I'm supposed to speak today on the question, "Does radio have to be lousy?" Before I can answer that question, though, I should probably address another one: "Is radio lousy to begin with?"
The answer to that is going to vary from person to person, since we all listen to the radio for different reasons and since we all like different sorts of programming. Furthermore, it's not enough to say that most radio is lousy, because the important point isn't whether we like everything that comes out over the dial. One consequence of great diversity is that whatever you like will probably seem to be drowning in a sea of trash. What's important is for the stuff you want to be out there and for you to know where and how to find it.
That said, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, yes, radio really is lousy—or at least a lot lousier than it could be and should be. I wrote a book about this, and the closest I've gotten so far to a negative review came from the conservative magazine Chronicles, which suggested that maybe there's more choices on the radio band than I was willing to admit. I quote:
"A survey of the average metropolitan area will yield broadcasts in Spanish, Korean, and Russian; sports talk shows; Gregorian chants; country and new country; classical music; National Public Radio; soft rock, hard rock, jazz, blues, oldies, classic rock, and Christian rock; fundamentalist preachers railing against all rock music as a tool of the devil; evangelical answer men telling listeners that they can't lose their salvation; Jewish geologists admonishing callers to sober up and take responsibility for their pitiful lives; call-in sex-advice shows; and outraged Republicans and libertarians whipping their listeners into a froth over Democrats, moral outrages, and Big Brother."
Now, that's an extraordinary list, in part because it describes an "average metropolitan area" that doesn't exist. Most cities do not have a Russian-language station or a program devoted to Gregorian chants, and in a lot of places you can't even get jazz or blues—or if you do, it's only for a few hours a week. There is a lot of variety out there: There's around 11,000 stations on the AM and FM dials, with dozens of formats for listeners to choose from; and even if there's no Russian station in your listening area, if you're in a big city there's a good chance that there'll be at least one station that offers non-English, non-Spanish programming. But you'd be shocked at how little variety there is within those stations. I went back to my old high school in North Carolina late last year, to help some students put a station on the air. We toured some of the local broadcasters, and the program director at one of them, an oldies station in Durham, was just beaming when he told us how big his music library was. Most places only have about 400 songs to pick from, he told us, but at this station, there were 1200 songs.
Later on, we dropped by the Duke college station, which is very good—a bunch of kids playing interesting and unusual music and doing a good job of it. I mentioned what the oldies guy had told us, and his jaw just dropped. That station—a tiny little place—had thousands of LPs and CDs crammed into it. The idea of limiting themselves to just 1200 songs was just completely foreign to them. But unfortunately, stations like that are fairly rare. For the most part, what we see out there is diversity without depth: an ether carved into a hundred niches, each of which is only an inch deep.
There's an even bigger problem with the claim that American radio listeners have enough diversity. It's true that in every American city there's a number of formats to choose from. But in every city, there's something else as well: a deafening silent sound of all the things that aren't being broadcast.
I'm going to give you samples of those things.
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play Wilmouth Houdini: "Uncle Jo' Gimme Mo'!"
We’ll start with something old. This was calypso in the days before Belafonte—the Arhoolie label, which put this out, collects all sorts of amazing folk music of the past and present, along with various ethnic flavors of pop. Most of it won't turn up on the radio.
play Bhundu Boys: "Ring of Fire"
African music. Anyone recognize this song? It's a cover of a Johnny Cash song—from Zimbabwe, where Dolly Parton and Don Williams are very popular. There’s very little African music on American radio, and what there is can't possibly reveal all the variety of music from that continent—a case in point.
play Marius Cultier: "Ouelele"
Where the Bhundu Boys were mixing Zimbabwean music with American country-western, this fellow from French Antilla was mixing the local sounds with American funk and jazz.
