Radio is dead-Long live the Radio.pdf - Universidad del País Vasco

Welcome to the third age of radio: understanding radio's present from radio's past
Licensed music radio did not reach Britain until 1967 when BBC Radio One was established.
There were stations that broadcast pop music programming from outside
Britain first from land-based Radio Luxembourg, and then ships based in the English
Channel. These stations were often best heard at night, and the smaller and cheaper
radio allowed the young listener to retreat to their bedrooms (Barnard, 1989). Here
the portability of the radio allowed a separateness of radio consumption within, rather
than outside, the home, which was characteristic of British radio listening culture
through to the late 1960s.
5. The new age: music radio and online music services
When I discuss my interest in internet radio with people outside academia, they most
often draw on anecdotes about their own music consumption to characterise contemporary
change. In these personal stories it is online music services like Last.fm,
Pandora, or Spotify which are seen as the major innovation in their music listening,
and the services are often presented as having the best qualities of listening to music
radio or to records from a personal music collection. On the one hand, I am told,
they offer up new and unheard music but, on the other, this is set within a bespoke
‘playlist’ of known music, all selected because of their existing tastes. These services
seem to be valued most, therefore, because they provide a bespoke playlist to each
listener. In this they offer a challenge both to traditional radio listening and to the
practices of collecting and playing records.
It is interesting that, in the anecdotes, the differences between the services tends
to be seen as matters of personal taste, especially in terms of the music which is offered
or the costs involved. There are, though, important differences in the way these
services operate. Last.fm combines a number of functions to deliver its service. At
heart it presents artists and music selected on the bass of their popularity on the service,
and then offers them as listening in its music radio-like play-out of tracks. This
play out can unfold automatically, or be changed by the listener. It is also possible
to install a data scraping application called Scrobbler onto one’s computer, and Last.
fm then uses information about all the music played on that computer to determine
what to offer in its bespoke play-out service for the individual listener. Last.fm gives
prominence to the idea that the popularity of music is most important through a section
devoted to charts of the most-played music on the service, and it also uses this
information to recommend music tracks or information on live events to the user.
The prominence of this discourse of popularity, however, disguises the way that music
tracks are selected for the bespoke play-out streams. These are selected because
other users whose listening profile resembles your own have listened them to. In
The Radio is dead. Long live the Radio!
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