Sales of Digital and Vinyl Up in 2008

Happy New Year! I've been absorbed in the holidays the past few weeks, but plan to resume regular features (including the 50 State Tour) next week. One of the highlights of the season was catching WGN's Yule Log broadcast on Christmas Eve, complete with a soundtrack made up of classic radio dramas like It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol. It was an awesome new take on the Yule Log genre and a fantastic homage to the early days of radio.

Speaking of classic sounds, today I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that sales of vinyl music were indeed up in 2008, along with sales of digital downloads. It's very interesting that while album sales were down overall, vinyl album sales were up 89% from 2007 and exploded to their highest level in 17 years. According to the same Nielsen report, more than two-thirds of vinyl sales were at independent record stores and the top selling vinyl album was Radiohead's In Rainbows. Digging deeper into the Nielsen SoundScan report, there are more fun tidbits about vinyl. Several of the top 10 vinyl albums of the year were reissues, including Abbey Road by the Beatles and Neutral Milk Hotel's amazing album In the Aeroplane over the Sea.

Did you buy any vinyl this year?

WICB College Radio DJ's Journey into the Music Biz

A couple of pieces in Ithaca College student publication The Fuse, share the story of one college radio DJ and his journey into the music industry. In the article "Adventures in College Radio", recent college graduate and former WICB DJ and Assistant Music Director John-Severin Napolillo talks about his love for radio and how his job in college radio has opened doors for his future career. (Another article gives a run-down of his daily tasks when he was WICB Assistant Music Director). He writes:

"...Impressed by my hard work, the music director offered me the assistant music director’s position...As assistant I hosted a weekly show premiering new music. I picked and monitored the new music that was played and reported it to the College Music Journal as a contributor to their weekly charts. I attended concerts for free and got to interview the bands. I had to pinch myself halfway through sophomore year when I found myself hanging out backstage with the Walkmen, one of my favorite bands. I also talked to radio promoters across the country on a weekly basis, tracking the success of hot new bands not only on WICB but at stations across the country."

He eventually spent a semester in Los Angeles doing an internship at Capitol Records. Following that he was granted a paid summer radio internship in New York at commercial station WLTW. John adds that none of this would have been possible without college radio:

"As a recent graduate I'm currently pursuing a career in radio while performing with my bands. When I look back on the great experiences I’ve had in the entertainment industry I’m reminded of the doors that college radio has opened for me. I’m sure they will continue to open for years to come."

In my experience, a pretty small number of college radio DJs have dreams of working in the industry, either in commercial radio, at a record label, or in music promotions. Personally, I cherish the freedom of college radio, and could not imagine having to play someone else's playlist at a commercial station. I also feared that working in music as a career would destroy my love for it. However, I spent one year working at an Internet music company, and it was actually the best job I've ever had. Working with music every day only enhanced my love for it and I couldn't believe that I was being paid to write about music and interview bands.

How about your station, do many of the DJs and staff members hope to work in the music biz?

Angry College Radio DJ

Has there just been too much college radio love lately? Perhaps....

In a post yesterday on NeoAvant called "Thoughts of An Angry College Radio DJ Pt.1," a college radio DJ rants a bit about the state of the station, writing:

"...I’m a DJ at my university radio station. It’s a shitty and excellent job. First off, most of the people I work with are either together with their job or just… annoying as fuck. Most everyone has this 'hipster' shit down- not only do they wear skinny jeans, but they cream said jeans over Tobacco and Deerhoof. Fuck those people… I’ve made it my main goal to play everything that they’re not playing. Not just for my sanity… but for the listeners out there who’ve heard the latest Sub Pop records album a million times already.

Don’t get me wrong - I like most of the djs and staff… but some people are so predictable that it hurts."

Does this sound like your college radio station? Do most of your DJs like the same bands? Who are the rebels? Are they the folks playing mainstream music or the people playing obscure, underground artists?

The author goes on to critique the station's Music Department:

"It’s crazy… our music directors in the past have given us crap for expanding our listening to include certain artists that AREN’T played otherwise, and for having fun by playing songs by random notable artists that you never hear on other stations. We’re young, we’re on the air, and we SHOULD be rebelling against the system and playing old LL Cool J at 4am."