By the way, what I'm doing right now is itself something that's increasingly rare on the radio: I'm actually telling you what you're listening to.
play Orishas: "Represent"
Another combination. In this case, it's Cuban hip hop—or Cuban-American, anyway. I actually did hear this on the radio, in fact that's how I found out about the record, but it was a tiny college station in California—much as I love the Buena Vista Social Club CDs and what they've done for Cuban music, the way it's been presented, especially on public radio and public TV, has given the false impression that Cuban music (and traditional music in general) are frozen in time, and that they need to be quote-unquote "preserved." I'm all for preserving the music of past, but vibrant musical traditions evolve, and part of how they evolve is by getting influenced by the other music around them, even if the results don't fit into any obvious radio formats or marketing categories.
play Wally Brill: "A Loop in Time"
This is even more unusual. A DJ took took some ancient 78 rpm records of Jewish cantors, and remixed them. You might hear stuff like this in a progressive dance club, but it's pretty unlikely you'll hear it on the radio. The thinking is that people want to dance to electronic dance music, but not listen to it in the car or anything like that. Of course, there's people who've tried it: I know a fellow, Jerry Szoka, who combined the two, by setting up an unlicensed radio station in a gay dance club he owned and broadcasting the evening's entertainment to his listeners in Ohio—he had a fair number of listeners, but eventually the FCC shut him down. We'll talk more about cases like that later on.
play Jorge Ben: "Ponta de Lança Africano"
If you recognize this song, it's probably not because you heard it on the radio. It's because it was used in an Intel commercial. These days, the people who pick music for TV ads are actually more daring than the people who pick music for radio playlists.
In case you're curious, this is a Brazilian rock song. It came out in 1976, though most Americans didn't get a chance to hear it until David Byrne put it on a collection of Brazialian pop he pulled together in 1989.
play Muslimgauze: "Romania Abuse"
I want to jump back to electronic music for a second. At least the dance stuff gets played in clubs. Music like this, which isn't really very danceable, has a very devoted audience, believe it or not. It's really flourished online, but you're not likely to hear it on the radio. Some of you might think that's a good thing, and while I like this CD, I have to admit that the chief use I've put it to is to blast it when the neighbors are being too loud. But barring this stuff from the airwaves isn't very fair to the people who like it, and more importantly, to the people who might like it if they stumbled on it while scanning through the dial but aren't exactly about to go looking for it, since they don't know it exists.
play 3Tripper: "My Unfinished Novel"
This, by contrast, is really good pop, with clever lyrics by a local band from Hawaii that releases their own music. You can order it from MP3.com. Leave aside the fact that it's not likely to be a hit in general, and consider instead the fact that it's not likely to get much airplay in Hawaii itself. There are exceptions, but the days of the "regional" hit are mostly over, at least as far as radio is concerned, which is a real shame.
play Orson Welles: "Dracula"
Radio drama is pretty much dead as well. Some public radio stations will play old serials or plays like this one, which is also available online by the way, but you can count the number of stations regularly producing new radio dramas on one hand.
play Carl Stalling: "Porky in Wackyland"
I'm just tossing this one in—it's the score to a Porky Pig short called Porky in Wackyland, one of the best short films ever made. Everybody loves this music, but heaven knows you aren't likely to hear it on the radio. In general, film music is rarely heard outside its original context, though occasionally a noncommercial station will devote a program to it. This was composed by Carl Stalling, who's regarded in some circles as one of the most creative forces in twentieth-century music.
play Soggy Bottom Boys: "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow"
This time I'm cheating: You can hear this music on the radio. It's the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou. The amazing thing is, this sold millions of copies without any radio airplay, became the best-selling country music album in the United States, finally got some airplay on TV, and still it's considered daring to play it on commercial country radio. The market is finally responding to it, as you can tell from the success of quasi-bluegrass bands like Nickel Creek, but the fact that radio was so timid, even in the face of such a big hit, tells you a lot.
Don't let public radio get away with claiming that they're the home of bluegrass and old-timey music. WAMU in Washington used to have a bluegrass format, but now it’s all-news except on the weekend, even when that means playing the exaxt same programs you can hear on another public station across town at the same time. Given that, it's possible that on balance, public radio is playing less of this kind of music now than before.
play Merle Haggard: "Bareback"
Meanwhile, bluegrass and old-timey are hardly the only kinds of country music that have had a hard time getting on the air. There's a whole movement of so-called “alternative country” music, some of it ultra-traditional and some of it crossbred with punk rock. This is arguably the most interesting and exciting music coming out today, but it's almost entirely absent from the airwaves. What's worse, onetime commercial gods of country music, like Merle Haggard, have been crammed into this category, now that most commercial country stations either ignore them completely or play only a bare handful of well-remembered hits. Haggard put out this album, If I Could Only Fly, on a small independent punk rock label the year before last. It's the best work he's done in 20 years, but it didn't get much airplay, certainly not on mainstream country radio.
