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Community Radio - Entering the Digital Age

With webcasting, iPods and P2P file sharing, it is difficult not to notice that the ways people are using audio are rapidly changing. Where a few years ago teenagers might swop 'mix tapes' it is likely now that they will instead swop a few gigbytes of their favourite artists. With social networking tools it is ever easier to share social preferences - in essence, to generate an understanding of what is 'cool' in a particular social group. Tools like Last.fm allow us to see what 'similar' people are listening to.

All of this has caused considerable consternation amongst various groups. The recording industry is understandably concerned that rampant music sharing could destroy their business model. Legislators and regulators worry about how to control this changing landscape. Professional journalists wonder whether amateurs will displace them.

The changes are also posing a challenge for radio stations. The BBC, for instance, have a research team looking at how 'social software' can be integrated into broadcasting. We're already all familiar with one impact on radio - the use of SMS messages to provide a 'return channel' for listeners. Those of you who, like me, can remember when dedicated call-in lines were rare on Irish radio will understand the changes that regular live phone calls and SMS messages have wrought on radio style and content. The BBC have experimented with bringing that one step further, allowing music content to be automatically set based on the text messages received, and looking at the possibility of further developments that are a blur of jargon and emerging technologies:

And there's more. David Park, a professor at Lake Forest College in Illinois, has been examining the impact of various technologies on college radio in the United States. He's excited by the impact that webcasting, text messages and even Paypal have been having on these stations, and believes that the combination may help such stations resist the impact to 'dumb down' and adopt a more mainstream sound. The argument is that former students continue to listen, now over the web, and contribute towards the station's costs but only as long as the station continues to offer a unique sound. Not only that, but with webcasting what were previously the undesirable low-listenership slots- how many people listen to college radio between 4 and 6am? -can now have cult followings, albeit several thousand miles away.

The flip side, of course, is that former students and others, if they constitute a large enough portion of the station's funding base, could stifle cultural change in the station. One of the unique things about college radio is that it faces such rapid change in community membership. Most students are on campus for three to four years at most, and as youth culture changes so too does the content they produce. While those who have been involved with a station previously - on air or as listeners - can be useful defenders of the need for an authentic student voice (or at least what they identify as an authentic student voice), they can also stridently oppose changes that reflect genuine changes in student culture, or changes in the balance of cultural power within the student body.

Nonetheless, webcasting and the return channels provided by SMS and other messaging technologies do provide exciting new opportunities for college stations and other small outlets. That's just as well because some of the other forthcoming developments in Irish radio are, if not necessarily negative, decidedly undetermined as of yet. Digital audio broadcasting, or DAB, is something that has been on the horizon for about a decade now - as long as Irish college radio has been around - and it may actually succeed in being adopted shortly.

In DAB instead of each station having its own frequency and transmitters there is a central operator who sends out a single signal called a multiplex. This multiplex contains within it a number of channels - probably between 5 and 8 - with some station identification information and possibly some text or other data. From a listener's point of view this will require buying new DAB radio sets.

For a small radio station, instead of (as at present) buying a transmitter and leaving it in the corner, transmission will involve streaming their audio to the multiplex operator, probably over a dedicated leased line since we all know how reliable webstreams are. These stations have two new set of ongoing costs - the costs of the studio to multiplex link, and the cost of channel space on the multiplex. Because there will be few multiplexes community and college stations will be competing for space with commercial stations, and the cost of space might be substantial. Unfortunately no one yet knows for sure, because the question of whether or how to adopt DAB is still being discussed by the various national and international regulatory agencies. The government department in charge, the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources (is it just me or are department names getting annoyingly long?) has to its credit suggested that community stations might be guaranteed a certain amount of space on multiplexes, or that subsidies might be provided to them to rent channel space.

