11 ms·

America's rural radio stations are vanishing

100 points by eplanit 7y ago

c3534l 7y ago
You could have written this same article 80 years ago.
merluck 7y ago
Hello. My family needs help. The Guardian article was written and investigated for almost 8 months. They are Mark and Tristan Lucke. The situation is extremely important. Please go to willcoxradio com for complete story . Today the temperature is high there. Fire smoke from the mountain is coming into the station. Mark isnt well because of this. The town of Willcox is looking the other way. The world news isn't. We really need help with this. My email is merluck63@ gmail.com. l help with everything to help them. My family needs help with getting this problem fixed before it is to late.Thank you for sharing this news. We truly appreciate it.Mercedez Lucke- Lucke-Benedict
merluck 7y ago
I had to join this to make sure my message was sent. Bless you all with love if anyone and everyone can reach out to Mark and Tristan . There has to be a way to stop this criminal 51% owner that Mark has to deal with. Everything was great brfire this happened. The station flourished. KHIL was global. Fans across the world. Now it is a huge mess and my family is suffering. It gets worse as the heat elevates. There must be something that can be done. No lawyers will touch this without money and there is none. I give half my salary to help them. Anyone? Can you help? Please share the articles. There are many more now . Mercedez Lucke-Benedict
hprotagonist 7y ago
our radio stations are vanishing, period, into a siriusXM and ClearChannel morass of repetitive hell. NPR affiliates (KEXP, etc) and college radio stations (WZBC, WRCT) keep the flame alive but they’re all that’s left. I still dearly miss the stations of my youth, which were crucial venues for hip hop culture (HOT97) and alt rock (KROCK, WFNX, ... ) in a way that youtube and soundcloud and bandcamp just aren’t.
- Sylamore 7y ago
  I miss the pre-merger XM. Back when I was a subscriber you could listen for several days and hear virtually no repeats on a single station, there was a depth to the song selections that exposed me to lots of new artists. There were actual DJs on the air and there were only a few minutes worth of commercials per hour. I recently had a SiriusXM trial and it seems like all the stations now have a fixed playlist that's limited to around 60 songs at a time, it was very much like domestic radio and it wasn't uncommon to hear the same song played multiple times in the same day. Granted, it's still significantly better than local radio (RDU MSA doesn't even have a hard rock or modern rock station) I just can't justify spending money on it when I already have streaming capabilities via my phone - but I do miss the curated content of a human actually into the material.
- cheez 7y ago
  > in a way that youtube and soundcloud and bandcamp just aren’t. For you. My daughter finds new non-pop music just fine.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  What do you think they contributed in your youth? Apart from high-quality spoken-word content (like Radio 3 and Radio 4), most radio stations are playing music which I could listen to elsewhere, in higher quality, when I want, and then they add some super low quality filler chat in between. Plus adverts! What do you miss from them? Just that was the only way to access music back then?
  - hprotagonist 7y ago
    My youth did not include high quality on demand free or minimially expensive music and/or music discovery services that were not a FM radio (or MTV). Independent radio stations have DJs and a culture around them that foster new music and support independent musicians. To pick an example, Hot97 was _the_ voice of the bronx (literally, in the case of angie martinez) and the east coast hip hop scene from more or less the beginning. DJs would meet or be introduced to or know of local artists, get their demo tapes on the air, and launched major careers as a result.
dsparkman 7y ago
Local radio stations of my childhood did one thing that no streaming service could provide... community. Not the "fake" online community crap. You got the news of your community. You learned the away high school basketball game had been rescheduled. You learned about crimes that may have happened in your community. It helped get local news out in a town that had a weekly newspaper. You got to hear fascinating stories from old timers in your community. Oh and there was music thrown in for good measure :)
- Johnny555 7y ago
  While this is true, since nowawadays you can just get all of that information off your smart-phone, broadcasting such information no longer brings enough listeners to support a station. Though to be honest, I don't even know what brings listeners to radio these days -- the only radio I listen to is 20 seconds in the morning before my car's infotainment system finishes booting and connects to my phone and then I can ask it to play just about any song/genre/playlist I want to, or ask for a news briefing, or the weather, etc. I used to listen to the station with the best traffic reports, but I don't even need that since my phone map will tell me about traffic backups ahead and even reroute me around it automatically
