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Stephen King to shut down his 3 radio stations in Maine
- linotype 2y ago[flagged]
- tptacek 2y agoI think the article explains it nicely: they generate steady losses, and he's getting older; if he dies, he doesn't want his successors to have to unwind the liabilities. It's ~2025. What is a popular music terrestrial radio station at this point other than a vanity project?
- pie420 2y agoAn institution of culture. something the new money tech elite dont seem to understand. modern society is desperately missing the concept of noblesse oblige
- IncreasePosts 2y agoThere might be a better way to implement noblesse oblige than provide 30,000 people a 39th option for hearing rock n roll music.
- jprjr_ 2y agoFM radio is dead and has been for years. I haven't seriously listened to FM radio since I got a portable CD player and that was in the late 90s. I can't imagine anybody trying to get into it now. Why would I subject myself to obnoxious ads every few minutes and music I don't like when I can just listen to what I want, when I want, ad-free? AM radio is still going with conspiracy talk and maybe sports radio? I honestly don't know, I've never given AM radio a real listen. Sometimes I get nostalgic for the radio. I remember calling in to stations and requesting songs, contests, morning zoo hosts, and so on. But it's probably not coming back.
- gazook89 2y agoI’m not trying to argue the point, but I listen to FM about every day, or at least every day I’m in the car. It’s much easier for me than getting music from my phone going, even with Bluetooth. And I have come to the conclusion that I like talk intermixed with music, even if the talk is an ad. It’s weird, I never thought that’d be the case, but I do. In fact, I wish I could easily mix my music library into my podcast library— specifically, interrupt podcasts with music (maybe replace the ads with a single song). I also like how easy it is to switch channels to something different. I could do that with CarPlay or something too with my own music, but then I probably have to actually think about it (when I should be thinking about driving). And for people who care about live music events (shows etc) it’s a great way to find out about those things, particularly if your city has a good public radio station and not just iHeartMedia. I’m not sure I Love radio, but I would probably really miss it if it wasn’t in my car.
- inferiorhuman 2y agoDunno where you are but local radio programming disappeared in most markets years ago. Even in the Bay Area. All of what you've said about radio content was true a decade or more ago, but much less true now. And for people who care about live music events (shows etc) it’s a great way to find out about those things Big stations promote big acts, sure. But that's easy enough to find information on elsewhere (e.g. Youtube). Smaller stations (e.g. KXSF, KPFA, KZSU) out here promote smaller venues but I'm typically out of range and end up listening to their content via the good old internet. I’m not sure I Love radio, but I would probably really miss it if it wasn’t in my car. There was a time I would (late 90s, early 00s) but now? Not so much. The ratio of music to ads has gotten awful. Even stations that have ostensibly gone back to their roots like KITS are a pale imitation of their past glory. Like they'll wear the meat suit of genres that were previously popular but make sure to mix it with plenty of mediocre top 40 and a suffocating amount of ads.
- gazook89 2y agoI don’t really listen to radio while traveling so I’ll take your word for it. In Minnesota we gave The Current, part of MPR family of stations which is pretty good from what I hear (about its status nationally, though always some one will say it “used to be better”). And yeah, that’s ONE station. Probably another part of it for me is that most of drives are probably considered short, the longest trip is usually 20-30 minutes depending on traffic and that’s only a few times a month. If I was doing hour long commutes, it’d be podcasts all day.
- sourcepluck 2y agoExcellent, agreed. Nothing is sacred except "the grind", it appears, yes. No value exists outside viewcount, or listenercount, or whatever metric the media uses. Your comment reminds me of something I read yesterday, an allusion that mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota made to what he called "Kultur", in this remarkable interview https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326965.pdf https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326965.pdf. The context is different, but I think your usage is in line with his in the interview.
- tptacek 2y agoYou can write as many paragraphs of this stuff as you like but I don't think that's going to get people to retain long-term 7-8 figure liabilities on their books. If there's even a notion of a system of "noblesse oblige", everybody has been defecting from it except for King.