I'm not sure I get the entire argument (especially in terms of who is rebelling against what), but it seems like the author worries that the station is afraid of taking chances and sticks to a standard college radio sound. That's never a good thing, and there are lots of critiques out there against the standardization and mainstream sounds found on college radio. I agree that all Music Directors should be challenged to have broad, eclectic playlists that are NOT based on music charts or the top hits listed in CMJ.

What's your college radio rant? And, how do you deal with drama, in-fighting, and differences in music taste at your station?

Texas Tech Radio Station KTXT is Shut Down and Protests Begin

Wow. This is a scary story. I just read on the College Broadcasters, Inc. website that nearly 50-year-old college radio station KTXT at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas was abruptly shut down on December 10th by the university. Apparently the school is shifting its priorities as far as student media go, and the station was seen as a financial drain, and perhaps, not "new media" enough for the school. What's shocking is that KTXT is a prominent 35,000 watt FM station that has played an influential role in radio, airing music not otherwise heard in the area. According to a December 10, 2008 piece on the KTXT website:

"...'We agonized over this decision and looked for ways to enhance KTXT-FM's role within the Texas Tech community, but ultimately we had to face the fact that changes needed to be made,' said Susan Peterson, director for Student Media. 'We recognize this is a huge loss to those who are loyal to KTXT-FM - its listeners and its staff - but the department must grow and change in order to best serve the entire student body.'...

'The overwhelming financial demands of operating an FM radio station, coupled with the radical changes in the radio broadcast industry, made it clear that we need to rethink our definition of broadcast media and refocus our commitment to bolstering student learning,' Peterson said. 'As they prepare to find jobs after graduation, our students depend on us to enhance the skills learned in the classroom. To meet that need, Student Media must adapt to the changes dictated by the industry.'"

Can you imagine if this happened to your college radio station? There's a huge push by staff members, listeners, supporters, and alum to encourage the university to reverse this decision. As of today, there are more than 4200 members of a Save KTXT group on Facebook. From that page you can learn more about how to show your support for the station, which I'd encourage any fan of non-commercial radio to do.

I'd hope that the station will resume operations and that those who made this decision will take a moment to read the passionate comments by KTXT listeners which can be found attached to many of the articles about the station shut-down, such as the following comments on a Houston Chronicle story:

"I was born and raised in lubbock Texas, and lived there from 1978 to 1999. KTXT specially the show DJed by the Cat in the Hat played a major role in defining the person I would become.

I distinctly remember hearing punk rock for the first time on the radio, which immediately gravitated to. Not only did this music introduce me to the music that would define my childhood and adult interest, but it also brought me into the crowd and scene in which I met my some of my most life long friends. KXTX is the only things that made Lubbock more than a cow town. Please don't take this away from the kids struggling to live there now. - Anthony Armendariz, Brooklyn NYC"

And another by a more recent DJ at the station:

"Fall '08 I finally got the guts to volunteer for KTXT, a radio station I'd been listening to for approx. 6 years. The experience was amazing. I made new friends, promoted up and coming bands, and got to make some listeners' day by playing music they would be unable to hear on any other Lubbock radio station. I have a lot of friends who would rather listen to dead air than mainstream Lubbock radio. KTXT provided an alternative, and it's a tragedy to have it taken away with absolutely no notice.

KTXT FM brought bands, art, music, and culture which Lubbock desperately needs. It was a valuable asset to the Lubbock community, a community which only receives national coverage when "the powers that be" make another mistake such as not allowing a GSA group for teens at local schools, arresting the Chippendales for dancing provocatively, and now shutting down the only good radio station that Lubbock has... had."

It's incredibly short-sighted and disappointing to me when a university fails to understand the impact of college radio on the broader community. Even if a radio station isn't the most popular station on campus, even if only a handful of students listen, and even if its DJs are a mere subculture of the university, the station is still playing a very powerful role. Many of the most passionate listeners might be community members, so they should also be considered when taking away such a vital community service.

KTXT is clearly a well-loved station and influential station with many listeners, so hopefully those fans and other non-commercial radio supporters will be able to galvanize in order to bring the station back. It might be that the station will need to become more self-sufficient financially, a not-uncommon practice in college radio. In any event, the station should be given a chance to survive....and I'd really like to be able to feature them on my Spinning Indie 50 State Tour. Catch this blurb about their illustrious past from the KTXT Wikipedia page:

"88.1 has, since the early 1980s, offered an eclectic mix of alternative programming ranging from oldies, new wave-80s, Reggae to house/trance, rock, country and indie. The 1980s led the way to the introduction of Reggae music to the South Plains area. Reggae bands were booked in local clubs as a result and Lubbock experienced a boom in world music influence locally.

As with all college radio during the 1980s, KTXT-FM was responsible for expanding the minds and opening the ears to the sounds of up in coming bands like REM, U2 and The Clash. Whilst other stations in Lubbock stuck with the CHR (Chart Hits Radio) format, KTXT-FM drew many listeners away from commercial radio with their alternative programming thus forcing the commercial stations to pay attention to KTXT's playlists and DJs. Many veteran DJs can claim KTXT-FM as their first home on the air and are currently employed throughout the US as a result."

Sounds like a really cool place. So, please, do what you can to show your support for KTXT. If this shut-down is truly a done deal, than this is a very dangerous precedent.

College and Community Radio Tidbits - 1980s College Radio Nostalgia and Community Radio Station Crisis in Colombia

1980s College Radio Nostalgia

The recent NY Times piece on college radio certainly generated some commentary, including a blog post on My Aimz Is True about the writer's connection to college radio in the 1980s and 1990s and how it helped shape her music taste and turned her on to songs by They Might Be Giants, the Smiths and Husker Du. She writes:

"College radio had a huge influence on developing my musical tastes in the 1980s and early 90s. Growing up in small town Wisconsin, I listened to WRST from the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. They even let some of my high school friends DJ, usually at 4a.m. on Thursdays. My only other source of alternative music came from friends who had older siblings in college, and they passed on what they heard at their local college stations to we high school underlings."

Community Radio Station in Colombia Under Siege
Non-commercial radio faces many obstacles in the U.S., mainly over struggles about funding, volunteer involvement, and connecting with an audience. But, imagine, if your station was under siege by outside groups, and was repeatedly vandalized. A post on the MAMA Radio blog talks about a community radio station in Colombia whose transmissions have been compromised due to vandalism and equipment theft. By the way, the author of this blog, Mario Murillo, is a Hofstra professor and radio veteran (WBAI, NPR, WHRU at Hofstra) currently working in Colombia. He's also involved with college radio in Columbia at radio station Javeriana Estereo.

My Radio Journal Article and the Origins of Spinning Indie

It was just about a year ago that the idea for Spinning Indie was born. As I completed the edits on a piece that I was writing about college radio for an academic journal (which I submitted in summer 2007), I realized that I had a lot more to say about the subject and needed an outlet for all of those ideas. I'd spent much of last December voraciously reading everything I could find about college and indie radio to add some context to my article. There was very little college radio scholarship out there, so most of the books that I read were about related topics like the history of radio, freeform radio and pirate radio. The college radio scholarship that I did find was fascinating, much of it done for MA theses and PhD dissertations. In fact, some of the most impressive work about college radio was done by graduate students, many of whom seemed to be active radio participants as well as scholars. Holly Kruse's book, Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes, was the stand-out among everything I read. It was also inspiring, as the book deal stemmed from her dissertation.

Since I started Spinning Indie, I've been able to connect with more college radio academics, definitely a small crew of great folks. In the months to come, I plan to summarize more academic articles related to college radio. In the meantime, the fruits of my academic labor are finally available for consumption, as my Radio Journal piece was published a few months back. I was hoping to be able to provide free access to the entire article online, but unfortunately there's only free access to the abstract (you can pay to see the entire article).

My piece, "Does 'indie' mean independence? Freedom and restraint in a late 1990s US college radio community" appears in Volume 5, Numbers 2 & 3 (2007) of The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media. This is my very first academic article, so needless to say I'm excited to see my name in print.

My article actually goes back in time to discuss a period during the 1990s when college radio was often working to define itself against commercial culture's embrace of "alternative" music. Since "indie" and "alternative" were being gobbled up and repackaged for commercial airplay and commercial sale, many college stations found themselves becoming even more vigilant about supporting independence from corporate control and corporate media.

The station that I write about in my article took a radical stance, only adding artists on independent labels to regular rotation. In addition to that, to be added to the library, releases had to be free of any major label funding or major label distribution. As I write in my article,

"Deciding to include major label releases at any college station is a political statement and deciding to ban major label releases is equally political. Yet many releases do not clearly fall into one space or another, which is confusing and controversial when they are banned from a station. What is indie? Who decides? This becomes both an aesthetic and a power issue."

What was fascinating to me, was that some new people at the station didn't seem to understand or appreciate this policy. I write:

"While staff members at the radio station were supportive and proud of the indie-only policy, I found that people struggled with it and at times felt restricted by it. This article will interrogate that tension between theory and practice, raising the question ‘Does indie mean independence’? at this college station."

In the article I also give nods to some college radio scholarship and talk a bit about the contested and vague definitions of "alternative" and "indie" in the 1990s. I also discuss some disturbing trends in college radio, in which many stations are becoming more and more like commercial stations, with narrow playlists of songs.

I conclude, saying:

"As the radio industry had continued to change in the 1990s and in the early 2000s, the questions raised by this article take on added relevance. Holtermann (1992) and others cite concern about the increasingly homogenous playlists at college radio stations in the 1990s. Low power and ‘pirate’ stations were in some instances established as a reaction against college radio not fulfilling its promise. Sue Carpenter reflects that her pirate station in L.A. was ‘. . . not only a reaction against bad radio but a reaction against authority’ (Carpenter 2004).

If college radio continues to reflect mainstream radio more so than independent radio, than it may lose more and more listeners to low power stations, satellite radio (with hundreds of niche channels, yet corporate-controlled), the Internet (with indie radio stations, big commercial stations, podcasts, band websites and access to mp3s) and iPods (where anyone can make their own playlist of music).

Yet college radio stations with a strong philosophy about independent music can still hold an important place on the radio dial. College radio has been rarely studied and it is a compelling space in which to explore the tensions between mainstream commercial radio and the underground, independent responses to that. As they are often student and volunteer-run organisations, college radio stations have their own institutional structures, although they are still in close contact with the commercial record industry. This station is but one example of a college radio station with a strong philosophy about exposing unheard music to listeners, and future research would benefit from taking a broader look at college radio as a whole and at independent-minded stations in particular."

Long live indie college radio! And long live college radio scholarship. If you're working on something related to college radio, definitely send it my way, as I'd love to review more academic articles for Spinning Indie.

Photograph Your Vinyl for NPR

My collection of 45s from elementary school and junior high fits in the Tote 45

Thanks to Earbender, for cluing me in to a lively discussion about vinyl on the NPR blog "All Songs Considered" (affiliated with their new music show of the same name). The launching pad for this discussion was the piece "Vinyl: The New CD?" Robin Hilton writes:

"A while back on the blog, I mentioned that I had gotten rid of all my CDs because I thought the compact disc was a dying format. It's so much easier to access everything from a hard drive. When I asked listeners what they thought would be the music format to replace CDs, a handful of people said 'vinyl.' I thought it was funny, but I've come to realize that they may be right.

I've read a number of reports that sales of vinyl LPs and turntables are way up. Retailers speculate the obvious: Vinyl turns music into a tangible work of art, allowing a deeper connection between listener and artist. And many vinyl LPs now come with a code to download a free MP3 version of the album, giving listeners both the convenience of digital audio and the beauty of art you can hold in your hand.

Vinyl could save not only music as high art, but also the music industry itself...But vinyl is a perfect excuse for returning to an actual, physical record store, where you can lay down some money and walk out with something real. I'd love to see local record stores come back."

Robin has started buying vinyl again and asked readers to submit photos of their own vinyl collections (you can see one on this update). Ultimately, they set up a Flickr page where you can send in your pictures and view photos from other vinyl addicts' collections. It would be fun to see some radio station photos in there too.

Yes...that my Styx!

It was also pointed out in one of the posts that the NPR folks have been getting more vinyl in the mail lately:

"I've mentioned before that reports show sales of vinyl rising dramatically, but anecdotally I can say that record labels sent us more promo copies of new albums on vinyl this year than any year before (in recent history). I'm certain that we're bound to see more and more vinyl arriving in the mail."

I'm sure this is true. At my radio station we're adding lots of vinyl every week and I'm definitely playing more vinyl this year than a few years ago. What a fantastic trend!