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    >nowawadays you can just get all of that information off your smart-phone Nowadays you can get all of that information off you smart-phone, but what about people that have no Internet access, no cable, no smart phone, and no regular access to any information services other than broadcast media due to cost? I have an aunt (by marriage) that can't afford a computer, can't afford a cell phone beyond a very basic feature phone, can't afford mobile data, couldn't afford the Internet even if she had a computer, and certainly can't afford a newspaper subscription. She listens to the local radio station for her small town to keep informed about what is going on, and occasionally goes to the local library to check her email to talk to her nieces and nephews who seem to be calling less and less lately because "everybody has a smartphone and Aunt Connie can see what they're doing on Facebook". There is a significant section of the population that relies on broadcast media to get information about their community. The fact that you do not does not mean that locally-owned, locally-focused broadcasters are a waste.
js2 7y ago
Related: A New Proposal Looks To Loosen Radio Ownership Rules https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730323196/one-more-scoop-of-vanilla-a-new-proposal-looks-to-loosen-radio-ownership-rules https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730323196/one-more-scoop-of-v...
markbnj 7y ago
Why isn't streaming filling this void? I remember back when winamp made it easy to receive live streams from hundreds of broadcasters. Is that still a thing? Broadband wasn't very broad back then, either, so the tech should be perfect for rural areas where connectivity is spotty.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  Ah, Shoutcast. It will always hold a special place in my heart [0], if only because it reminds me of a more care-free time in my life. But in addition to the complexities of licensing if you want your stream to be legal, it seems to me that there's at least one flaw in the design. To receive an uninterrupted Shoutcast stream, you have to have a persistent, unbroken TCP connection with the server. IIUC, this is a recipe for frequent interruptions on mobile. I think that Apple's HTTP Live Streaming and MPEG DASH have the right idea; instead of an actual stream, you get chunks of media from an HTTP server, based on a playlist. In Apple HLS, that playlist is even a variant of the Winamp .m3u format. I understand that these systems are primarily used for video, but I wonder if any radio stations use HLS or DASH for their online streams. Of course, the downside of these systems is higher latency, but that might not be so bad [1]. [0]: One of my first real projects in Python was Supercast (http://supercast.sourceforge.net/ http://supercast.sourceforge.net/), a Shoutcast-compatible server. I was also a DJ on the Internet radio station for which I wrote that server. Not a particularly good one, mind you, but it was fun for a little while. [1]: Back when I was into Shoutcast, I did think the latency of large buffers was a bad thing. One difference between Shoutcast and my Supercast server was that Supercast didn't send an initial large audio buffer to each listener. But priorities change sometimes, and now I think it's more important to avoid drop-outs.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    iHeartRadio streams support both HLS and Shoutcast. You can find the stream info for each station embedded in a JSON object on the stream page. For example, for a iHeartRadio station that I listen to occasionally, there's the following: "streams":{ "hls_stream":"http://c8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609/playlist.m3u8", "shoutcast_stream":"http://c8icyelb.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609_icy", "pivot_hls_stream":"https://us.api.iheart.com/api/v3/adswizzhls/redirect.m3u8?url=https%3A%2F%2Fc8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com%2F609%2Fplaylist.m3u8&marketId=51", "secure_hls_stream":"https://c8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609/playlist.m3u8", "secure_shoutcast_stream":"https://c8icy.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609_icy" }
madengr 7y ago
I’d start a hobby, classical station. The local KPR (Kansas) is pretty much classical, but is polluted with the drivel from NPR. Instead of advertisements. You can’t go thirty seconds without hearing the name “Trump”
sadphone9000 7y ago
It is disgusting that all cell phones don't have an AM and FM receiver.
- rando444 7y ago
  Most phones have a radio antenna, it's just not a default application feature for whatever reason. If you're running an android phone, you should be able to enable a radio with little trouble.
  - zcid 7y ago
    A lot of the phones in the US will have a radio but no internal antennae. The radio is only activated when headphones are plugged in as they become the antenna.
  - chatmasta 7y ago
    For a while you could use apple headphones as an antenna for the FM radio in the iPhone.
- jccalhoun 7y ago
  Radios in phones are an underappreciated feature. I just moved and didn't have internet access at my new home and I got a lot of use out of the fm radio in my moto g6 since I didn't want to use up my data.
momokoko 7y ago