- sourcepluck 2y agoWhen you say "everbody", you're referring to a modest percentage of people, and even for those people, it's only true some of the time. The real world is full of people doing stuff that is not explained whatsoever by notions like increasing profits in account-books. People do economically disastrous things like have dogs, go on holiday, they get their nails done twice a month, waste half their Sunday doing their Gran's hedges, and etc etc. They have babies, and often someone stays at home with the baby, losing boat loads of money in many cases if you calculate what they could earn if they worked full time and put the child into a cheap daycare. Not to mention all the hours spent in amateur sports clubs, and ukulele groups, and pipe bands, and sometimes, they even run radio stations, and blogs, and maintain software, and make little robots, just for a laugh. The notion of everyone going around calculating everything to maximise income all the time is a fairytale certain people tell themselves to convince themselves they're the real mavericks, the hard ones who don't flinch from reality. The motivation for the deception is clear, but unfortunately, it's patently false.
- khana 2y ago[dead]
- bawolff 2y agoThere are plenty of cultural institutions in the modern world that are basically run as a charity. I think the elite understand this just fine they just don't view some random rock radio station as a cultural institution.
- klodolph 2y agoAh yes. If he dies.
- codpiece 2y agoAnd if he remains dead...
- michaelwilson 2y agoLet's just hope we're not on his "People to Haunt" list.
- sjhatfield 2y agoKEXP
- caust1c 2y agoSo happy they expanded to the Bay Area after living in Seattle for a few years!
- xnorswap 2y agoI've been listening to them on KEXP.org for a decade or more now. It's a little odd tuning into "the morning show" in the afternoon, but it's good radio, and so much better for discovering music than any of the alternatives here. 6 Music can be as good, but it never quite got over the "death" of the UK indie music scene and sometimes feels more like a tribute act to it's former self. As I speak the heaviest tracks in rotation are from Bon Iver and Doves, and while both are great acts, they're not new bands. Overall the discoverability is way down, and fairly often I'll find new music, even music from UK+Ireland, via KEXP, rather than from the media here.
- bagpuss 2y agogive Do You Radio a try, former NTS guys went out on their own, all available on mixcloud so you can flick through bits you don't like https://doyou.world/ https://doyou.world/
- indigodaddy 2y agoRadio Paradise is also still pretty good for discovering new music..
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- into-ruin 2y agoXRAY.fm in Portland is another
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- disantlor 2y agoWFMU
- RobRivera 2y agoHeritage project, source of joy and soothing, an opportunity to ply your intellect on radio tech? Vanity project seems like such a misnomer. When I think of vanity project, I think of Bender building a tomb in his honor a million cubits high with fire eyes saying 'RE MEMBER MEEEEEE'
- khana 2y ago[dead]
- stevage 2y agoA valuable community service appreciated by thousands of people? The opposite of vanity.
- tptacek 2y agoGiven how people consume music today, I stand by "vanity", and I think King agrees.
- talldatethrow 2y agoI think he'd agree more with Passion Project not vanity.
- tptacek 2y agoSure. Either way: not a thing sustained for its utility. I think running independent rock radio stations is admirable. It sounds fun. But if it's losing him millions of dollars, obviously, he should immediately stop doing it.
- xemdetia 2y agoDepending on the market it is still possible to be profitable. There is still a market even though it is narrow and most stations solve the problem like how Stephen King did- you have multiple stations to increase inventory.
- dylan604 2y agoSomething that can be received without a data plan
- jprjr_ 2y agoBefore we had data plans we had MP3 players, CDs, tapes. I guess what I'm getting at is - for a lot of us the radio was already dead before streaming was an option.
