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
of music radio. The Last.fm inter-subjectivity and Pandora ‘DNA’ recommendation
systems sit somewhere in between, as they automate the specialist selections usually
undertaken by DJs using the wisdom of crowds in the first case, and a musical attributes
profile in the second. If increasing the diversity of music which is heard and
recognising the link between music and cultural vitality are means to increase the
public good, then both of these services make an important contribution. They are,
though, a compromise between the important role that specialist DJs have as tastemakers
within fan cultures and the automated systems of contemporary radio programming.
In addition, the recommendation functions of the music services act merely
as an index of the cultural interaction between music fans, reflected in older practices
of record sharing and mix-tape exchange. Of course, by automating approximations
of these cultural practices, Last.fm and Pandora have created a cost-effective, centralised,
virtual location for personal music immersion. By contrast, the strong social
media orientation, the record collection model, and the customisation of the Spotify
service places it more firmly in the heart of existing music fandom practices, but
further away from specialist music radio.
In important ways, though, these services all resolve one of the central economic
difficulties that capitalist firms have with public goods. As such goods are freely
available, companies cannot control the access of consumers and so cannot use traditional
payment models to turn the public good into a commodity. Over-the-air radio
ultimately used spot advertising as a form of financing and commodified its audience
as the primary good it produced. However, the internet makes it easier to control
access and to make some or all of the services subject to subscription models. Music
services, then, are taking the radio-like experience away from the public status of
over-the-air radio, and this in itself has been a reason that such services have not
faced the sort of regulation to which radio has been subject. If scarcity of channels
is a justification for intervening in the provision of radio, ubiquity is a justification
for non-intervention. This is compounded by the fact that the internet allows these
services to be offered globally, and they are less restricted to the locality by their technology,
and to national organization by their regulation. As the current restriction
of the Pandora service to the US demonstrates, it is issues of IP which remain the
strong determining regulatory force.
6. Conclusions
Last.fm’s semiotic claim to inherit and supersede the fifty-year tradition of over-the-air
music radio in the twenty-first century is, of course, hyperbole. Such music services
certainly imply an understanding of the cultural value of music radio, and offer bes-
The Radio is dead. Long live the Radio!
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