Private equity markets killed radio. Radio stations were simply worth more to a large broadcasting company than a small local station because large broadcasters could leverage their massive advertising network. We're going to eventually look back and wonder how much damage the rise of private equity and modern finance has done to so many things that were once of such high quality. Financial engineering is distorting the original intent of market forces and leaving more and more consumers with an inferior product.
- api 7y ago
  The phrase "financial pollution" recently came to mind in the context of foreign investors buying and sitting on real estate and driving up costs for local residents. I think the phrase may apply to a lot of things. Keynes seems to have been right about the problems of "saving beyond planned investment." It seems to create even more problems than he imagined. A little of it does end up finding interesting important ventures but most of it is big dumb money that chases bubbles or gets parked in socially destructive rent seeking operations. Money is made for some investors but the overall ROI for civilization is a net negative; making money by destroying wealth.
  - jeremyboom8 7y ago
    > making money by destroying wealth. http://artbrock.com/blog/magical-power-objects-and-sociopaths http://artbrock.com/blog/magical-power-objects-and-sociopath...
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    You are describing legalized money laundering designed to tie up money and keep it out of circulation. It will keep inflation away until it doesn’t, as some day the consequences of printing money will be felt. One of the most negative influences of civilization has been people hoarding wealth, and we’re reverting to an environment that empowers that.
    - RaptorJ 7y ago
      You'll only feel the consequences of printing money if productivity and population stop rising, and seeing as how the earth in infinitely large, I don't see that happening!
paulcarroty 7y ago
http://www.radio-browser.info/ http://www.radio-browser.info/ - great service with many clients. Just type any city in search and hear the local radio right now. It's kind of traveling, very funny - hear the local news of places where you never been.
jccalhoun 7y ago
I still miss WOXY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOXY.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOXY.com (It wasn't rural but it was bought by a corporate station). I listen to a good amount of radio but most of it is "radio" since I listen to it online. I could pick up the local NPR station but it is just easier to listen online. The local music radio stations are either country, religious or corporate (like JACKfm) so I listen to The Current https://www.thecurrent.org/ https://www.thecurrent.org/ online for a couple hours a day most days.
MrRadar 7y ago
Reading this article brought to mind one of my favorite radio stations, WOJB. It's located in rural northern Wisconsin. I live in Minnesota outside of its broadcasting range, but I always look forward to listening to it on my trips to visit my relatives who live in the upper peninsula of Michigan. The first time I listened to it the DJ had his 4 year old daughter with him in the studio and during one of the breaks she asked him to sing her favorite song. He obliged and it was some depressing country song, but towards the end she joined in enthusiastically, breaking the tension. It was very heartwarming. That is my favorite radio memory and the kind of radio you don't get from corporate stations. After that I looked the station up and learned that it was founded to bridge the divide between the Native American and white populations of the region between whom there were significant racial tensions. I can't speak to whether it did or not, but it certainly seems like it has. One year while driving through I caught a live broadcast of a pow-wow which was a delightful surprise. A few years ago I was driving through the area and I couldn't pick them up. The next town I got to I stopped to look up the station to see if I had just forgotten the right frequency but it turned out that their transmitter had broken and needed a complete replacement. In the end it took them about a year to raise the funds to buy and install the new transmitter and I think they are still operating at reduced power because their antenna needs to be replaced (which is apparently in part what caused the original transmitter to break). It just goes to show how fragile these institutions that can form the pillars of communities can be. They do broadcast online, but I find that when I'm not traveling I mostly listen to local stations here in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is almost certainly a beneficiary of the policies the article cites as the cause of the decline of rural radio. Radio here is as vibrant and alive as it's ever been (at least that I've been around). I have 6 different public stations that all have different programming in my car presets and there are many more commercial stations I listen to on occasion. The FM dial is completely packed (I don't think there are any open frequencies right now) and the AM dial is pretty full as well. I just wish this did not come at the expense of my rural neighbors (and I don't think it has to).
- isaacdl 7y ago
  I love WOJB! I go up into northern WI for an annual trip every year and it's always a highlight when we get in range. Wondered why it was so much harder to pick up this year. I especially love some of the late night DJs...eclectic music tastes that I don't ever hear elsewhere on the radio.
