Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2020

Focusing on early experiments with algorithms and music streaming at WFMU, the longest-running US freeform radio station, and the Free Music Archive (FMA), a curated open music website, this article shows how commercial streaming services have been indebted to independent, open music infrastructures but have then erased and denied that history. The article ‘provincializes’ music streaming platforms such as Spotify by focusing not on their commercial aims but instead on the ‘convivial’, collaborative practices and spaces that their software engineers and users inhabited. I analyse an experimental national telephone broadcasting service at WFMU in 1989, an algorithmic WFMU radio stream ‘The Flaming Robot of Love’ during the Republican National Convention in 2004 and the ‘Free Music Archive Radio App’ that recommended tracks on the FMA website from 2011 to 2016. The app worked with an application programming interface (API) from Echo Nest. Echo Nests’ algorithmic recommendation engine also powers most commercial streaming services today. When Spotify purchased Echo Nest in 2014 and took the start-up’s open API offline in 2016, it engaged in ‘primitive accumulation’ of open-access knowledge and resources for commercial purposes. The FMA closed in 2019 and now only exists as a static site. As social institutions, however, WFMU and FMA ‘recomposed’ – adapted to a new medium and a new political context – collaborative engineering practices of the early broadcasting era. The article argues that moments of oppositional ‘conviviality’ in media culture such as the FMA should be analysed as elements of a continuous struggle.

Connectivity made possible by the diffusion of digital technologies has offered new possibilities for the public to interact with media, including radio. However, interactions are often framed by globally managed platforms, owned by companies with values based on maximizing profit, rather than prioritising Illich’s forms of conviviality. In this article, we draw on experiences from the Grassroot Wavelengths project that introduces an innovative peer-to-peer platform to support the creation and management of community radio stations. We offer insight into the practices of participation in community media, where the users influence decisions concerning the technology, the content, the actors and the organization policy of the radio station, through a participatory design approach. These collaborations between researchers and users, together with a focus on the development of relational assets in local contexts, are fundamental in an attempt to design a platform that fosters conviviality and offers an alternative way to consider participation in community media.

In 2018, the BBC announced plans to replace their long-established ‘iPlayer Radio’ service with a new platform called BBC Sounds. The new service was promoted as a single space where listeners can consume BBC radio, music and podcasts, creating a single point of interaction between audiences and content. This is, however, far more than an exercise in reframing public service radio content in a new app; it is also a practical application of these policies through the commissioning of content made for online, specifically, younger, audiences. This shift happens not only at a time where traditional broadcasters are exploring ways to re-engage younger listeners but as commentators search for the ‘Netflix of Podcasts’ This article explores the manner in which the BBC Sounds project is a response to current trends in the radio industry and to which it recognizes podcasting as an audio medium that is distinct from but institutionally connected to radio.

This paper investigates the motivations of volunteers in participating in broadcasting on a community radio station in the age of social media. The station chosen broadcasts in Irish, a minority language in Ireland, although it is also the state’s national and first official language. It was founded to support and develop the community of Irish speakers in an English-speaking environment. Raidió na Life is based in Dublin and broadcasts to a mixed and dispersed population of Irish language speakers. One of the original aims of the station was to build a sense of community and linguistic empowerment for these people. Data generated by interviews and focus groups reveal that volunteers do not seem to share these clear-cut aims, in fact they seem to lack a sense of themselves as language or community activists. However, the performances of their roles as voluntary broadcasters, particularly in their engagement with their audiences on air and online, appear to be having the desired effect of building social, cultural and linguistic networks. The article demonstrates how social, communicative and cultural benefits can accrue through traditional broadcasting and new social media, even where practitioners are unaware of this dimension to their work. The element of fun or enjoyment keeps people volunteering and makes it personally worth their while. This is found to be more important than any sense of language or community activism as a motivation for participation in the station and is actually one of the reasons why Raidió na Life has manged to stay so successfully on air for the past 27 years.

Radio is hailed as Africa’s medium of choice in the global communication age. Introduced as a colonial tool of information, education and entertainment in the early 1930s, radio broadcasting was mainly in colonial languages as colonial administrators perceived local language broadcasting a threat to their empire building and ‘civilization’ agendas. The fortunes of local language broadcasting did not dramatically change in the independence era when broadcast media were in the firm control of the state. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, mostly resulting from a more liberalized media environment, local language broadcasting has undergone unprecedented growth. Drawing on written archival material, including internal communication among policy-makers, audience letters, key informant interviews and findings from a recent audience study, this article charts the progressive development of local language radio broadcasting in Ghana, and engages with the role played by early audiences and broadcasters in indigenizing broadcast content.

The voices of minority ethnic staff working in radio are very rarely heard. In fact, the UK radio industry has been singled out, by the government approved regulatory body, as continuing to fail to reflect the diversity of British communities – both on-air and in terms of employment. This article illustrates the perspectives of minority ethnic workers employed at the BBC on the Asian Network, a specialist ethnic radio station, and examines how they craft programme and news content for a distinctive audience. Through in-depth interviews with 30 BBC employees, there is look at the challenges, conflict and barriers this group of staff face. The interviews expose a difference of opinion among staff over the core target audience and the version of Asian identity articulated on-air and demonstrate that a rigid gatekeeping system restricts the dissemination of news content about all the communities that comprise the group British Asian.