The Promise of Radio Paradise: An Open-Source Challenge to Commercial Radio

Remember when “commercial broadcasting”
didn't ridicule the archaic concept that broadcast bands were a
public space where stations and their owners operated by the grace
of public trust?That idea started falling out the window somewhere in the
Nixon administration. By the Reagan administration it was hanging
by its toes. The Clinton administration gave it the heave-ho by
deregulating station ownership to the extent that one company,
Clear Channel
Communications, owns large hunks of the radio dial in
nearly all the major markets, including 5 FMs in New York, 5 FMs
and 2 AMs in San Francisco, and 5FMs and 3 AMs in Los Angeles, to
name a few. In Santa Barbara, the small city where I live, Clear
Channel owns 4 FMs and 3 AMs. The total number of local stations
isn't much more than that.As Brad Kava of the San Jose Mercury
News points out in
his
current column, the company's influence extends much
farther:To comply with the legal limit of eight stations
in any market, the company sold off three signals in the San
Francisco market: KXJO-FM to Spanish Broadcasting, and KCNL-FM and
KFJO-FM to Chase Radio Properties, both minority-owned
broadcasters. But Clear Channel continues to program the stations.
For a sale to be legal, the new owner must program at least 85
percent of the station's content, according to federal regulations.
Clear Channel is simulcasting all of KSJO's content on KFJO and
KXJO.No wonder the commercial radio dial is wall-to-wall generica.
Nobody protests, for two big reasons: 1) If the last administration
didn't care much, the current one cares even less. This
administration clearly loves Big Business, as its toothless
proposed settlement with Microsoft amply demonstrates, and Clear
Channel is bent on becoming the Microsoft of radio. 2) Clear
Channel controls much of the local cross-promotional entertainment
advertising flow as well. Here's Brad again:Clear Channel is also the country's largest
promoter of concerts and theater events. Locally, it owns Shoreline
Amphitheater and books the biggest shows into San Jose's and
Oakland's arenas and Saratoga's Mountain Winery. It advertises
these events heavily on its competitors and works deals with those
stations so they can sponsor events at its facilities.
The competitors can't afford to risk losing those ad
dollars.Not that anybody is up for a fight with the company that Eric
Boehlert calls Radio's
Big
Bully and a
Tough
Company on Salon.com. Nor is anybody raising a stink about
the role played by the record companies in all of this, which Eric
wrote about in his article,
“Pay
for Play”: “Listeners may not realize it, but radio today
is largely bought by the record companies. Most rock and Top 40
stations get paid to play the songs they spin by the companies that
manufacture the records.”Back when I was a kid, in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
“payola” made front-page headlines when it was learned that disc
jockeys took money and favors for playing certain songs. In those
days radio mattered. So did the concept of public trust. Today it's
a rare jock that gets to choose his or her own music. That's
essentially a corporate decision.It gets worse, but we've explored the darkness far enough.
Rather, let's look at the alternatives.On the Demand side, there's music sharing, which
Napster pioneered and
for which it got destroyed by the music industry. In the
open-source world their work survives in the form of
Limewire and other
systems that take advantage of the
Gnutella network
protocol.Whatever else one might call music sharing over the Net, it
serves as the listeners' workaround of the commercial radio's
failure to care. In the old days, radio was a system whereby
professional connoisseurs shared their music collections with
listeners. Yes, there was commercial involvement but not of the
massive and cynical industrial sort we see today, where radio acts
as a sampler tray for goods pumped from Production to Consumption
through thoroughly integrated manufacturing, promotion,
distribution and retailing pipes, whose unseen powers bear a creepy
resemblance to those of
The
Matrix.On the Supply side, we have on-line radio stations created
and run by the same kind of connoisseurs that once thrived on
commercial radio (and persist on some noncommercial stations).
You'll find a few of these on
Yahoo's and
Real.com's
radio listings, which are dominated by licensed commercial and
noncommercial stations that employ those companies' server
software. You'll find a lot more on places like
Live365,
which lists on-line stations streaming MP3 audio. Apple's
iTunes
tuner also lists hundreds of streaming MP3 stations (maintained, I
am told, by a Kerbango
veteran). Ogg
Vorbis is out there too.Taking the lead at making on-line radio an actual business is
“Wild” Bill Goldsmith, who is responsible for the lovably
anachronistic KPIG, a
highly successful commercial FM station that serves the Santa
Cruz-Salinas-Monterey Bay area of California over the air on
107-oink-5 (from, no kidding, the town of Freedom), and the rest of
the world over a sparkling 128Kb MP3 stream (plus others of lower
fi). Bill's other labor of love is
Radio Paradise,
which he runs out of his place in (no kidding) Paradise, CA.Bill has built both KPIG's and Radio Paradise's on-line
broadcast systems on Linux and other open-source hacks, which he is
eager to share with the rest of the world. There's even money in
it, Bill says.I'm bringing this up today because Bill will join us on
“The Linux Show”
this evening, and because I've written about Bill twice already for
Linux Journal, and the links are still fresh.
Here they are: 1) the January 2002
“Linux For Suits” editorial , and 2)
the
November 1, 2001 SuitWatch newsletter.And yes, I have an ax to grind. I love good radio, and I miss
hearing more of it on the air. I believe Open Source Radio is the
best hope—not only for on-line broadcasting but for over-the-air
commercial broadcasting as well, mostly because it not only saves
money but gives commercial broadcasters a cornucopia of
connoisseurs that might well serve as sources for over-the-air
“content”.For that we'll need the Open Source community to start
pushing the ball Bill started rolling.Are we up for it? I'd like to hear what you think.

Doc Searls
(doc@ssc.com)
is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.