- dylan604 2y agoYes yes, you can find any little thing to add as an argument to support "I don't listen to radio", but a lot of us still listen to radio. Sometimes, you want to find something other than what's in your mp3/CD/cassette collection. Growing up, there were very specific shows that I would listen to specifically for being introduced to something (whether it was new or old and just new to me). Radio did not become a bad experience to me until Clear Channel/Comcast bought up all of the non-indies and made it greater than 80% chance that you'd hear a commercial whenever you tuned into any given station. I'd also suspect that your "a lot of us" sounds really big in whatever echo chamber you find yourself
- tptacek 2y agoYou listen to it, but presumably you don't support it, since it's dying, right?
- dylan604 2y agoYour presumptions are almost as bad as when you assume. Actually, they're better since you can leave the "me" out of the assu prove to be. I've supported my community station KNON since I was in high school. Might have missed here or there, but I've contributed to them longer than anything else. The only thing dying in this thread are the 3 stations King runs, and whatever notions you thought you had on me.
- 2y ago
- JKCalhoun 2y ago> What is a popular music terrestrial radio station at this point other than a vanity project? More's the pity.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- dredmorbius 2y agoTerrestrial radio: an immensely effective political propaganda tool. (May involve more than just music, but music is good earbait.) "The Divided Dial: How Conservative Talk Radio Came to Dominate the Airwaves" (6 part podcast, transcripts available, originally published Nov-Dec 2022) <https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial>
- edm0nd 2y agoTo me it read as if he is dying. He's currently 77.
- Alupis 2y agoYou have to be a very special brand of knuckle-dragger to leave the US because you didn't get your way in one election.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoSome people leave because they feel they might be at risk from the new government. This has been a common theme during the 20th century. And the incoming administration has been explicitly threatening to go after his enemies. Unclear whether he will actually follow through on that, let's hope not.
- Alupis 2y agoThe propaganda is strong with some.
- josefritzishere 2y agohttps://archive.is/tDHvx https://archive.is/tDHvx
- readyplayernull 2y agoImagine a radio experience where listeners are not just passive consumers but active participants. This groundbreaking concept will transform traditional listening into an engaging, interactive platform. An interactive radio that allows users to express their opinions in real-time by pressing one of three buttons. Whether it's a song choice, a controversial topic, or a poll about the day's news, listeners can instantly share their views. This immediate feedback loop will create a dynamic dialogue between the host and the audience.
- galleywest200 2y agoThis sounds like the live-streaming we already have but with extra steps.
- jprjr_ 2y agoHonestly there aren't even extra steps. It's just live-streaming, maybe with a chatbot.
- throwaway0665 2y agoAre you not describing the current talkback radio experience?
- jprete 2y agoBroadcast radio stations typically had phone lines for listeners to call. Music stations would take song requests and run contests where the Nth caller would win a prize. Talk radio would put callers on the air to chat with the host. Maybe you already knew this, but anyone who remembers broadcast radio would also know it. If you're making a joke, I don't quite get the punchline.
- readyplayernull 2y agoIt's a retro-invention, something that could have been pitched in the golden days of radio. Inner joke I guess, I laugh at re-reading it. Normal people do poetry, I hate poetry.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoThe death of radio is a damn shame.
- queuebert 2y agoOn the upside, we'll be slightly safer from alien invasion when we stop blasting RF into the void.
- jl6 2y agoOr maybe the RF leak is what will get noticed as a distress signal so that benevolent aliens can come and rescue us from our pitiful worchless, zitless existence.
- Workaccount2 2y agoI turned on the radio for kicks a few weeks ago, just to see what it was like nowadays. Ads. It's all ads. Like 10 minute blocks of ads interleaved with radio hosts reading promo weather and promo traffic, followed by ads, then maybe a song. Then more ads.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoDid you need an account to tune in? I haven't listened to the radio in years because they closed down my stations! WBRU and WBCN!