jarjoura 7y ago
I think all you grumpy commenters in here are nostalgic af! I hated radio in my youth. It was 20 minutes of the same songs followed by another 20 minutes of commercials. The same playlists over and over, and really the only value-add were the DJs talking to you. Then once radio stations caught on to that, they shifted to shock-jocks that really went overboard. I mean look at Howard Stern, he grew out of that shift. If Live Nation and CBS radio didn't buy up all the radio stations in the 90s, they probably would have vanished one by one as people moved on to iPods and CDs for consumption. Both Apple Music and Spotify have playlists of every conceivable genre and of every mood you could possibly be in. Want to listen to bad elevator cover songs? You can find it! There shouldn't be any problem with music discovery at this point. I'm constantly finding new music from all kinds of artists. For everything else, DJs in the morning, shock-jocks, talk radio, those are served by Podcasts. Once again, every possible genre, from murder mysteries, to local news, it's all there. Maybe your small community doesn't have a replacement podcast yet, but that doesn't mean it can't exist. The barrier to entry is so low that I imagine it's only a matter of time.
nickthemagicman 7y ago
The rural parts of America voted for Trump. They kinda deserve everything they get.
- dang 7y ago
  It's not ok to vandalize HN with political flamebait. You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you keep doing this, we're going to have to ban you. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and following the rules when posting here?
  - nickthemagicman 7y ago
    I don't even know why I said that. I think I was hungover. Apologies.
imroot 7y ago
This article is about 20 years too late. Back in the late 1990's, I worked for a rural radio station -- they were in the process of moving to full automation, and was working on getting the country station in full automation: I had a background in Audio/Video Productions (and computers/electronics), so, I spent a lot of time working on the automation (old Harris Automation System, vs the rest of the cluster using AudioVault from BEI). There was someone in the studio from 5AM Until Midnight (sometimes later if there were west coast ballgames) Monday-Friday: We'd do the news at the top and bottom of the hour (each station in the cluster got sent back to network audio at different times -- 4:15, 6:00, 6:30 after the hour, which required some really good pacing and reading skills to not let the other stations know you're pushing something back to network), cut live and recorded weather for other stations, and then answer the phone/distribute faxes/etc. I learned a lot about RF and Broadcast engineering during this time, and it honestly was the catalyst to push me into electrical and computer engineering (admittedly, restoring a VAX/VMS with the station engineer was the biggest driver). I can identify a "Satellite" station from a mile away. The liners sound different -- if they even match up -- the clocks at the top and the bottom of the hour are sync'ed with :30:00 and 00:00. Sunday mornings was religious programming (the "hangover" shift), and we'd do Friday night Football for High School and Saturday/Sunday College and Professional Football games, and Basketball games during the winter months. Add in some NASCAR and Indy racing (on the country music station), and there were plenty of weeks where I had 50/60/70 hours (at 17, I thought I was financially set -- lest I know that I was completely wrong!) To this day, the group of stations that I grew up with are still using split ownership to get past FCC rules about station clustering (but, all ran out of the same building).
8bitsrule 7y ago
I just learned the other day that the last college station I DJ'd at was sold to Public Radio, long ago. Commercial radio? Given the facility, equipment, antenna, license, electricity, that's just the start. A one-person operation is almost impossible, even if you're independently wealthy and have the technical chops. But if all you've got is automation? the 'community' part is hopeless ... might as well be 'iHeart' (hah!) 'People' radio is unavoidably a people-intensive operation. How do you fill 16 hours a day with sound? That's 4 four-hour shifts. Every. Day. Assume you've somehow found 3 volunteers, each with a personal record collection. How many people will you find to interview in a town of 3000-10000? Who's going to sell quality advertising? Who's going to produce it? Who's going to manage the business side? Climb the tower? Sad it is, but that model is over. Mr. Lucke is the one fanatic in a town of 3000 - I salute him, Behringer console and all. But community radio has headed in a different direction, and across the US is finding ways. For anyone interested in what is still working, across the US, check out the Radio Survivor podcasts. (These guys know their stuff.) http://www.radiosurvivor.com/category/podcast/ http://www.radiosurvivor.com/category/podcast/
subpixel 7y ago
A good one and a great one, while they last: Good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHVW https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHVW Great https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKHR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKHR

100 points by eplanit 7y ago

You could have written this same article 80 years ago.

Hello. My family needs help. The Guardian article was written and investigated for almost 8 months. They are Mark and Tristan Lucke. The situation is extremely important. Please go to willcoxradio com for complete story . Today the temperature is high there. Fire smoke from the mountain is coming into the station. Mark isnt well because of this. The town of Willcox is looking the other way. The world news isn't. We really need help with this. My email is merluck63@ gmail.com. l help with everything to help them. My family needs help with getting this problem fixed before it is to late.Thank you for sharing this news. We truly appreciate it.Mercedez Lucke- Lucke-Benedict

merluck 7y ago

I had to join this to make sure my message was sent. Bless you all with love if anyone and everyone can reach out to Mark and Tristan . There has to be a way to stop this criminal 51% owner that Mark has to deal with. Everything was great brfire this happened. The station flourished. KHIL was global. Fans across the world. Now it is a huge mess and my family is suffering. It gets worse as the heat elevates. There must be something that can be done. No lawyers will touch this without money and there is none. I give half my salary to help them. Anyone? Can you help? Please share the articles. There are many more now . Mercedez Lucke-Benedict

hprotagonist 7y ago

our radio stations are vanishing, period, into a siriusXM and ClearChannel morass of repetitive hell. NPR affiliates (KEXP, etc) and college radio stations (WZBC, WRCT) keep the flame alive but they’re all that’s left. I still dearly miss the stations of my youth, which were crucial venues for hip hop culture (HOT97) and alt rock (KROCK, WFNX, ... ) in a way that youtube and soundcloud and bandcamp just aren’t.

Sylamore 7y ago
I miss the pre-merger XM. Back when I was a subscriber you could listen for several days and hear virtually no repeats on a single station, there was a depth to the song selections that exposed me to lots of new artists. There were actual DJs on the air and there were only a few minutes worth of commercials per hour. I recently had a SiriusXM trial and it seems like all the stations now have a fixed playlist that's limited to around 60 songs at a time, it was very much like domestic radio and it wasn't uncommon to hear the same song played multiple times in the same day. Granted, it's still significantly better than local radio (RDU MSA doesn't even have a hard rock or modern rock station) I just can't justify spending money on it when I already have streaming capabilities via my phone - but I do miss the curated content of a human actually into the material.
cheez 7y ago
> in a way that youtube and soundcloud and bandcamp just aren’t. For you. My daughter finds new non-pop music just fine.
chrisseaton 7y ago
What do you think they contributed in your youth? Apart from high-quality spoken-word content (like Radio 3 and Radio 4), most radio stations are playing music which I could listen to elsewhere, in higher quality, when I want, and then they add some super low quality filler chat in between. Plus adverts! What do you miss from them? Just that was the only way to access music back then?
- hprotagonist 7y ago
  My youth did not include high quality on demand free or minimially expensive music and/or music discovery services that were not a FM radio (or MTV). Independent radio stations have DJs and a culture around them that foster new music and support independent musicians. To pick an example, Hot97 was _the_ voice of the bronx (literally, in the case of angie martinez) and the east coast hip hop scene from more or less the beginning. DJs would meet or be introduced to or know of local artists, get their demo tapes on the air, and launched major careers as a result.

dsparkman 7y ago

Local radio stations of my childhood did one thing that no streaming service could provide... community. Not the "fake" online community crap. You got the news of your community. You learned the away high school basketball game had been rescheduled. You learned about crimes that may have happened in your community. It helped get local news out in a town that had a weekly newspaper. You got to hear fascinating stories from old timers in your community. Oh and there was music thrown in for good measure :)

