalist Brian Whitmore, UNHRC’s Pablo Mateu, ethnologist Ihor Poshyvailo, investment banker Olena Bilan, Tufts University’s Daniel Drezner, a cameo appearance by Boris Johnson, and many more. Together these interviews provide a unique, diverse, and kaleidoscopic perspective conveying the substance, atmosphere, and flavor of Ukraine while it was on the receiving end of a hybrid war from Russia.
This book reveals the value and significance of pirate radio, with a special focus on local radio stations that broadcast illegally in Poland in the early 90s. It shows that many of them, like in ...other countries from the region, began as non-commercial, community-oriented initiatives. Several sources of information were used to maximize the potential of the study, especially documents gathered from public institutions, press articles, interviews with radio representatives, and decision-makers who influenced the shape of the broadcasting system. The analysis of these sources supports the conclusion that, although the pirates left a lasting legacy, they lost out in the licensed regime driven by market logic.
Este artículo contextualiza y analiza las opiniones que los radioescuchas del programa radial Antología Musical de Colombia enviaron a su director, el músico colombiano Oriol Rangel. Estas fueron ...transmitidas en cartas y comentaron los valores de la “música nacional”, núcleo del programa, identificada con los géneros populares andinos. Aquí se muestran las confluencias entre radio comercial, industria discográfica nacional, crítica especializada y audiencias radiales a mediados del siglo XX colombiano. Las opiniones de los oyentes, reconstruidas a partir de fuentes primarias novedosas, expresaron hábitos de escucha, jerarquías estéticas y ansiedades por la percepción de pérdida de la “música nacional”.
Sonic Intimacy addresses and establishes the new concept of “sonic intimacy” as a key term through which sound, human, and technological relations can be assessed and understood in relation to ...capitalism: what is sonic intimacy, how it is changing, and what is at stake in its transformation? Analyzing “sonic intimacy” through key case studies of three alternative music technologies of the black Atlantic (sound systems, pirate radio, and YouTube), James addresses in particular the aural transmission of care (intimacies), the internal (intimate) affects of sound and the collective affect of sound (intimacy) and its relation to (intimate) times and spaces. Sonic Intimacy thus explores what is at stake in the development of sonic intimacy for human relations and alternative black and anti-capitalist public politics. This discussion on the transformation of sonic intimacy starts with the sound system. The sound system highlights the affective and political implications of in-time: collective and bass mediated intimacies. Pirate radio permits an exploration of the initial privatization of this intimacy, as bass is scooped out and dialogues established between bedrooms, and over radio infrastructure. An analysis of the YouTube music video then provides insight into sonic intimacy’s further fragmentation as alternative sound waves are commodified, speakers shrunk, distances increased and human relations made out-of-sync. More importantly, however, these case studies also provide the book with latitude for exploring how old intimacies have been retraced and where new intimacies have arisen: the aimless fervour generated through the pirate radio; the immediacy, uncertainty, deferral, multiplication, repetition and mobility of the YouTube music video. Ultimately, Sonic Intimacy outlines the importance of sonic intimacy as an area of study, argues that changes in sonic intimacy are contingent with the shrinking possibilities of alternative public culture, and tentatively identifies potential new sonic intimacies that may provide a resource for the struggle against, and demand beyond, neoliberal capitalism.
While transnational conglomerates consolidate their control of the global mediascape, local communities struggle to create democratic media systems. This groundbreaking study of community media, ...first published in 2005, combines original research with comparative and theoretical analysis in an engaging and accessible style. Kevin Howley explores the different ways in which local communities come to make use of various technologies such as radio, television, print and computer networks for purposes of community communication and considers the ways these technologies shape, and are shaped by, the everyday lived experience of local populations. He also addresses broader theoretical and philosophical issues surrounding the relationship between communication and community, media systems and the public sphere. Case studies illustrate the pivotal role community media play in promoting cultural production and communicative democracy within and between local communities. This book will make a significant contribution to existing scholarship in media and cultural studies on alternative, participatory and community-based media.
This article contextualizes and analyzes the opinions of people who listened to the radio program the Antología Musical de Colombia, as found in the letters they sent to its director, the Colombian ...musician Oriol Rangel. In those letters, listeners remarked on the values of the “national music” of Colombia, the core of the program, which was drawn from popular genres of Andean music. The article shows the convergence of commercial radio networks, the national record industry, specialized criticism and radio audiences in the mid-20th century in Colombia. The opinions of the listeners, which are recreated on the basis of novel original sources, reveal their listening habits, aesthetic preferences and anxiety about what they regarded as the loss of “national music”.
Since the 1960s, public service broadcasters have attempted to meet the demand for music by young listeners. As commercial radio offerings have expanded, and as public broadcasters are monitored more ...closely than before, the question arises as to what degree and in which ways public
service radio should differ from commercially formatted stations. This article analyses the differentiation strategies applied in music programming by major radio stations in targeting youth and young adults in Finland. Employing a multi-measure approach in the analysis of the content, the
results confirm that YleX, a popular music station of the public broadcaster YLE, differs significantly from its major commercial rivals Energy and The Voice. The article argues that even a radio station focusing on the latest hits can fulfil a public service mission.
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