music
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KDFC wounded, KUSF killed (almost)
This week the Bay Area loses two of its radio landmarks. On 102.1fm, KDFC, which has been broadcasting classical music since 1946, will be replaced by a simulcast of KUFX (“K-FOX”), a classic rock station in San Jose. And on 90.3 fm, KUSF, which has been one of the most active and community-involved free-form college… Continue reading
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Stuck without Gerry Rafferty
Just learned that Gerry Rafferty has died. Chronic alcoholism, apparently. I liked his music. Good lyrics, catchy tunes.. He was big in progressive/album radio when I worked and hung out there. I suppose he’s best known for the Raphael Ravenscroft solo saxaphone choruses in the song “Baker Street” (for which Ravenscroft was paid £27 with… Continue reading
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Solved Science Theater 2010
This morning, while freezing my way down 8th Avenue to Piccolo on 40th to pick up a couple of cappuccinos, I paused outside the New York Times building to admire its stark modern lobby as KNX radio delivered the latest storm news from Los Angeles through my phone’s earbuds. In the midst of reports of… Continue reading
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Purple Reign Ends
Prince, to the Mirror: “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. “The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became… Continue reading
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A happy beginning to the new WQXR story
Last July I explained Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station. One hundred and twelve comments followed, the last posted in January of this year. Far as I know, that’s a record for this blog. Background: when WQXR, which had been New York City’s landmark classical music station since the Roosevelt Hoover… Continue reading
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Radio gets personal
The great Larry Josephson — to me the best radio host ever (he was real and honest and funny and groundbreaking and smart long before Howard Stern was the same, and I am a serious Howard fan too) — once explained his radio philosophy to me in two words: It’s personal. From the beginning we… Continue reading
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How the Internet becomes the Content-o-net
The Cinternet is Donnie Hao Dong’s name for the Chinese Internet. Donnie studies and teaches law in China and is also a fellow here at Harvard’s Berkman Center. As Donnie sees (and draws) it, the Cinternet is an increasingly restricted subset of the real thing: He calls this drawing a “map of encirclement.” That last… Continue reading
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So ya wanna be a rock & roll star?
Heard “Cherry Pie”, by Skip & Flip, this morning on the radio while taking The Kid to school. I remembered that Skip & Flip had another hit, “It was I”, and that one of the two singers also had a later hit as a member of another group. What was it? I wondered. The Kid… Continue reading
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WGBH and public radio’s future
@robpatrob (Robert Paterson) asks (responding to this tweet and this post) “Why would GBH line up against BUR? Why have a war between 2 Pub stations in same city?” (In this tweet and this one, Dan Kennedy asks pretty much the same thing.) The short answer is, Because it wouldn’t be a war. Boston is… Continue reading
Art, Berkman, Business, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, Live Web, music, News, Past, problems, radio“Robert Paterson”, AM, Berkman Center, BUR, Cambridge, channel 2, Chris Lydon, Dan Kennedy, FM, GBH, iphone, ipods, Morning Edition, music, Open Source, PRX, public radio, radio, The Takeaway, traffic, uhf, WBUR, WGBH -
Urban radio moves into white space
There’s something new on the FM dial in Boston. You might think of it as a kind of urban renewal. Grass roots, up through the pavement. (There’s a pun in there, but you need to read on to get it.) You might say that fresh radio moved in where stale TV moved out. Here’s some… Continue reading
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Whose Side(wiki) Are You On?
What are we to make of Sidewiki? Is it, as Phil Windley says, a way to build the purpose-centric Web? Or is it, as Mike Arrington suggests, the latest way to “deface” websites? The arguments here were foreshadowed in the architecture of the Web itself, the essence of which has been lost to history —… Continue reading
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Copy rights and wrongs
The best insights compound the obvious. They make so much sense that you struggle to comprehend their many implications. Such is the case with the first line, and then the first paragraph, of Kevin Kelly‘s Better than Free: The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character,… Continue reading
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Says here your name is Zimmerman.
Suspicious white man reported in minority neighborhood: Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood. Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part… Continue reading
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Singing of addictions…
Ry Cooder singing “I’m a fool for a cigarette”: 1401 views, 4 ratings. WritingHanna singing “Coffee Ditty“: 704 views, 101 ratings. Hannah sounds a lot like Maria Muldaur, no? Continue reading
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Tuning time and place
In Curation, meta-curation, and live Net radio, Jon Udell begins, “I’ve long been dissatisfied with how we discover and tune into Net radio”, but doesn’t complain about it. He hacks some solutions. First he swaps time for place: I’ve just created a new mode for the elmcity calendar aggregator. Now instead of creating a geographical… Continue reading
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Earth: Bringer of Lunch
The kid goes to bed every night lately while treating himself to a classical piece on his bedroom stereo. Tonight, our last (a bonus, thanks to a plane that didn’t fly) in Santa Barbara before returning to Boston tomorrow, he played one of his favorites: The Planets, by Gustav Holst. Noting that Holst only set… Continue reading
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WQXR goes to WNYC, WBCN leaves FM dial
Heard this morning on WNYC that the New York Times has unloaded its remaining broadcasting asset, which consists of the channel and facilities of WQXR, which has been a classical music landmark for as long as it’s been around. (One way or another, since 1929. Wikipedia tells the long story well.) The story on WNYC’s… Continue reading
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The best thing on radio, right now
— is All A Capella, on WERS/88.9 in Boston. Listen here. Or on the Public Radio Tuner. Or on WERS own iPhone app. Or iTunes (it’s in the list called “Public”). They just started tweeting too: @allacappella889. The performances are just freaking astonishing. You’d think they were playing instruments. And harmonies tight enough to make… Continue reading