Johnny555 7y ago
While this is true, since nowawadays you can just get all of that information off your smart-phone, broadcasting such information no longer brings enough listeners to support a station. Though to be honest, I don't even know what brings listeners to radio these days -- the only radio I listen to is 20 seconds in the morning before my car's infotainment system finishes booting and connects to my phone and then I can ask it to play just about any song/genre/playlist I want to, or ask for a news briefing, or the weather, etc. I used to listen to the station with the best traffic reports, but I don't even need that since my phone map will tell me about traffic backups ahead and even reroute me around it automatically
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  >nowawadays you can just get all of that information off your smart-phone Nowadays you can get all of that information off you smart-phone, but what about people that have no Internet access, no cable, no smart phone, and no regular access to any information services other than broadcast media due to cost? I have an aunt (by marriage) that can't afford a computer, can't afford a cell phone beyond a very basic feature phone, can't afford mobile data, couldn't afford the Internet even if she had a computer, and certainly can't afford a newspaper subscription. She listens to the local radio station for her small town to keep informed about what is going on, and occasionally goes to the local library to check her email to talk to her nieces and nephews who seem to be calling less and less lately because "everybody has a smartphone and Aunt Connie can see what they're doing on Facebook". There is a significant section of the population that relies on broadcast media to get information about their community. The fact that you do not does not mean that locally-owned, locally-focused broadcasters are a waste.

js2 7y ago

Related: A New Proposal Looks To Loosen Radio Ownership Rules https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730323196/one-more-scoop-of-vanilla-a-new-proposal-looks-to-loosen-radio-ownership-rules https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730323196/one-more-scoop-of-v...

markbnj 7y ago

Why isn't streaming filling this void? I remember back when winamp made it easy to receive live streams from hundreds of broadcasters. Is that still a thing? Broadband wasn't very broad back then, either, so the tech should be perfect for rural areas where connectivity is spotty.

mwcampbell 7y ago
Ah, Shoutcast. It will always hold a special place in my heart [0], if only because it reminds me of a more care-free time in my life. But in addition to the complexities of licensing if you want your stream to be legal, it seems to me that there's at least one flaw in the design. To receive an uninterrupted Shoutcast stream, you have to have a persistent, unbroken TCP connection with the server. IIUC, this is a recipe for frequent interruptions on mobile. I think that Apple's HTTP Live Streaming and MPEG DASH have the right idea; instead of an actual stream, you get chunks of media from an HTTP server, based on a playlist. In Apple HLS, that playlist is even a variant of the Winamp .m3u format. I understand that these systems are primarily used for video, but I wonder if any radio stations use HLS or DASH for their online streams. Of course, the downside of these systems is higher latency, but that might not be so bad [1]. [0]: One of my first real projects in Python was Supercast (http://supercast.sourceforge.net/ http://supercast.sourceforge.net/), a Shoutcast-compatible server. I was also a DJ on the Internet radio station for which I wrote that server. Not a particularly good one, mind you, but it was fun for a little while. [1]: Back when I was into Shoutcast, I did think the latency of large buffers was a bad thing. One difference between Shoutcast and my Supercast server was that Supercast didn't send an initial large audio buffer to each listener. But priorities change sometimes, and now I think it's more important to avoid drop-outs.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  iHeartRadio streams support both HLS and Shoutcast. You can find the stream info for each station embedded in a JSON object on the stream page. For example, for a iHeartRadio station that I listen to occasionally, there's the following: "streams":{ "hls_stream":"http://c8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609/playlist.m3u8", "shoutcast_stream":"http://c8icyelb.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609_icy", "pivot_hls_stream":"https://us.api.iheart.com/api/v3/adswizzhls/redirect.m3u8?url=https%3A%2F%2Fc8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com%2F609%2Fplaylist.m3u8&marketId=51", "secure_hls_stream":"https://c8.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609/playlist.m3u8", "secure_shoutcast_stream":"https://c8icy.prod.playlists.ihrhls.com/609_icy" }

madengr 7y ago

I’d start a hobby, classical station. The local KPR (Kansas) is pretty much classical, but is polluted with the drivel from NPR. Instead of advertisements. You can’t go thirty seconds without hearing the name “Trump”

sadphone9000 7y ago

It is disgusting that all cell phones don't have an AM and FM receiver.

rando444 7y ago
Most phones have a radio antenna, it's just not a default application feature for whatever reason. If you're running an android phone, you should be able to enable a radio with little trouble.
- zcid 7y ago
  A lot of the phones in the US will have a radio but no internal antennae. The radio is only activated when headphones are plugged in as they become the antenna.
- chatmasta 7y ago
  For a while you could use apple headphones as an antenna for the FM radio in the iPhone.
jccalhoun 7y ago
Radios in phones are an underappreciated feature. I just moved and didn't have internet access at my new home and I got a lot of use out of the fm radio in my moto g6 since I didn't want to use up my data.