- galleywest200 2y agoCheck out a listener-powered station such as KEXP at 90.3 (Seattle) or 92.7 (SF/Oakland). If you live outside of these regions they stream at KEXP.org or on their mobile app. You can also listen to the last two weeks of shows at https://www.kexp.org/archive/ https://www.kexp.org/archive/.
- nicksergeant 2y agoYep, still going strong here in Rochester, NY as well with WBER: https://wber.org https://wber.org
- billconan 2y agomaybe running a youtube channel is a better/cost effective option,
- this_user 2y agoThis was never about the money, he just wanted to control over the programming at his local station that he was listening to.
- jprjr_ 2y agoI think licensing becomes a bigger issue if you try to run a radio station on YouTube with any commercial music. Even if you're OK from all copyright perspectives and fully-licensed, YouTube's copyright system is really easy to abuse. What should be a good deal more cost-effective is an old-fashioned, Icecast/Shoutcast/Azuracast-based internet radio station.
- SllX 2y agoWell there’s the Lofi Girl: https://www.youtube.com/live/jfKfPfyJRdk https://www.youtube.com/live/jfKfPfyJRdk BGM Channel: https://www.youtube.com/live/s1KpZtdvAdA https://www.youtube.com/live/s1KpZtdvAdA The Good Life Radio: https://www.youtube.com/live/IkmLXvBfVv0 https://www.youtube.com/live/IkmLXvBfVv0 Every one of those has multiple concurrent streams too.
- wodenokoto 2y agoBGM channel is more a cover band than a radio station. I don’t know the details, but it is my impression that YouTube strikes are for copyrighted _recordings_ and not copyrighted written music. In the same vain, I think that lo fi is more a DJ (in the modern musician sense) that was good at automating and promoting himself rather than someone choosing other people’s recordings. I don’t know the sample sources at all
- NeinMiez 2y ago[dead]
- ortusdux 2y agoI wonder if he called in requests Howard Hughes style - https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/howard-hughes-bought-tv-station-because-he-had-insomnia https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/howard-hughes-bought-tv-st...
- slyall 2y agoRemember this from the TV show Cheers. Robin is Robin Colcord who is a billionaire who is a love intest of the character Rebecca.... Rebecca Howe: [about Robin] I told him the biggest secret of my life. Carla LeBec: What? Rebecca Howe: I told him about You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling by The Righteous Brothers and what that song does to me. Right? Do you know what he did? Carla LeBec: What? Rebecca Howe: He called this radio station he owns and he had them play it all night. Woody Boyd: I heard that. I thought that was the long version
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoOf all the characters, I can't believe that Woody Harrelson would turn out to be the most talented :-)
- snypher 2y agoKelsey Grammer, Rhea Perlman, John Ratzenberger? Plenty of talent on Cheers!
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoTBH none of those have impressed me as much as Woody.
- euroderf 2y ago> I thought that was the long version Tangentially related: It's common DJ knowledge that on the night shift, when you have to answer the call of nature, there's a few go-to songs. Obv Stairway to Heaven is one. Another is the extended version of Radar Love.
- rnl 2y agoThis page has 4 popups waiting to be closed overlapping the content
- allturtles 2y ago> All we hear is radio ga ga Radio blah, blah Radio, what's new? Radio, someone still loves you > Invisible airwaves crackle with life Bright antennas bristle with the energy Emotional feedback on a timeless wavelength Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free
- RF_Enthusiast 2y agoI own a licensed FM radio station in the U.S. The only way I see to make it work is as a one-person operation, as there's no way to afford a staff. I wrote a lot of scripts to make it happen.
- Eextra953 2y agoSound interesting, do you have a blog or something to learn more? I've always been interested in something like this.
- RF_Enthusiast 2y agoI’ve been thinking about documenting the journey online, likely in the form of a blog. I know I would have been interested in reading about someone who took this step before I did. So, the answer right now is "no," but hopefully, when I get a chance, that will change.
