Following on from yesterday’s post, I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole ‘Internet (& iPods, etc.) vs Radio’ thing. It’s been the subject of much discussion on the Radio Studies email discussion list. In the thread ‘More bad news for radio’, I posted the following lengthy diatribe – and was rightly ignored.

I’ve written (and discarded) dozens of responses to this thread, but I always get stuck on one point.

When we say ‘bad news for radio’… what do we mean?

Bad for radio company owners?
Bad for radio as a medium?
Bad for radio as category of content?
Bad for radio as a series of professional practices?
Bad for traditional broadcasting infrastructures and legislation?
Bad for the makers of radio receivers?
Bad for the historical trajectory of radio as a developing technology?
Bad for radio as a means of broadcasting over the air using wireless waves?
Bad for radio formats?
Bad for radio as a means of promoting music as a commodity?
Something else? All of the above? Some but not others?

I know this is a deeply pedantic point, but I think we talk at cross purposes unless we decide what it is we mean when we say ‘radio’ – especially when evaluating the potential impact of something new.

Is radio something that goes on inside a radio station? Something that comes out my speakers? The talking box that sits on my kitchen bench? The transmission signal? A set of rules under the guidance of OfCom? A way of making profit for shareholders? A way of communicating with other human beings? A socially-negotiated audience experience?

Yes I know it’s all of these and more – but as a ‘radio scholar’, I try and keep it clear in my head which one I’m analysing at any point in time. Saves all sorts of bother later.

So – my response changes depending on which I think I’m discussing. Is the trend that has more and more people using the internet bad news for radio? Yes and no.

That said, I think there’s a lot of work to be done here and there’s always room for a transnational approach no matter what the context.

There are perfectly successful enterprises that call themselves radio stations and yet don’t ever broadcast over the air (Etherbeat‘s a good example). There are traditional radio stations who earn a good deal of revenue from non-radio web services (one radio group in New Zealand runs a highly successful employment website, for instance).

I listen to a lot of radio – but almost none of it is over the air. I listen to live streams of local stations, archived programmes, international stations, sounds from home and internet-only stations.

None of my three most listened-to stations are based in the UK – although I consider myself both a regular Radio 4 and 6Music listener (almost never through an actual radio – terrestrial digital TV and the internet are now more convenient platforms for me for both stations).

I listen to podcasts created by radio stations and by non-radio ‘civilians’ both locally and abroad – and thanks to sites like Transom.org and PRX.org, I listen to some incredibly good radio programmes that have never been broadcast.

I’m also an enormous fan of Last.FM which I think has almost nothing ‘radio’ about it at all.

Now that I think about it, the only radio station I’ve listened to over the air using an actual radio in recent months has been local community station New Style FM. And that was for 15 minutes.

So… is this good news for radio or bad news? I may be an extreme case of a radio consumer (an active ‘high-use’ radio consumer that arguably listens to almost nothing on the radio), but I think it’s safe to say that things are different.

The way in which they are different is both complex and an enormous challenge to try and unpick in an attempt to attribute simple causality.

Links:
The Radio Studies Network
Public Radio Fan
BBC Radio Homepage

Tags: podcast, ipod, radio

Previously: Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc