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- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2004
Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2004
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2004
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Burnishing the brand: Todd Storz and the total station sound
Authors: Tom McCourt and Eric W. RothenbuhlerThis article examines the development of Top 40 radio by Todd Storz and Mid- Continent Broadcasting in the years following World War II. Our findings, based on recent interviews we have conducted with Storz employees, challenge the received wisdom concerning Top 40’s development and practices. Previous accounts infer that Top 40 marked an abrupt, almost instantaneous break with previous radio programming practice; that on-air talent chafed under its tightly prescribed scheduling; and that Top 40 specifically targeted the burgeoning teenage audience, primarily through rock-and-roll music programming. We find, instead, that Top 40’s development was gradual; that deejays at Storz stations readily embraced the format, and that Storz stations, rather than seeking specific demographic segments, sought to re-aggregate the mass audience for radio. We argue that Top 40 radio was conceived in mechanistic, rather than aesthetic, terms. Each Storz station functioned as a well-oiled sales machine; the intention was to sell the station-as-brand to advertisers, rather than promote individual records or personalities to audiences.
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An unheard story? The challenge for radio studies in Italy
More LessThis article intends to provide a survey of the sparse research done on Italian radio, within a historical framework, and in particular to investigate the reasons why for so long it has been subjected to specific ‘high brow’ academic interests and areas. While in Britain and in the United States of America the debate about radio has been characterized most obviously by a perceived opposition between public service and commercial broadcasting, discussion in Italy has by contrast been framed first by an assumed dichotomy between literary, humanistic culture and broadcasting, and later between radio and television. Now deregulation, globalization and new technologies provide or require new models of communication, and are offering an opportunity for researchers to bridge this gap in a wider multidisciplinary and transnational academic community.
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The political economy of Internet music radio
By Tim WallThe new technologies of the World Wide Web have become an important arena for sound broadcasting, and for those with access there is a whole world of radio available to listen to online. The relatively small cost of making music radio programmes for online distribution has led many to argue that the technology makes the possibility of free access and diverse radio. Using empirical research and a broadly political economic analysis this paper examines recent and likely future trends to judge the degree to which the technology is adding to the public good. It concludes that two major ways of presenting streamed radio are developing, related to two business models, which are leading to the domination of this new form of radio by a small number of companies.
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The Launch of IREN, Europe’s new International Radio Research Network
By Peter LewisIREN is funded by the European Commission for two and a half years by which time it will have set up an association to continue the work of coordination and support across Europe. Its existence will, its founders hope, encourage the development of radio groups and networks where none as yet exist, and in particular give support and encouragement to academics whose work is isolated and receives little institutional support. Younger researchers and academics from the new EU member countries will be especially encouraged.
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'The Radio Conference: A Transnational Forum'. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. 28–31 July 2003
By Ken GarnerApart from one or two areas of debate, the show was pretty much a consensual act of worship of its object of study. And there was something in the nature of this shared enthusiasm that was a bit like radio itself. Just consider some of the many things on which delegates were agreed. That radio, while resisting serious analysis because of its ordinariness and continuous presence, derives its very importance in our lives from this quality of immediacy, or live-ness. That radio cuts deep into the social and cultural contexts in which it arises. And that consequently its still largely shrouded history is just beginning to reveal how it has been exploited in different places to mask or magnify various cleavages - social, political, ethnic, linguistic, geographical or generational - in the pursuit of nationalist or commercial ends. How even in supposedly mature and liberal radio cultures, the medium has been an engine driving through respectability and consensus, the values of the professional centre of society, at the expense of the exorcizing of apparently troublesome, marginal or aberrant groups.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Kate Lacey, Peter Dahlén and Brian O’NeillListening In: Radio and the American Imagination from Amos ‘n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern, Susan J. Douglas (2004) . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 415 pp., ISBN 0-8166-4423-3 (pbk), $19.95
Elvis: A Radio History from 1945 to 1955, Aaron Webster (2003) . Plano, TX: Republic of Texas Press, 248 pp., ISBN 1556229437 (pbk), $18.95
Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (eds), (2002) . London and New York: Routledge, 569 pp., ISBN 0-415-92821-4 (pbk), $31.95
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 21 (2023)
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Volume 20 (2022)
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Volume 19 (2021)
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Volume 18 (2020)
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Volume 17 (2019)
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Volume 16 (2018)
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Volume 15 (2017)
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Volume 14 (2016)
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Volume 13 (2015)
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Volume 12 (2014)
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Volume 11 (2013)
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Volume 10 (2012)
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Volume 9 (2011)
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Volume 8 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 7 (2009)
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Volume 6 (2008 - 2009)
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Volume 5 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 4 (2007)
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Volume 3 (2005)
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Volume 2 (2004)
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Volume 1 (2003 - 2004)