momokoko 7y ago

Private equity markets killed radio. Radio stations were simply worth more to a large broadcasting company than a small local station because large broadcasters could leverage their massive advertising network. We're going to eventually look back and wonder how much damage the rise of private equity and modern finance has done to so many things that were once of such high quality. Financial engineering is distorting the original intent of market forces and leaving more and more consumers with an inferior product.

api 7y ago
The phrase "financial pollution" recently came to mind in the context of foreign investors buying and sitting on real estate and driving up costs for local residents. I think the phrase may apply to a lot of things. Keynes seems to have been right about the problems of "saving beyond planned investment." It seems to create even more problems than he imagined. A little of it does end up finding interesting important ventures but most of it is big dumb money that chases bubbles or gets parked in socially destructive rent seeking operations. Money is made for some investors but the overall ROI for civilization is a net negative; making money by destroying wealth.
- jeremyboom8 7y ago
  > making money by destroying wealth. http://artbrock.com/blog/magical-power-objects-and-sociopaths http://artbrock.com/blog/magical-power-objects-and-sociopath...
- Spooky23 7y ago
  You are describing legalized money laundering designed to tie up money and keep it out of circulation. It will keep inflation away until it doesn’t, as some day the consequences of printing money will be felt. One of the most negative influences of civilization has been people hoarding wealth, and we’re reverting to an environment that empowers that.
  - RaptorJ 7y ago
    You'll only feel the consequences of printing money if productivity and population stop rising, and seeing as how the earth in infinitely large, I don't see that happening!

paulcarroty 7y ago

http://www.radio-browser.info/ http://www.radio-browser.info/ - great service with many clients. Just type any city in search and hear the local radio right now. It's kind of traveling, very funny - hear the local news of places where you never been.

jccalhoun 7y ago

I still miss WOXY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOXY.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOXY.com (It wasn't rural but it was bought by a corporate station). I listen to a good amount of radio but most of it is "radio" since I listen to it online. I could pick up the local NPR station but it is just easier to listen online. The local music radio stations are either country, religious or corporate (like JACKfm) so I listen to The Current https://www.thecurrent.org/ https://www.thecurrent.org/ online for a couple hours a day most days.

MrRadar 7y ago

Reading this article brought to mind one of my favorite radio stations, WOJB. It's located in rural northern Wisconsin. I live in Minnesota outside of its broadcasting range, but I always look forward to listening to it on my trips to visit my relatives who live in the upper peninsula of Michigan. The first time I listened to it the DJ had his 4 year old daughter with him in the studio and during one of the breaks she asked him to sing her favorite song. He obliged and it was some depressing country song, but towards the end she joined in enthusiastically, breaking the tension. It was very heartwarming. That is my favorite radio memory and the kind of radio you don't get from corporate stations. After that I looked the station up and learned that it was founded to bridge the divide between the Native American and white populations of the region between whom there were significant racial tensions. I can't speak to whether it did or not, but it certainly seems like it has. One year while driving through I caught a live broadcast of a pow-wow which was a delightful surprise. A few years ago I was driving through the area and I couldn't pick them up. The next town I got to I stopped to look up the station to see if I had just forgotten the right frequency but it turned out that their transmitter had broken and needed a complete replacement. In the end it took them about a year to raise the funds to buy and install the new transmitter and I think they are still operating at reduced power because their antenna needs to be replaced (which is apparently in part what caused the original transmitter to break). It just goes to show how fragile these institutions that can form the pillars of communities can be. They do broadcast online, but I find that when I'm not traveling I mostly listen to local stations here in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is almost certainly a beneficiary of the policies the article cites as the cause of the decline of rural radio. Radio here is as vibrant and alive as it's ever been (at least that I've been around). I have 6 different public stations that all have different programming in my car presets and there are many more commercial stations I listen to on occasion. The FM dial is completely packed (I don't think there are any open frequencies right now) and the AM dial is pretty full as well. I just wish this did not come at the expense of my rural neighbors (and I don't think it has to).

isaacdl 7y ago
I love WOJB! I go up into northern WI for an annual trip every year and it's always a highlight when we get in range. Wondered why it was so much harder to pick up this year. I especially love some of the late night DJs...eclectic music tastes that I don't ever hear elsewhere on the radio.

jarjoura 7y ago

I think all you grumpy commenters in here are nostalgic af! I hated radio in my youth. It was 20 minutes of the same songs followed by another 20 minutes of commercials. The same playlists over and over, and really the only value-add were the DJs talking to you. Then once radio stations caught on to that, they shifted to shock-jocks that really went overboard. I mean look at Howard Stern, he grew out of that shift. If Live Nation and CBS radio didn't buy up all the radio stations in the 90s, they probably would have vanished one by one as people moved on to iPods and CDs for consumption. Both Apple Music and Spotify have playlists of every conceivable genre and of every mood you could possibly be in. Want to listen to bad elevator cover songs? You can find it! There shouldn't be any problem with music discovery at this point. I'm constantly finding new music from all kinds of artists. For everything else, DJs in the morning, shock-jocks, talk radio, those are served by Podcasts. Once again, every possible genre, from murder mysteries, to local news, it's all there. Maybe your small community doesn't have a replacement podcast yet, but that doesn't mean it can't exist. The barrier to entry is so low that I imagine it's only a matter of time.

nickthemagicman 7y ago

The rural parts of America voted for Trump. They kinda deserve everything they get.

dang 7y ago
It's not ok to vandalize HN with political flamebait. You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you keep doing this, we're going to have to ban you. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and following the rules when posting here?
- nickthemagicman 7y ago
  I don't even know why I said that. I think I was hungover. Apologies.

imroot 7y ago

This article is about 20 years too late. Back in the late 1990's, I worked for a rural radio station -- they were in the process of moving to full automation, and was working on getting the country station in full automation: I had a background in Audio/Video Productions (and computers/electronics), so, I spent a lot of time working on the automation (old Harris Automation System, vs the rest of the cluster using AudioVault from BEI). There was someone in the studio from 5AM Until Midnight (sometimes later if there were west coast ballgames) Monday-Friday: We'd do the news at the top and bottom of the hour (each station in the cluster got sent back to network audio at different times -- 4:15, 6:00, 6:30 after the hour, which required some really good pacing and reading skills to not let the other stations know you're pushing something back to network), cut live and recorded weather for other stations, and then answer the phone/distribute faxes/etc. I learned a lot about RF and Broadcast engineering during this time, and it honestly was the catalyst to push me into electrical and computer engineering (admittedly, restoring a VAX/VMS with the station engineer was the biggest driver). I can identify a "Satellite" station from a mile away. The liners sound different -- if they even match up -- the clocks at the top and the bottom of the hour are sync'ed with :30:00 and 00:00. Sunday mornings was religious programming (the "hangover" shift), and we'd do Friday night Football for High School and Saturday/Sunday College and Professional Football games, and Basketball games during the winter months. Add in some NASCAR and Indy racing (on the country music station), and there were plenty of weeks where I had 50/60/70 hours (at 17, I thought I was financially set -- lest I know that I was completely wrong!) To this day, the group of stations that I grew up with are still using split ownership to get past FCC rules about station clustering (but, all ran out of the same building).

8bitsrule 7y ago

I just learned the other day that the last college station I DJ'd at was sold to Public Radio, long ago. Commercial radio? Given the facility, equipment, antenna, license, electricity, that's just the start. A one-person operation is almost impossible, even if you're independently wealthy and have the technical chops. But if all you've got is automation? the 'community' part is hopeless ... might as well be 'iHeart' (hah!) 'People' radio is unavoidably a people-intensive operation. How do you fill 16 hours a day with sound? That's 4 four-hour shifts. Every. Day. Assume you've somehow found 3 volunteers, each with a personal record collection. How many people will you find to interview in a town of 3000-10000? Who's going to sell quality advertising? Who's going to produce it? Who's going to manage the business side? Climb the tower? Sad it is, but that model is over. Mr. Lucke is the one fanatic in a town of 3000 - I salute him, Behringer console and all. But community radio has headed in a different direction, and across the US is finding ways. For anyone interested in what is still working, across the US, check out the Radio Survivor podcasts. (These guys know their stuff.) http://www.radiosurvivor.com/category/podcast/ http://www.radiosurvivor.com/category/podcast/

subpixel 7y ago

A good one and a great one, while they last: Good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHVW https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHVW Great https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKHR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKHR