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AboutReboot your radio!
# About
# Reboot your radio!
By Pit Schultz
Notes on the polymorphous architecture of a free cultural radio
Radio as Frontend, Internet as Backend
As we heard, the internet has become an all day mass medium, more and more
"things" are networked, digital audio and video turn into net based
services, and the desktop interface of the workplace is not the only way to
go online anymore. In the post-internet phase, the network doesn't
disappear, it only becomes less visible. The audio channel emancipated from
the screen first, to put the presence of the net in the background, in
favour of the ear (and the sharing of music files). Media resources can get
transparently connected, while the end user experience doesn't change
drastically, such as in IP telephony or radio syndication. Satellite,
cable, radio, and other kind of large technical networks get interconnected
and glued with IP based networks hence they aren't replaced by them. They
still exist next to each other. Some old media types are there to stay and
have a second life, like vinyl had with the introduction of digital
culture. Radio, as a highly developed medium, works cost effective on a
local level, it has many advantages on the end user side, it is mobile, and
available to the farthest corners of the world. So the combination of radio
and internet doesn't lead to the replacement of radio as a means of
distribution, it rather reintroduces people into the loop. On the level of
production, through decentralisation, interconnection and automatisation of
the studio and archive, the virtuality of possible changes and connections
multiplies the freedom in which the flow of sounds can go, to only
intensify the need of social labour, and focus even more around the people
producing and listening to the program. The network effect escapes into the
acoustic space and doesn't stay as a mere epiphenomena of self-referential
net culture, but comes back to reinform the urban environment about itself.
The architecture of radio broadcasting creates an instant communality, it
is local and one-to-many, while the opposite counts for the net. Both
together form a new media type ready for exploration.
Open Radio License
Radio shows usually contain music which is copyrighted. Radio stations have
to pay a fee to their national royalty collectors to be able to legally
broadcast copyrighted content. The creators should get compensated through
this system, but in reality, commercial format radio works as a redundancy
machine in favour of mainstream artists. For radio archives publicly made
available, additional fees have to be paid as well as for live streaming
and even more for on demand archives. Non-commercial Radio Stations which
do not play mostly mainstream music have problems financing these fees. On
the other hand they do not have problems sharing their shows with other
non-commercial radio stations, if credits are given. To simplify the
international program exchange between such radio stations, a license model
would be useful which combines an internationally compatible compulsory
license model with an open content license model. The use of already
published copyrighted material is then combined with the creative work
component of the radio dj. A new form of agency is needed, international
and specialized for the compensation of non-commercial use of copyrighted
music in a networked broadcasting environment. An open radio license would
make it easier to facilitate legal file-sharing between non-commercial
radio stations and to provide public access to radio archives (on demand
and as stream) through the internet. Such an environment would foster the
development of new musical styles and support non-mainstream music in a way
which has a positive effects worldwide for the labels and artists producing
music. With a compensation system based on the indexing of such radio
playlists it would be possible to better redirect the fees to the authors.
Such a system would need to be internet based, to facilitate the
registration of music tracks, the indexing of access statistics, playlists
control the payment of fees. Other forms of content, such as journalistic
features can get compensated in similar ways.
Free Cultural Radio
The common alternatives to mainstream radio are free radio or public radio
formats which define themselves dialectically in the way they distinguish
themselves from the commercial formats as 'counterparts' often focusing on
a transcendent concept of society and the public sphere. A new form of
radio would define itself by the immanence of the given social fields, and
their political, cultural and economical factors of production. The
components: local music culture, free software driven editorial systems,
cultural openness, international program exchange, art + experiment,
political information, and the archiving and transmission of local cultural
events would serve as a suitable abstraction of editorial content zones,
which then can get organized autonomously down to the level of single
programs and shows. The goal is to interpolate the already existing
cultural production of a local urban environment into the airwaves and
relate it to the one of other cities. None of the categories of locality or
non-commercialty are completely fixed or clear, they are produced in the
process of making the radio program, not just as a representation of the
struggle of surpressed minorities, or the expression of subjectivity, but
as a transformation of an ongoing production from one sphere to another,
the urban space to the acoustic space, a social feedback process of
subjectivity production which is for many reasons certainly under a
paralyzing central control.
Exstream Programming
Software culture means to reflect the function, architecture and philosophy
of software in a way which makes it possible to change it. With the
availability of open source software components it is possible to multiply
the productivity of a software development process without multiplying the
costs. It means more room for open ended experimentation. In a fully
experimental programming environment, the software and it's social
application are embedded into one constant and incremental development
cycle. Bug reports and feature requests, chat discussions and wiki
checklists, sofa debates and research orgies are providing a critical
environment of constant challenge and pragmatic and collective decision
making which avoids a few common problems of software development such as
overcomplexity. The artistic use of software is to be practised almost
immediately by the use of artists testing the functionality with their own
content, or by the artful consideration of a complex situation into
beautifully simple concepts and guidelines. Archive, Scheduler, Playout.
"Tools not rules."
