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

Tim Wall
poke streamed music for us in playlists which balance the familiar with the acceptably
new. The more recent take-up of 3G broadband mobile devices has also allowed the
services to leave the restrictions of the desktop computer and match the portability of
over-the-air radio. Nevertheless radio remains a very popular medium. In the UK and
the US over 90% of the population listen at least once a week (Arbitron, 2011; RAJAR,
2011b), and in the UK an increasing proportion of the population have access to the
extended number of stations offered by digital broadcasting. Nearly 40% of citizens
now have access to a digital radio, and the UK’s DAB service now accounts for just
under 20% of listening, with digital TV and the internet about 5% each.
This paper has primarily sought to understand how this extension of radio listening
opportunities relates to discussions about radio as a public good and for the
public good which have been an important part of the way in which radio has been
evaluated, and some radio services justified. Taking the polar national radio systems
of the UK and the US, specialist music and diversity in the range of music played
on radio has, historically, benefitted from an expansion in the number of radio stations
provided. This has also been the case with the availability of DAB, internet
radio and the new music services. However, most music radio still serves the central
ground, and as regulation of the ownership of radio in both the US and UK has
lightened there has been consolidation around a smaller number of brands, and even
the commercial codification of musical diversity in music formats has been driven
to a greater uniformity. Examples from the margins of UK commercial radio and
US college radio provide the exceptions, like WFUV and WZBC in the USA, and
XFM and Jazz FM in the UK, however much they represent interesting approaches
to music programming.
Internet radio has changed radically in the last decade, and perhaps the opportunities
for new forms of music are more apparent in the new music services than in
the development of online radio services. It is notable, though, that at least two of
the new services – Last.fm and Pandora – use radio as an analogy to make their offer
comprehensible to users. These services have been particularly effective at exploiting
the technological potential of new digital technologies for metadata tagging and
scraping as part of the interactivity offered by the organisation of the internet. As
brands, services like Spotify utilise the sort of marketing impact that radio stations
have traditionally employed. However, what they offer is the ability to create an individualised
listening experience, but one extended beyond the limitations of a private
record collection. The services, however, do not yet account for a large proportion of
radio-like listening. After initially including them in their listening surveys, Arbitron
no longer count such engagements with music, while RAJAR do not consider them
radio at all.
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The Radio is dead. Long live the Radio!