Radio’s not f*cked! 📻🥂🎶
I’m a freshly-minted ‘teacher of media’. I’ve got an internet radio station. I’ve also got a large chip on my shoulder (a whole potato, in fact!) And for the last twenty years, I’ve been hearing how dead radio is. Every time a new type of media comes along — it doesn’t matter if it’s podcasting, social media, or black & white television — someone, somewhere, gives radio a kick in the guts with some kind of melodramatic headline:
But I put it to you that radio’s not fucked.
It’s fighting an underground war of resistance, rescuing indie artists, one bandcamp purchase at a time, from the clutches of billionaire streaming platforms. Rather than AI hosts and algorithms, real people, with real passions, put together hours and hours of specialist music programming available for anyone to hear. Instead of a single destination app storing most of the worlds music, tens of thousands of individual stations, all around the world, send out a careful selection of songs and spoken messages, unique as stars in the night sky.
And all you have to do to find them is look.
If you don’t believe me, please check out Radio Garden . . . spin the globe, and find one of the 30 000 radio streams in hundreds of genres and languages, from all around the world!
Radio Garden is the polar opposite of a monopoly. The app grew out of a special project from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, a government funded museum and archive. The app was never meant to be a commercial application – but to perhaps cover the costs of running it, there is a free version with ads, as well as a version you can buy for a few dollars, which is ad-free.
And the moment you start to spin the globe there is a certain pleasure involved: an arm-chair voyage of discovery – and I promise that you can feel a very holistic aspect to this app, an underlying altruism that has been rare on the web over the last twenty years: You are not being funnelled into a particular country or radio station, the way you are forced to line up next to certain items at a supermarket; or finding digital things ranking higher or lower, based on popularity.
Instead, you spin the globe and wander over a symbolic version of our world. You do of course see that wealthier countries have more green ‘radio glitter’ lighting up their landmass. But you will still find the tiny radio shacks of Oceania, or the astrology broadcasts of Kathmandu.
And as I write this, I’m listening to ‘Nutbush City’ on KPISS Radio of New York City via Radio Garden, and earlier on in the show, they were playing the Miles Davis soundtrack for a French movie, where the radio DJ described how Miles recorded it all in one night, just from watching a cut of the movie in a theatrette. Hearing the DJ’s voice tell this story, tells me how much he cares about the music and this wonderful back story.
But how did I know to look for KPISS?
I was on Bandcamp listening to music. This is often where I look for new music for my own radio station, the Halloween Listening Party on FOTW Radio. Although it is mainly a Halloween radio station, during the off-season, which is about nine months of the year, I program in J-Pop, Italo disco and 80s classic hits, for a daily two-hour show, where listeners mainly from Japan tune in.
And while looking on this Bandcamp label page for Italo disco and old rave classics, I noticed the name of someone who had bought a track (their NO HUMANS ALLOWED moniker caught my eye!) – and their profile revealed that they did a radio program for the KPISS radio station.
Visiting KPISS, I couldn’t believe they had all of these great shows built around genres like Electroclash, Italo and Synthwave. And when I read their ABOUT page, I was surprised and pleased to see:
“KPISS is the first and only internet radio station supporting artists and labels directly via Bandcamp.”
The reason this jumped out at me, is that I often want to write to Bandcamp, to tell them how I get at least 40 percent of my music from Bandcamp. I’ve been running my station for 10 years, and have been finding artists like Europaweite Aussichten, Full Eclipse, Seja, Astral Stereo Project and Christian Bergnana – as well as awesome lables like Synthwave Cafe & Mothball Record. And I buy their music. And I can honestly say that I have spent a few thousand dollars getting music for Halloween.
And I would say this is true of most internet radio stations – we rely on scheduling MP3s into the radio playout software. And so this means buying musicians tracks, which means supporting the artists directly.
And in the case of Bandcamp, it means about 80-90 percent of the purchase money goes directly to the artist – with Bandcamp taking about 10 percent on a sale. And then when they have Bandcamp Fridays, which is 12 times a year (first Friday of every month) – a full hundred percent goes directly to the musician.
And interestingly, in the discussion around musicians being paid paltry royalties by streaming platforms, I rarely hear Bandcamp get a mention as an alternative. The reason might be that most music by major labels does not come through Bandcamp – maybe just some of the smaller commercial labels. But Bandcamp is a tech company who is doing the right thing by the artists.
But according to Bandcamp:
“Fans have paid artists and their labels $1.54 billion using Bandcamp. In the past year alone, they’ve spent $196 million on 13.5 million digital albums, 11 million tracks, 1.55 million vinyl records, 750,000 CDs, 250,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.”
Going back to us indie online radio stations, most of what we are doing are passion projects, labours of love, because communicating and sharing music with others is a big part of our own enjoyment, and also how we have chosen to spend the ‘me time’ in our lives.
But also, looking at the economic side of it, we don’t charge musicians any money to upload their work to our ‘platform’/broadcasting server. We share information and images of their releases on social media. We buy their songs ‘old school’ from iTunes, which includes commercial songs – so the big record labels are still getting money from us.
We also have to purchase small-time user broadcast licenses, which in Australia, goes directly back to the major record labels, who set up the collection agency for this purpose. We pay for our websites, plus an annual subscription to a dedicated radio server that lets us give a stream to our listeners. At a very fundamental level, a small internet radio station costs at least two-thousand dollars a year to run, without factoring in any kind of labour cost. But I’m sure the cost can go much higher, the more effort you put into it.
And then you have this disgusting behaviour by the major record labels who in 2022 pressured Radio Garden to block all non-UK streams (the rest of the world) from being available on their app. The reason behind it was the erroneous belief that many of the radio streams where unlicensed pirate radio stations delivering contraband music cargo into the British Isles. They made a moral judgement about many radio stations who are doing the right thing and paying their dues but punishing them as a result.
But I would say that there are many stations out there like FOTW Radio and KPISS doing good things –not necessarily big players, and maybe even pushing against something to their own detriment.
But I would never say that it’s a waste of time! The radio channel brings me great joy. A few weeks ago, when I was feeling a bit down, I saw a song request come in for the J-Pop show, and I suddenly realised that I’m not alone in the world – I reguarly get to talk to my listeners online.
And when Spooky Season rolls around, lots of old friends come out of the woodwork, and send me a message and a song request –as well as the musicians themselves, making music especially for Halloween! And so I like to think of those little green lights on the Radio Garden globe, as lighthouses dotted around the world, ‘sending out an SOS to the world’ — SHARING OUTSTANDING SONGS — and a message of hope.