- kolinko 2y agoCare to share how you get advertisers and how you track how many listeners you have? I wonder how this compares to to the way online media works
- RF_Enthusiast 2y agoI’m early into the ownership journey, but in my situation, the station serves a tourist resort area, so the station is trying to capture listeners coming in on the highways into town. The advertiser base I’m developing is primarily made up of tourist-based businesses. My market is too small to be measured by Nielsen’s media ratings, so there’s no great way to measure it at the moment.
- yakkob 2y agoHi RF_Enthusiast. Myself and a few friends are doing the same thing as a result of the most recent non-commercial filing window. Would love to connect with you in some way if you're open to it, would love to compare notes and see what kind of scripting you've set up (we also use lots of scripts and write lots of code). Our call letters are KRDF if you'd like to reach out.
- throaway250 2y agockuw 95.9 fm in winnipeg!
- FerretFred 2y agoI never knew that! I just added the 3 stations to my iNternet radio app and will be listening right up until the end. Very sad...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kleiba 2y ago> “While radio across the country has been overtaken by giant corporate broadcasting groups, I’ve loved being a local, independent owner all these years,” King said. Almost nobody likes this development, yet no-one does anything about it. Almost everyone except politicians is critical of big corporations, yet they're ever growing like a tumor, leaving small mom-and-pop businesses by the wayside. In recent years, I'm hearing more and more how we're supposed to shop locally and support regional producers. Yet, I don't see how our government is supporting this call themselves. Without regulation, small businesses will not be able to compete with the giants.
- graemep 2y ago> almost everyone except politicians is critical of big corporation I think that is the critical point. Big corporations are good at lobbying. They shape policy. Politicians do not only like big corporations, they allow them a lot of influence, so they can shape policy to advantage themselves against smaller competitors.
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoWhich also includes building bureaucracy moats- that load smaller competitors with unpaid for paperwork and prevent them from operating. Which is never really addressed as source of state inefficiency in liberal literature. At some point, the creature gets hacked by the actual ruler (monopolistic cooperations) and used as a sock puppet.
- graemep 2y ago> Which also includes building bureaucracy moats- that load smaller competitors with unpaid for paperwork and prevent them from operating Exactly. one of the defining moments for my political views was hearing the CEO of a big pub company explaining that this was why they could keep expanding as smaller competitors gave up because of the administrative burden. Both governments and big business live complex rules.
- 2y ago
- alexpotato 2y agoThe comments regarding running a small radio station reminded me of this excellent blog post on how to motivate people when there isn't a lot of money available. https://web.archive.org/web/20130409033601/http://www.articulateventures.com/thoughts-on-being-an-employer/salary-negotatiations-whats-possible-when-there-is-no-more-mone/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130409033601/http://www.articu... TL;DR: - guy goes to work at a small radio station - station doesn't have a lot of money - his boss works out some non-monetary incentives e.g. he loves surfing so he gets a flexible schedule etc I know HN skews towards the "big tech, lots of money and RSU" end of the spectrum so always love to share this story for those who don't have that lever to pull.
- Molitor5901 2y agoI lament that I never listen to the radio. Really since I bought my first iPod I have not listened to the radio. With the smartphone I don't feel I really need the radio. My bandwidth for receiving information is far more wider and diverse than the radio can give me. Instead of radio stations, I think money should be spent on local journalists and amplifying those voices and let them choose their own mediums.
- xnyan 2y ago> I lament that I never listen to the radio. I do not, I’m sure people who lived in larger markets had access to better programming, but where I lived radio was 90%+ ads, uninteresting political commentary and sports commentary. There were a few interesting high-quality programs (hi Car Talk), but they were very much the exception even 30 years ago. The challenge with broadcast media is you have to cater your content to the largest possible group of people, so sports and the news. I will never forget the mid 2000s when podcasting really started taking off, hearing people discussed topics and subjects that I was actually interested in was an unbelievable feeling.
- Kye 2y agoThis is how I learned Stephen King owned three radio stations in Maine.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]