Let's get the weird news out of the way: Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist, is now deriving his paycheck from Clear Channel. That's right: The spike-haired symbol of anarchic, anti-capitalist rebellion, the very punk, is sucking avatar of punk, is sucking the teat of the broadécast devil incarnate, the apotheosis of airwave-polluting, Britney-spewing corporate radio.
Weirder still, it's all cool. Jones' five-day-a-week gig as a DJ at Indie 103, a Clear Channel-backed station in Los Angeles, is not a sign that he has pathetically sold out his youthful beliefs. "FCC no!" he says, dropping into his customary off-air vocabulary. "I'm out of here if they tell me what to __FCC__ing play - that's it, mate." And the music on his two-hour show bears out his claim. A head-snappingly diverse jumble of vintage punk, unsigned local bands, ancient pop novelties, and a whole lot of vividly alive rock and roll, Jonesy's Jukebox is, according to Blender magazine, nothing less than "the best show on the radio."
More than that, Jonesy's Jukebox is just possibly a peek at the future of radio itself. Which may be the weirdest news of all - not so much that a Sex Pistol is, once again, helping to shake the dust off rock and roll, but that music radio could even have a future.
Between the 1920s, when the first stations began to broadcast, and the end of grunge in the 1990s, music played over the radio was arguably the most innovative force in US popular culture. The sound of jazz, country, and rock pulsing from every dashboard in the nation inspired and drove Hollywood, Broadway, Seventh Avenue, literature, television, and practically everything else. But in the past decade, radio changed from a village of small, independent stations to a bastion of the US media oligopoly, content to deliver sterile, cookie-cutter broadcasts. The transition made sense economically, because Big Radio was able to cut costs by consolidating advertising departments and using the same programming across the country. But alienated listeners fled in droves.
Noting radio's declining audiences, recurring low-level payola scandals, horrendous public image, and competition for drive-time ears from iPods, satellite broadcasting, and cell phones, pundits have been gleefully pronouncing the medium's last rites. But they may well be wrong. Rather than being on life support, radio in fact is on the verge of its boldest technological change since the introduction of FM stereo in the 1960s. Not only that, it may be on the threshold of another golden age, one which could have almost as powerful an impact as the first. And in the vanguard of this movement, bizarrely enough, are many of the same flaccid, reactionary media giants that put radio in a coma to begin with.
"I don't get it," Jones says. "But they're letting us put on some __FCC__ing good radio here."
The Man Who invented punk, he has been known to call himself, squints through his reading glasses at a CD. "Track 1, Mr. Shovel," Steve Jones says, handing the disc to his producer, who is sitting across the table from him and is not named Shovel. Mark Sovel - who is also Indie 103's music director - slips the CD into one of the four players on the wall behind him and fingers several buttons to cue the proper tune. The Man Who Invented Punk leans close to the thick, condomlike sheath encapsulating the microphone. "Next, some Flaming Groovies," he softly informs the world, or at least that portion of Los Angeles within range of 103.1 FM. "And the song is … 'Teenage Head.'" The name elicits a brief, barely visible grin, a remembrance of loucheness past.
It's a Tuesday afternoon in January, and Jones, whose back is acting up, is not at his most perky. Nonetheless, a penumbra of cool surrounds his every move, even when he's doing nothing more than sitting stiffly in his chair, drumming his fingers to the Superégroupies, an unsigned Swedish band whose CD lists what seems to be the home phone number of their manager. As a former Sex Pistol, Jones is set for life in the seen-it-all department. He may have given up booze, drugs, cigarettes, and (soon) carbs, but he is still the guitarist for the only 30-year-old rock band apparently too controversial to get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
After walking into the station at the crack of noon carrying perhaps 30 CDs from home, Jones shuffles and deals them onto his desk in the recording studio, which is situated in a surprisingly posh office complex in downtown LA. A beat-up set of headphones draped over his ears, he picks out tracks and gives them to Sovel. Every now and then he stops to identify the songs he has just played, reading the names in his quiet, slightly swallowed baritone. "It's personal," Jones says of the show. "The way it should be."
At many radio stations, Jonesy's Jukebox literally couldn't be done. Most now keep their entire playlist - often as few as 300 songs - on big hard drives; distant music directors select the songs according to focus groups, Billboard charts, and the flow of promotion money, ordering up entire shows by remote control. Some studios no longer even have CD players. Jones' unruly stack is a throwback to the stoned adolescence of FM in the early 1970s, which is when 103.1 came into existence. Like most radio stations, it was bought and sold many times, changing formats like suits of clothing along the way. "I'm sure it was dozens of formats," says Michael Steele, the station's program director. "I don't think anyone knows how many."