Other groups, specifically the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) have been less sympathetic, suggesting that allocation of channel space should solely a matter for the multiplex owner, based on business (read commercial) considerations, and that in any event the FM band is good enough for community stations and that's where they should remain. While many community stations are quite happy with FM at present, the problem is that it's expected that the FM band will be allocated to different uses a few years after DAB finally starts. Even if the FM band were to remain allocated to broadcasting it could quickly become a ghetto for community stations, as RTE and commercial stations migrate to DAB and newer radio sets wouldn't have access to the FM band - think about how the short, medium and long wave bands have become less accessible to listeners over time.

There may be solutions that could be more attractive to community radio in the long run than gaining access to the DAB band. Work has already begun on what are known as software-defined radio sets. At present most radios perform a number of tasks: they pick up radio signals from the air; they tune into a particular signal and decode it into an audio signal; they pass the audio signal to speakers or headphones. Which signals can be 'tuned in' and decoded depends on the radio hardware, and the abilities are, literally, hardwired and cannot be (easily) changed. With software-defined radios the tuning and decoding is, as you might expect, completed by a piece of software and extra capabilities can be added by adding new software - think of it as plug-ins - to your radio receiver.

If extendible software-based radios became the norm we could imagine that community radio could survive without access to DAB, though we would need to ensure that the appropriate plug-ins were readily and freely available. But if we head further along this road - and I will provide some speculative examples in a moment - some interesting issues arise concerning both the role and concept of broadcasting. When broadcasting first developed in Europe there were few choices as to the channel you could hear - for many years there was only a single licensed station in Ireland - and this allowed broadcasting to serve as a unifying force, bringing citizens together in a single aural space. As the number of stations increased - first with pirate and then with licensed non-state broadcasters - different social and cultural groups could split up and find their own space on the dial. But it was still - moves between AM and FM notwithstanding - the same dial, and stations could be seen as generally similar outlets aimed at different audiences, just as we might understand The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, and even The Sun, to be generally similar.

Travel very far down the software-defined road, however, and we might find that 'listening to the radio' can come to mean quite different things to different people. We have already seen some signs of this with the development of what some are calling podcasting, a process whereby audio pieces can be distributed online and, making use of a technology known as RSS syndication, listeners can have pieces from their chosen sources automatically downloaded to their computer and from their to their portable mp3 player, to be listened to at their leisure. The general idea is familiar, of course, from programmable video recorders, and even has a jargon name - 'time-shifting' - but podcasting brings it to a new level, where the new content you listen to is fully personalized and can originate anywhere.

We can easily see some of where these developments might lead, as people download programmes from their favourite sources as they become available, and listen to them at their own pace. The idea of having shared experiences of listening to the radio would fracture even more. Of course in many respects this is merely an intensification of the impact of the walkman, but an intensification in volume (not a tape or two, but dozens of GB) and speed (no need to go to a record store to buy content, the newest content gets sent to you automatically each day or hour). If software-based radio and podcasting were to integrate with other developments, such as Bittorrent-style file sharing and the tagging tools so enamoured of the BBC's researchers, we can imagine yet more possibilities.

These possibilities create great opportunities for college and community broadcasters, as they can allow them to overcome budget constraints in terms of distribution and accessibility. They also open up opportunities for individuals and much more modest groups to get involved in audio production. This is something that most community radio activists would welcome - greater accessibility is a key goal of community media - but it generates fresh challenges for community outlets. If individuals can 'do it for themselves' why do we need community media outlets?

If the access to equipment that community groups can offer is less of an incentive to some - though not all - people greater stress must be laid on other aspects. Aggregation may offer one key. Individuals may not be competing for limited time on a radio station's schedule, or space in a newsletter, but reaching an audience is perhaps even more difficult as a result, and promotion by being included in aggregated RSS feeds, or signposting on a community website becomes invaluable in a world of many small producers. In a media world built on social networking tools, the local face-to-face networks of community radio groups may truly come into their own.
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by

Andrew O'Baoill
20th February 2005

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