* * * * * * * * * *
There's two more things you usually can't find on the radio, and in some ways they're the most unfortunate gaps. One is a station that wouldn't simply play one of the styles of music I just played for you, but would mix and match all of them in the same show. This is called "freeform," and it used to be fairly common, but now is limited to a certain number of noncommercial stations and less than 10 commercial ones. There are a number of different definitions of freeform radio out there, but they all require the DJ to pick his own records, something that's incredibly rare these days.
The other thing you usually can't find on the radio is a place for you to do what I just did: to stand in front of a microphone and be a DJ. If you want to play CDs on the air, as opposed to through a couple of loudspeakers in a hotel, you'll find that it costs a lot of money to get the government's permission. A radio dial that isn't lousy wouldn't just give us more freedom to choose among different styles of programming. It would allow us the freedom to create programming of our own.
So what do we hear on the radio instead? On some stations, you're not just going to have trouble finding DJs who pick their own records. You're going to have trouble finding DJs at all. Some of you might have seen an article in The Wall Street Journal last month about the biggest commercial radio chain, a behemoth called Clear Channel, and its efforts to propogate a format called KISS-FM. Around the country, 47 different stations with different call letters are all calling themselves KISS-FM and offering pretty much the same programming (though with some variations). On these stations, prerecorded DJs add bits of local color without ever stepping into the town that hosts the station that's broadcasting them. Clear Channel, by the way, has been trying to establish a trademark on the phrase KISS-FM, which sometimes means threatening lawsuits against other stations that call themselves KISS — except for the station that has the actual call letters KISS-FM, which isn't owned by Clear Channel and follows a different format. You'd think that if there were a trademark to be claimed, that's the station that would hold it.
Now, some people would point to KISS-FM and say, "Obviously, listeners are satisfied with this kind of radio. The market has spoken." But the market hasn't spoken, and not every listener is satisfied. For more than a decade, according to the analysts at the industry publication Duncan's American Radio, the percentage of people who listen to the radio has gone steadily down, except for one brief uptick during the talk-radio boom of the early '90s. Meanwhile, radio broadcasting is encumbered with a ton of regulatory barriers which have prevented upstart stations from coming on the air and transmitting something new. Even direct-satellite radio, which promises to tremendously increase the number of listening choices we have, is limited. The National Association of Broadcasters fought hard to prevent it from going on the air at all, and for all the new channels that are now being unveiled for those willing to pay for them, the Federal Communications Commission, under industry pressure, only granted two companies the right to engage in satellite broadcasting.
At any rate, we could have a lot more variety even on the AM and FM bands, without paying for a special satellite receiver, if only the FCC would ease up on its entry barriers. There's a lot of talk about radio deregulation these days, and that can obscure a very important point: We do not have a free market in radio broadcasting. In a free market, you could go out this afternoon, buy some equipment, and start broadcasting whatever you want, and as long as you weren't seriously interfering with someone else's signal, no one would shut you down. The technical cost of starting a low-power FM station is within most Americans' reach: anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, depending on how elaborate a station you want to put together. The legal cost is much higher. Your startup costs are going to be $100,000 at the very least. If you get a low-power FM license, it may be less, but as I'll explain later, most Americans are in no position to get a low-power FM license.
What sorts of stations are kept off the air by these entry barriers? Would they be interesting and lively, or would they just be more of the same? It's surprisingly easy to answer that question, because for the last decade or so, a lot of people who don't have $100,000 to spare have gone on the air anyway, without the Federal Communications Commission's permission.
Now, as you might expect, some of them did programming that was of no possible interest to anyone but themselves. Here's a sample:
[play excerpt from aircheck]
I actually listened to this entire tape once. I can't imagine that anyone else has, except maybe the guy who made it. Stations like that one tend to drift off the air long before the FCC notices them—in this case, the station shut down because some of its equipment broke. The really good unlicensed stations find a niche for themselves in their communities, and stay on the air until the government asks them to cut it out. Some of them keep broadcasting even then.