It's easier to say what Indie 103's current incarnation isn't than what it is. What it isn't, mainly, is corporate radio. There's no bellicose lowbrow comedy, no nighttime remotes from the mall, no short playlist, no lengthy discussions of who got fired on The Apprenétice, no talking over song introductions and finales, no 10-minute blocks of screaming ads, and, perhaps most important, no programming dictated by faraway computer software. "The basic difference between us and what you mostly hear is that we don't suck," Jones explains. "I'm being objective about this - most other radio sucks now."
The industry's shift to robo-programming has many causes, but the most important is the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Before the law went into effect, media companies could own no more than four stations in a single market, and only 40 nationwide. The new measure removed almost all of the ownership limits, setting off a frenzy of consolidation in what had once been a proudly fragmented industry. According to a 2003 report from media analysts BIAfn, the top 20 radio groups owned at least 2,700 stations - including almost all the stations that people actually listen to - and raked in $10 billion a year. The remaining 10,000-odd stations, most of which are individually owned, split $9 billion among them.
Biggest of the radio giants is Clear Chanénel, which owns more than 1,200 stations. With a presence in almost all of the 250 largest US media markets, it is to rock radio what Wal-Mart is to retail: an overwhelmingly dominant force. Clear Channel's story is well known in the industry. After the Telecommunéications Act passed, the company, run by a former shock jock, borrowed gobs of money from Wall Street and went on a binge, buying about 70 radio companies. It consolidated operations under a central command to create the radio equivalent of a television network, in which every station, no matter where it is, broadcasts basically the same material. In the great majority of its programs, Clear Channel espouses the gospel of Tight: tight playlists of big hits from a tightly restricted musical genre (Classic Rock, Smooth Jazz, Lite FM) aimed at the tightly defined demographic that listens to it. Meanwhile, it has increased revenue by adding more and more commercials.
The strategy was profitable in the short term but ruinous over the long haul, because audiences grew restless. Some people drifted away; those who continued turning the dial to Big Radio did so more from lack of an alternative than any desire to listen. Conésequently, Clear Channel and its ilk grew even as the radio audience as a whole shrank. Although 200 million people still tune in at least once a week, according to prominent music-radio consultant Fred Jacobs, the number of ears listening every day has slowly slipped to about what it was in 1994. The audience of 18- to 24-year-olds, a demographic particularly beloved by advertisers, has fallen nearly 22 percent since 1999. Fearing advertisers will start moving their dollars elsewhere, Wall Street has cooled on Clear Channel; its stock price has fallen to about a third of its 2000 level. Similar woes beset its main competitors, such as Infinity Broadcasting and Citadel Broadcasting.
In effect, the giants have been gobbling up larger and larger shares of a smaller and smaller pie. Notoriously, the US autoémobile industry pursued a similar approach in the 1970s. The result: a flood of badly engineered cars, followed by a Japanese invasion from which Detroit has never fully recovered. Big Radio is widely perceived to be on the same road. "Music radio is broken," says Barry Ritholtz, chief market stratéegist for the Maxim Group investment bank. "A significant percentage of its audience hates it, and that's something I don't see how they're going to fix."
For corporate radio, the equivalents of Honda and Toyota are the iPod and satellite broadcasting. "If all the stations are playing the same thing, why not make your own station with your own tastes?" asks Indie 103's Sovel. "The popularity of the iPod is directly related to the crappiness of radio."
Meanwhile, the two satellite radio companies, XM and Sirius, hope to erode the power of terrestrial broadcast the way cable did network television's. Beamed down from a pricey string of satellites, the two services offer subscribers hundreds of channels for every conceivable music niche, fewer commercials, better sound quality, and DJs who aren't regulated by the schoolmarms at the Federal Communications Commission - including, famously, Howard Stern, who will move to satellite radio next year, partly to avoid FCC oversight. By January, satellite radio had 4.3 million subscribers.
It is striking to note that satellite radio and the iPod are not encroaching on National Public Radio. Unaccountably, NPR's listeners apparently perceive it as a trembling invalid with such a tenuous hold on existence that people still regularly respond to an ancient email hoax claiming that Congress is about to destroy the network by eliminating its modest federal subsidies. In truth, NPR is a radio heavyweight whose audience has increased by a staggering two-thirds since 1999. And some in the industry have noticed. Though they did not consciously emulate public radio, a scatter of stations around the country - Indie 103 in Los Angeles, KBZT in San Diego, KQMT in Denver, KNDD in Seattle, WRNR in Annapolis, and perhaps a dozen others - have tried to create a kind of rock radio that models NPR's conversational tenor, lengthy attention span, and relative lack of hype. Fred Jacobs calls it NeoRadio.
