I ♥ College Radio

I was actually a bit surprised that the HTML heart symbol was permitted in the title field there. The iHeartRadio brand launched with the URL iheartmusic.com back in April of 2008. It was sort of a mix of ideas from the start. they were going to stream music to mobile devices and webcast 800 of Clear Channel radio stations online. The comedy here is that Clearchannel is simultaneously moving toward a national programming model where hundreds of these stations will be more-or-less identical.So as tech-savvy as it might seem at first, the content is about as edgy as cheese-whiz.

Last year they debuted the ability to make custom music streams, much like Pandora. Clearly they had figured something out about the content problem. Then I got news yesterday. Clear Channel was soliciting college radio stations to join their platform. This was unexpected.  They put out a press release confirming everything on January 23. You can read it here. Sources report that they are negotiating individual deals with university and radio station representatives, indicating a level of motivation and interest that cannot possibly be generated by a sense of charity.  The first college stations to get involved are below:

• Appalachian State’s WASU – Boone, NC
• Connecticut College’s WCNI – New London, CT
• Dartmouth College's WFRD - Hanover, NH
• Denison University’s WDUB – Granville, OH
• DePaul University’s Radio DePaul – Chicago, IL
• Emerson College’s WERS – Boston, MA
• Flagler College’s WFCF – St. Augustine, FL
• Green River College’s KGRG – Tacoma, WA
• Ithaca College’s WICB – Ithaca, NY
• Rice University’s Rice Radio – Houston, TX
• Seton Hall University’s WSOU – Orange, NJ
• Stanford University’s KZSU- Stanford, CA
• Temple University’s WHIP – Philadelphia, PA
• College of Wooster’s WCWS – Wooster ,OH

You will notice that not all of these are even radio stations in the broadcasting sense. Rice radio is the webcast that the students were left with after KTRU was sold off. WHIP, and Radio DePaul are all also strictly online. The rest are a mixed bag: WSOU is arguably the biggest college radio station in America, WERS is nearly as big.  WICB is a large but rural college station with s strong commercial lean, KGRG, WASU, WCNI and WCWS are all rimshots to major markets lost in the suburbs. WFRD is in the unrated market areas on the Vermont and New Hampshire border. There is no pattern to this list, it screams shotgun approach, and these are just the early signers. There will be more.

What is the purpose?  That's an open question.

More Noise from Neville

In January of 2008 I wrote about a noise rock radio program called Noise from Neville that  ran on WRIU in the mid 1980s. Because this program once hosted a band named Shithaus, who's members later went on to form Cop Shoot Cop, and because they used the recording of that program to make a rare and now hotly sought demo tape, that single post became one of my most popular. At the urging of Adam from Pop-Catastrophe I went on a hunt for Neville himself... and with further help from the staff of AS220 I found him.

My timing here could turn out to be pivotal. The archived tapes from the hundreds of programs that Neville recorded of his program are in jeopardy. Maybe you can help.  I'll get into that more below.  I recorded our  phone interview; it is transcribed below with a modicum of editing as we did tend to wander.

1. Please describe "Noise from Neville" for a new listener.
Noise From Neville was a program inspired by independent musicians and audio artists that I had heard from the New England Scene. I had been interested in college radio from a very young age. I mapped all of the stations I could receive from my home and discovered that the non-commercial channels from 88.1-91.9 offered a selection of music that did not repeat incessantly, and was not driven by giant corporate record companies. I tracked the Boston live music indie scene while in high school and started going as soon as I could get a ride. Carmelita did a show featuring live bands in the studio on Sunday nights [Metrowave] and when I couldn’t get to clubs or get in – as I was well underage, it was convenient to listen to the local bands on her show every Sunday night on WERS 88.9.

2. How did you get the program "Noise from Neville" on air?
WRIU had a policy that to get to the FM station, you first had to do a show on the AM carrier current station [called Studio B]. The reception was so poor that no one really cared what you did as long as you didn’t break the equipment or damage too many records. They also had a student video production facility where we did some on campus productions. After a couple of weeks, I was given a late night show on Monday nights. I was frustrated that the library was limited to older records that were well worn and that all of the new music was being pushed on the station from the record companies. Using the universities' mailing permit, I enlisted some of my fellow students and sent postcards to thousands of independent artists. The response was fantastic. We were receiving music from one of every three artists we solicited. I would pick up a large mail bag of music once a week at the post office, open it and play it on the air. When I first started with live bands, I used a concert formula and let the bands play a full set. After some feedback from listeners I changed that format to intersperse the live music with recordings in an attempt to attract a larger audience.

3. How long was the program and in what time slot did it run?
I started at URI in 1982. I was 19 when I started college and the radio program, I made “the wrong dean’s list” and left after that first year but continued on the air for almost 12 years thereafter. We had the longest run on Saturday’s from 11AM to 2PM. We would meet at about 9AM to get the band set up and build a proper studio setup. The equipment was ancient and there was no good way to isolate the drums. The results were often raw and imbalanced. Despite the shortcomings, local artists seemed to enjoy the exposure and the opportunity to make a recording.

4. How long were you on air?
In addition to running the show on WRIU 90.3 for almost 12 years, I did a short run on WZBC in Boston on Monday Nights from 11PM-2AM when I would jam bands into the news room as there was no live studio. That went on for about a year. I was promoting the show by giving rubber stamps to the clubs with my show name on it and the program director didn't like that. The WRIU show ended when the Student advisory board received information that there had been empty beer containers found in the studio. Despite having a written policy that no alcohol was allowed, some musicians insisted on using alcohol.

5. How did you engage all these bands to perform?
They would contact us. As we only did one a week, there would often be a waiting list. Lots of bands played: Throwing Muses, Neutral Nation, Roger Miller, the Zinnias from Lowell played. they were difficult, they brought in a tuba. There was a industrial noise band, that pretended to be christian industrial noise. They were faking it, but it was a very  convincing angle.  RRR records was a good supporter, and sent a lot of good music.

6. How has the effort to archive them been going?
I think the total number of live artists was about 217 by the time we wrapped it up. I compiled a list some time ago but fear it did not survive. There are 420 tapes in my possession. Some of them are demo tapes from bands.  I wanted a continuous format in high quality stereo and I started using a Sony Beta recorder because it gave me 8-bit stereo quality on a 4 hour tape.  They became unplayable when a young fellow broke into my apartment and took my Maranz and my boom box and my Sony Beta Deck. I am pretty sure it provided him with crack when it was fenced later. The rest are on 90 minute cassettes. My son has dubbed some of them. He's got 60 shows they stop they start. They're difficult to listen to. I'm not impressed with myself at 23 years of age. I think I'm rather annoying.  The bands are nervous, they break a strong and we have to cut back to a recording... then restart. That's just the nature of live recording.  It's far from perfect, noisy. The board was a Tascam 60 mixing bay and the pots were scratchy. They got a new Yamaha [at WRIU] after I left.

7. Did you ever think about going back to Radio?
Somebody asked me the other day why I'm not doing this anymore. I said because Ken Friedman exists. As long as Ken Friedman exists I don't need to spend time exploring Swedish-sound-bite-sampling-pace-change-voice-removal-singing-dictionary-avant-garde-free-form-mashups... I think he's meeting our needs very nicely. They [WFMU] are my idea of what a radio station should be.

8. What's special about these tapes that need preserved?
[When I recorded them] I knew that statistically some of them  might be successful. I wasn't shocked at all. ..They are raw and not very high quality either in the skills of the artists, the sound recording standards, nor the young DJ’s work. Conversely they represent "the best we could do” with what we had and did involve a tremendous amount of volunteer work to produce. ...I didn't have favorite shows but I had favorite bands.

9. What's your best-case scenario for the cassettes?
 Loving homes throughout the globe after they are digitized.

10. What do you think is the worst-case scenario?
 Dropped in a dumpster in frustration of having been moved one time too many.

PPM and College Radio

I was looking at the ratings for Boston this morning and I noticed something I didn't expect. WFNX only had a 0.8 share. They've been the big rock station in Boston for more than a decade and now they can't muster a 1-share. But the PPM books have had some outliers and odd results. Overall PPM seems to be more accurate. So when it's results don't jive with an assumption you have to reconsider your assumptions.So when I saw that WERS had a 0.9 Share... that was something that had to be reconciled. can a college station out-draw a commercial station? Hypothetically it's possible, it seems improbably when you think about marketing budgets but programming really is everything. In Boston WODS, an Oldies station is the number 1 station. That' s also unusual. So I took a look at the other PPM markets looks for this result. PPM is currently in the following 16 markets: Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington DC, Detroit, Boston, Miami, Seattle, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and San Diego.

To preface this I'll say now that I excluded NPR talk and Classical as they obviously demo differently than rock. In New York, WSOU, WFUV, WFMU and WFDU don't even book WBGO came in at the bottom with a 0.3. That pattern continues almost without exception. In San Francisco KCSM gets a 0.5, in Dallas KEOM 0.6, in Houston KTSU 0.5, in Atlanta WCLK 0.5, in Philly WXPN has a 1.5, narrowly bested by WRTI with a 1.6, KPLU scored a 2.2 in Seattle, Minneapolis KCMP 1.6, and in San Diego KSDS got a 1.3.

Of that entire set of stations all are jazz except for three: Both KCMP and WXPN are AAA and KEOM runs a Hot AC mix of sorts. KEOM, while it's book was respectable was still dead last in it's market. WERS leans hard toward Triple A, and it's rating was comparable to the other two, this level of scrutiny proves little. The outlier could be instead a consistent and repeatable sampling problem. But, perhaps this is real and can set a new bar for non-commercial stations. Maybe they can compete on their own terms.