Consider Human Rights Radio in Springfield, Illinois. This was started by a blind guy in a housing project, and originally, you couldn't hear it outside the boundaries of the John Hay Homes. Along with playing music and books on tape, Human Rights Radio covered local issues very intensely, especially police brutality. In January 1989, for example, after some Springfield cops beat up a boxing coach and his son, the fellow who started the station, M'banna Kantako, interviewed the victims in their hospital beds and then broadcast the tape.
Later that year, a domestic dispute turned into a hostage crisis and a hundred or so heavily armed cops showed up at the housing project. The standoff lasted for three days, and Kantako covered the whole thing live. It ended when someone started shooting, and three people from the projects were killed. Kantako investigated the standoff and the shootings, and concluded that by overreacting to the initial dispute, the police had paved the way for the deaths. He also probed the question of whether it was police bullets that had killed the three dead. Needless to say, no other local radio station, or any other media outlet, was giving these events this kind of attention.
In the early days, Kantako also trained kids from the John Hay Homes in the basics of radio production, though this project fell off when those same kids started getting harassed by teachers and the police. Eventually, the John Hay Homes were demolished, but the station is still on the air, covering issues of interest to the poor people of Springfield.
Another station: Excellent Radio, run by Charley Goodman in downtown Grover Beach, California. Only two weeks after its debut in 1995, a storm knocked down all the region’s radio towers except for Goodman’s. Charley monitored his scanner closely, passing storm news and emergency announcements along to his listeners. Not long after that, Goodman asked the city council if he could broadcast its meetings live to his listeners. After a few months, he got the go-ahead. The city attorney understood that the station had no license, but that, he felt, was a matter between it and the FCC. California’s open meetings act, on the other hand, guaranteed the station the right to cover the council.
The station's volunteers ranged from skate punks to retirees, from white hippies to Spanish-speaking cumbia DJs. There was an afternoon kids’ show called Treasure Ivan, hosted by the 1960s tunesmith Ivan Ulz, who'd written songs for the Byrds, the Four Freshmen, and several other pop groups. There was a swing show, a ska show, and a weekly helping of “pure pop for now people.” One pair of programmers started interviewing the stars of the World Wrestling Federation. And a retired teacher who'd become an environmental activist had a show called Pollutions—Solutions. Once more, the fact that the station was technically illegal didn't keep local officials from coming on her show—for members of the Planning Department, for example, to talk with their constituents about the contamination of the nearby dunes. Also, unlike Human Rights Radio, Excellent Radio maintained cordial relations with the police, who faxed it the same press releases they sent to all the other local media. The station even had a retired highway patrolman on its staff. He did a jazz show.
Some of you might remember an article Michael Lynch wrote for Reason a couple of years ago about pirate radio in Florida. (Pirate radio is another name for unlicensed radio. Some unlicensed broadcasters regard it as a term of abuse, but others have embraced it.) One of the stations Michael mentioned was Hot 97.7, based in Liberty City, better known as the Miami ghetto. This station was run by a fellow named Brindley Marshall, a.k.a. Bo the Lover. Bo used to be a gangster; back in 1984, he even managed to smuggle a gun into a courtroom. After five years in prison, though, he turned his life around, and became one of the most popular disc jockeys on the Miami club circuit. Hot 97.7 first went on the air in 1996, broadcasting from a warehouse called the Pure Funk Playhouse. At first it was a low-power station, but by the time the FCC shut it down, it was transmitting at 2,000 watts and covering all of Miami and then some.
Now, Liberty City is the poorest, most run-down part of Dade County. Jobs are scarce there, litter covers each corner, drug abuse is rampant, and crime is high. The Pure Funk Playhouse is only a few blocks from the dumpster where a little girl was killed in the crossfire between rival gangs. For a while, the local cops set up a camera in an abandoned bank across the street, to keep an eye on the young blacks who’d hang out in front of the Playhouse all day long. According to Bo the Lover, "They were sure we were fronting for something. They kept sending undercover cops over here, trying to buy crack." But the cops always came away empty-handed. Unlike some of Miami’s pirate stations, Hot 97.7 would never, say, broadcast where to score some coke or where someone had spotted some cops. They always told pushers to stay off their corner, and after that initial period of mistrust, the local police decided that the people in the warehouse weren’t just real DJs, but were real allies in the fight to keep kids away from drug abuse and gangs. Michael and I talked with the beat cop on Bo’s block, Sgt. Frank Dean, and he was full of praise for Bo. Naturally, he wouldn’t condone broadcasting without a license, but he actually had nothing but kind words for the station and its founder.
In a neighborhood where there just isn’t much to do, Hot 97.7 gave people a creative outlet. It also broadcast community announcements, and not just bland stuff like a local events calendar. Once, when a kid ran away from home, the police told his parents that they’d have to wait a day before they started searching. So Mom and Dad went to Bo’s radio station, the call went out over the air, and by the end of the day the runaway had been found. Bo's station also aired some talk shows. Kat, a teen mother turned community activist, hosted a weekly program called Underground Teen Talk, in which service providers and others took teenagers’ calls about pregnancy, HIV, and related issues.
But the most interesting thing about Hot 97.7 might be how popular it was. This wasn’t unusual for pirate stations in the Miami area, though it caught a lot of record companies by surprise. The companies kept wondering why some of their releases were selling well in Miami without getting any local airplay. Then they found out that a lot of stations were playing them—it’s just that those stations weren’t licensed. According to Vibe magazine, Big Pun’s album Capital Punishment topped Miami’s Soundscan charts weeks before any of the legal stations in town were playing it. After that, record companies routinely sent their new releases to the pirates.
Needless to say, Miami's licensed stations wanted the FCC to shut their unlicensed competition down. At the same time, though, some of them started copying their illicit competitors. So in 1996, when a Liberty City pirate called The Bomb started making waves, WEDR—that's a legal station—started a show called The Bomb and hired a former pirate DJ to host it. And in early 1998, when some fully licensed businessmen launched a Tampa station called WILD 98.7 FM, their disc jockeys claimed to be kids broadcasting illegally from a boat in Tampa Bay. Even after the hoax was exposed, some listeners still thought they were real pirates—just unaccountably lame ones.
So that's a small selection of the stations that have gone on the air without the FCC's permission. There's a lot of others, ranging from Panthers to Promise Keepers. There have been left-wing stations, right-wing stations, Hasidic stations, Haitian stations, high school stations, church stations, a station run by migrant farmworkers, a station based in a discount mart, a station based in a retirement home. There have been some really interesting programming experiments: I know of at least two stations, for example, which were basically programmed by their own listeners. The audience sends in music, newscasts, and promos via e-mail, as MP3 files. The station then broadcast them.
When you look at the tremendous variety that's been put on the air in defiance of the law, and then stop to ponder how much more there could be if you weren't weeding out the people who'd rather not break the law, you can't help think of contemporary radio as lousy. We could have all the variety of the Internet on our boomboxes, and we don't.
Speaking of the Internet: I'm not going to get into the field of Internet radio, which is obviously very diverse despite some new costs that have been heaped onto it by the intellectual-property lobby. One thing the Internet has proved, though, is that forms of music that allegedly aren't commercially viable can actually do quite well when they're allowed to find an audience. In 1999, when Arbitron released its first ratings for Web broadcasters, the two stations with the most listeners were a pair of FM outlets—that's licensed outlets, not pirates—with Internet simulcasts: KFAN in Fredericksburg, Texas, and KPIG in Watsonville, California. (We might be able to catch KFAN here in San Antonio—it's at 107.9 FM, if anyone wants to try.) Both of those stations broadcast a lot of alternative-country music mixed with rootsy rock and blues, and both of them have done very well in their local listening areas. But they haven't been imitated much in other markets, where the conventional wisdom is that listeners prefer the polished Nashville brand of country music. Obviously, there's an audience for this kind of stuff after all; and maybe, if the entry barriers to broadcasting weren't so steep, some more stations like these might emerge.
So why do we have all these entry barriers? One of the stated rationales—the main one—is that there simply isn't room for all these new stations. But the fact that so many unlicensed microbroadcasters managed to run stations without causing any serious interference should stand as a response to that argument. It's true that some microbroadcasters have run sloppy operations and stepped on other people's signals, just as some licensed broadcasters have done the same. But most don't.
When you actually talk to broadcasters, you find that the reasons for the entry barriers are a lot more cynical. A lot of them honestly believe that letting more stations on the air will result in a lot more signal interference. But mostly, they just don't want the competition. They're also sitting on some valuable licenses whose prices would sharply drop if more broadcasters were allowed on the air.
Also, some of them will say flat-out that you need to make sure broadcasters made a substantial investment in their stations, even if you need to gin up that investment artificially, because that way they won't waste their frequency on something frivolous. I've actually seen one activist trying to convince broadcasters that low-power FM won't be a threat because there will still be enough restrictions to keep the dabblers out. I'm going to quote him directly:
"How many of the 'nutcases' do you really think will be willing to spend a year trying to get a CP [construction permit], then spend ten grand or more (substantially more for a station with any sort of profit potential) to actually put the station on the air?"
And that's from a supporter of low-power broadcasting. So this is the mentality we're contending with.
OK. So how could we make room in the law for all these different sorts of radio stations? One step would be to allow broadcasters to transmit at lower levels of power. A new high-powered station set between another two high-powered stations might cause a lot of interference; a station with a weaker signal might not. The FCC used to issue so-called "Class D" licenses to schools and community groups to transmit at just 10 watts of power, until the public broadcasting establishment complained that all those little stations were sitting where they might put big NPR outlets instead, leading the government to stop issuing the licenses in 1978. More recently, Clinton's FCC Chairman William Kennard put forward a fairly conservative plan to license 100-watt noncommercial stations on the FM band. The FCC approved the plan, though it met some opposition from the Republicans on the commission. One of them, Michael Powell, is now the head of the FCC and is regarded as a booster for free markets; he often says that the FCC should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. But he dissented in part from the low-power FM plan, specifically citing the possibility that the new stations might erode the economic vitality of existing broadcasters. The other Republican commissioner at the time, Harold Furchgott-Roth, is regarded as a radical free-marketeer, but he voted completely against the plan. To be fair, he raised some significant issues, such as whether the new stations would face the same red-tape requirements endured by other broadcasters. But rather than propose answers to these questions, he used them as an excuse to oppose the plan altogether.
After the plan passed the FCC, the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio started lobbying Congress to kill it, and a sizable number of Democrats, plus every Republican in the House except Ron Paul and Ed Royce, voted against low-power broadcasting. They didn't wipe out Kennard's plan altogether, but they did pile on yet more restrictions, to the point where there's no room, for example, for legal low-power broadcasting in any American cities. Some rural areas will still get new stations, and that's it.
Another step toward better radio would be to allow stations to broadcast closer together. To avoid interference, there must be buffers between broadcasters. That is why there are no stations at, say, 101.2 FM—the FCC won’t risk interfering with the outlets at 101.1 and 101.3. Similarly, and more importantly, if a station is transmitting at 101.3, you have to be a substantial physical distance away before you can be licensed to transmit at 101.1 or 101.5. No one disputes the need for such buffers. But the current rules are based on the technical standards of the 1950s. It’s now possible for far more stations to fit onto the spectrum without stomping on each other's signals.
The FCC is already pragmatic enough to allow stations some leeway in bargaining with each other to set the actual boundaries of their coverage areas. It should let them actually sell interference easements, allowing both established and new broadcasters to set up shop at a closer frequency if they pay for the privilege.
Then there's perhaps the most significant act of deregulation the government could do: It could open up new spectrum to broadcasting. Simply turning over unused UHF spectrum to FM radio would make room for hundreds more channels in every city. Beyond that, if the FCC would open even more of the ether to broadcasting, manufacturers could sell so-called downconverters: small devices that would attach to or sit near a radio and convert signals sent over other sections of the spectrum. This would work a lot like DirecTV, which allows a TV set built to receive UHF and VHF signals pick up broadcasts made in the SHF band. But if you want to bring down the price of the converter, you’ll need a highly integrated device without a high parts cost. And in order for companies to invest in developing such a machine, you’ll need a regulatory regime that will allow the product to be put to the use for which it was devised.
Meanwhile, we need a regulatory regime that will allow radio itself to be put, not just to the use for which it was devised, but to all the new, creative uses that broadcasters can conceive.
If we've got time for questions, I'll take some now.