Unlike most mainstream announcers, NeoRadio DJs have a measured, sometimes wry tone. They aren't afraid of long pauses - "dead air," in the jargon - and they mix in sentimental favorites with unpredictable material. Listeners are encouraged to call in, to pick tracks, to feel a sense of ownership. To Indie 103 program director Steele, NeoRadio means a station that creates a community of artists and listeners built around its musical sensibilities. "My measure of success is when somebody like Henry Rollins or Courtney Love or Dave Navarro calls in to the station and says 'I love what you are doing and I want to be part of it.'" Rollins and Navarro have become regular Indie 103 DJs, with once-a-week two-hour slots; Love is a frequent guest. "These aren't professional jocks with professional jock voices," Steele says. "These are people who, when they tell you they really like a song, you pay attention."
In some ways, NeoRadio is a throwback to the past, when radio stations were the centers of the kind of virtual communities now more common online. As many as 700 people a day call a special number at Indie 103 that lets listeners request a song and record whatever DJ-style intro they'd like to give it. An engineer pores through the recordings and assembles entire programs of audience-presented material to broadcast when the station itself has no DJs scheduled. "You get wonderful calls," says Stacie Seifrit Griffin, a DJ for Annapolis's WRNR, which also invites listener participation. "People just call to say thank you for doing what you're doing."
No NeoRadio station is a blockbuster hit. Indeed, most are such small operations that they have trouble drawing national advertising. "Seasoned people can make half a million at KIIS-FM [Clear Channel's big LA station] selling radio ads," says Seifrit Griffin, who was marketing director for one of KIIS-FM's competitors. "If you go to RNR, my station now, which bills probably $5 million a year in ads, a top salesperson can make 80 grand. You're not always going to get the best people, with the best connections. And that means you're always going to be struggling to keep the lights on."
Despite this, Big Radio sponsors about half the NeoRadio stations, Indie 103 among them. In fact, Indie has two corporate masters. It is officially owned by Entravision Comémunications, a kingpin of Spanish-language media. And Clear Channel has cut a deal to buy every second of Indie's advertising time, 24/7/365, reselling it to advertisers ranging from Fox Television to the National Guard. "Clear Channel writes us a check once a year and that's it," says Steele. The irony is not lost on him: Two years before cofounding the station, Clear Channel dropped Steele as KIIS's program director - he'd made no secret of his objections to its policies. "But the fact is that they are aware of what we're doing at Indie 103 and support it."
Clear Channel and Entravision are backéing the station not because their managers have suddenly transformed themselves, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, into benéevolent music philanthropists, willing to support a marginal format because of the glow it puts in the cheeks of music fans. The reason is that Big Radio, unlike the music, television, and movie industries, is not running away from the threats posed by new technology. Instead, it is embracing them. Stations like Indie 103 are a critical component of Big Radio's most important survival project: digital radio.
Indie 103's studios are in an executive palace on LA's Museum Mile, one of the toniest addresses in the city. The building lobby is practically big enough to require its own zip code; signs direct visitors to its various wings. Outside, pink marble walls flank a circular drive, fountains gush by expensive growies, and placards funnel annoyed smokers into obscure corners. Entravision's second-floor headquarters houses five radio stations, but only one is likely to feature the Yobs' guitar-crunching version of "Silent Night."
In January, Entravision joined 20 other radio heavyweights in announcing plans to accelerate the conversion of their signals from analog to digital. The new standard is known as high-definition radio,-la HDTV. According to Jeff Liberman, president of Entravision's radio division, Indie 103 will be among the first of the company's stations to go digital, with the new signal in place by the end of this year.
Much as the major film studios set aside their differences and formed a consortium to control the format of movie DVDs, the big players in radio, usually hypercompetitive, jointly established iBiquity Digital, a Maryland-based company that owns the basic patents on HD radio. "The industry has never gotten together on anything like this before," Liberman says. "HD radio took a lot of negotiation."
The technical standard is known as IBOC (in-band, on-channel) and is Big Radio's attempt to reclaim the dashboard from satellites and CD players. From a media mogul's point of view, Liberman says, the standard has a key advantage: Stations can broadcast traditional analog signals and new digital signals on the same frequency. Radio stations that have spent years drilling their identities into listeners' skulls - "Mix 105!" "1010, New York's all news station!" - will not have to force listeners to hunt for their digital version on the dial. (Actually, Indie's digital broadcast frequency will be very slightly above or below its analog frequency, but digital radios will display the same number, so that listeners will appear to be tuned in to the same 103.1.)
"If you're satisfied with what you have now, you're not going to be forced to buy a digital radio," says Dave Salemi, iBiquity's VP of marketing. "You won't even be forced to reset the buttons on your car radio. But if you want the new services that digital will bring, they'll be there." HD radio, Salemi says, "will let AM have FM-quality sound and FM have CD-quality sound." Indeed, he promises, signal quality will be better than satellite radio's. "No more crackling, pops, losing reception," he says. "You'll either get a signal or you won't. If you can pick up a station, it'll sound good."
At the same time, almost nobody in radio thinks that people driving in city traffic with their windows open are overly concerned about perfectly reproducing Usher's every sigh. Instead, broadcasters are focused on the new technology's ability to send multiple digital signals on almost the same frequency. "We could have an Indie A and an Indie B," Liberman says. "Maybe Indie A would be our normal programming, and Indie B would be special events, or an endless repeat of Jonesy's Jukebox for people who missed it in its normal time slot." For similar reasons, NPR has promised to convert more than 300 stations to HD radio by 2006, allowing the network to offer music and news simultaneously.
Believing that the multiple-choice format will offer listeners "something unique," Clear Channel is "aggressively" converting stations to HD at the rate of nearly one a day, says Jeff Littlejohn, vice president of distribution development. By the end of 2007, "our goal is to have 95 percent of the top 100 markets fully converted - we're talking more than 450 stations." Clear Channel intends to use HD radio first to offer simple services like displaying song titles and artist names or sending traffic data to display on navigation systems. Meanwhile, manufacturers intend to drop the price of HD radios for cars and stereos below $200 by the end of this year, bringing the new medium's clear sound within reach of a middle-class audience.
Ultimately, broadcasters will have the chance to spray multiple streams of bits into listeners' dashboards and homes - as many as six streams per station, depending on the fidelity requirements of the programming. Because the 1s and 0s in HD radio are functionally identical to those sent across the Net, says Jim Griffin, founder of media consulting firm Cherry Lane Digital, "digital audio implies the ability to carry video, software, email, text messages, you name it." Within a few years, he says, radios will have what he calls a buffer - a TiVo-like device that stores broadcast signals at the listeners' command. "You program it to store All Things Considered for the drive home. Maybe on the show there's an alert about a new virus. You punch a button and download an antivirus update into your buffer from NPR B, then take that into your house when you get home." Or perhaps you hear a review that makes you want to get a movie or an album, which you download as you drive. Meanwhile, your radio, which taps into the automobile's GPS unit, is constantly scanning for local traffic reports, and when a pertinent one appears, interrupts and then resumes the stored All Things Considered. "At the other side of the transition," Griffin says, "digital radio isn't necessarily radio in the way we think of radio, other than the fact that it uses transmitters. It's all about pushing and pulling bits into the buffer."
Some of those bits will be advertising. As listeners select the programs they want to hear, they're instructing the radio about their interests. "Whenever you pull the dial like a piece of taffy and let more signals come through, you are of course going to get a lot more niches," Griffin says. As a broadcaster, "you make money [running a collection of niche stations] because targeted ad buys are so much more valuable than nontargeted. Traditional media isn't a great way to reach fly fishermen or people who are in quilting bees, but niches are."
In this TiVo-esque environment, Clear Channel-style mass broadcasting becomes less and less effective. "When everything you want is on your iPod, why should you listen to what some big company gives you?" asks digital-broadcast pioneer George
Aposéporos, head of the streaming-media company Friskit. "You hate Britney Spears or you hate depressing news about Iraq. Why would you put up with it for one second when you don't want it?" Aposporos argues that radio falls into two categories: "the stuff I know I want, which I want to be in control of, and the stuff that I don't yet know I like and want." Radio can't win the first category, he says. No matter how carefully targeted the niche audience, no matter how much the playlist is restricted to songs known to be popular with that demographic, the iPod will deliver a more precisely tailored program. But radio has something to contribute in the second category, Aposporos says. "Your iPod will never be able to completely duplicate as idiosyncratic and individual a bunch of voices as DJs." The only problem, he says, is that since the corporate takeover of the airwaves, "I'm not sure I can think of any examples of that kind of radio."
How about a station whose fans are passionate enough to call up the DJs simply to tell them thanks for playing such terrific music?
"Time for a contest," Steve Jones announces. He picks up Left of the Dial: Dispatches From the '80s Underground, a Rhino Records boxed set of little-known garage rock. Indie 103 has acquired an extra copy, and in a parody of radio prize contests, Jones is now giving it away. Or, rather, he is supposed to be giving it away; Jones seems to be having second thoughts. "I love this set," he says. "I have a copy myself, but I had to FCC some FCC to get it. Now it doesn't seem fair, quite, giving it away."
Eventually deciding to do it anyway, he picks out an obscure track and whistles the tune. Listeners are supposed to recognize the song and call in. Few Sex Pistols aficionados know this, but Jones is a fine whistler - amazingly good, in fact, at the little-practiced art of capturing a rage-filled guitar lead in a whistle. Equally amazing, some listener does recognize the tune and calls in to claim his prize.
After teasing the listener by somehow twisting his Hispanic surname into a German one, Jones cues up the last songs. It's the end of the show. The desk in front of him is covered with a jumble of CDs, many of which he got by haunting Amoeba Music, nerdvana for Caléifornia music fans. A commercial from the military plays; off air, he rolls his eyes and mutters imprecations about the current administration.
Donning a faded white coat, Jones listens politely to questions about the possibilities offered by digital radio. "I don't give a toss about that stuff," he says as he crams a few CDs into his pocket. "As far as I'm concerned, it's about me coming here and playing music I like. And if you want to listen, that's __FCC__ing great."
High-definition radio delivers greater clarity, improving the FM signal to nearly CD-quality sound and AM to current FM standards. Unlike HDTV, HD radio works within the same broadcast frequencies as today's stations, so digital and analog listeners can turn to the same place on the dial. - P.B.
HOW IT WORKS
1. To upgrade to HD, a station adds a second transmitter that broadcasts a digital version of its signal at nearly the same frequency.
2. The listener's HD radio receiver tunes to the analog signal first, then moves to digital after about 5 seconds. It will switch back to-analog whenever it can't pick up HD.
3. Standard tuners receive the same analog transmission as always.
HOW TO GET IT
There are just three HD receivers on the market, all for in-car installation. Wired's choice:
JVC KD-SHX900: With a 256-color screen, JVC's over-the-top HD receiver can play photo slideshows as well as MP3 and WMA files from your homebrew discs. Still not enough options? It's also satellite-ready, with jacks for a Sirius or XM tuner. $850, www.jvc.com
WHAT'S NEXT
NPR plans to split HD broadcasts into as many as six channels per station - imagine Car Talk and Fresh Air channels. On the hardware front: in-home receivers by 2006.
Think TiVo for your radio: Program to record, listen to it later. But the coolest TiVo-like features - season passes, wishlists - are still to come. - P.B.
HOW IT WORKS
1. Subscribers log onto RadioTime's Web site to browse a schedule of shows customized to a local area.
2. Click the Record button for desired shows.
3. The RadioTime desktop software on the listener's computer records the show as an MP3 file, either through the computer's AM/FM tuner or from a webcast. Play recordings on a PC or load them onto a portable player.
HOW TO GET IT
RadioTime: A combination online scheduler and desktop recording application, RadioTime picks up shows you select via webcasts collected in its real-time database of 35,000 stations from 140 countries. $39 per year, or $59 for USB FM tuner and one year of service, radiotime.com
HOME/OFFICE
RadioShark: This sleek, 8-inch-tall tuner turns your PC or Mac into a radio and recorder. You have to set recording times and station frequencies manually, but you can create presets and repeating schedules for favorites. Best feature: Time Shift, which lets you scroll back and forth in a live broadcast as if it were a recording. $70, griffintechnology.com
PORTABLE
Radio YourWay: You can schedule recordings with this AM/FM/MP3 player. Sound is captured at fairly low quality - 16- or 32-Kbps - but it should be good enough for talk shows. And unlike the MyFi satellite radio, it'll record while you're on the move. $150, pogoproducts.com
WHAT'S NEXT
RadioTime's next version will combine scheduler and player into a single interface, including an optional AM/FM tuner for grabbing local shows that aren't webcast.
Charles C. Mann (www.charlesmann.org) is author of the forthcoming 1491: New Revéelaétions of the Americas Before Columbus. He wrote about anime in issue 12.09.
credit Joe Pugliese
Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones programs Jonesyés Jukebox the old-fashioned way at Indie 103 in Los Angeles.
JVC KD-SHX900
RadioShark
"Radio YourWay"
Feature:
The Resurrection of Indie Radio
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