Remediating radio: Audio streaming, music recommendation and the discourse of radionessAriana Moscote Freire
The Radio Journal - International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, 2007 -Volume 5 Numbers 2&3.
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Abstract
Abstract
In recent years, the consumption of audio material online has become a significant force in the media landscape.
As this is often referred to as radio, we are led to address the way in which this user-defined, personalised experience relates to more traditional discourses of radioness.
Are the existing concepts of radio, as deployed, relevant to this form of consumption, or do they serve to create false expectations and structures within the newer formats?
This article charts the current and historical conceptions of radio, and compares this with the nature of the various online experiences available, in order to establish the extent to which these can be classified as radio, and to which it is reasonable for them to claim this title.
POINTS (ed. GGA)
Theoretical and historical conceptions of radio
A dynamic and diverse medium that has 'frequently reinvented itself (Hendy 2000: 6), radio has always posed a definitional challenge to its the orists and commentators.
RUDOLPH ARNHEIMWriting in the 1930s, Rudolph Arnheim under stood 'wireless' as a broadcast medium with certain characteristics, the most of important of which was its 'blindness'.
He felt that its effects could be replicated in other situations where the visual was absent and the aural highlighted, such as listening to records or even, he speculated, in a darkened theatre (Arnheim 1936: 276). But the arrival of pictures in broad casting complicated this conception; Arnheim believed that television stripped broadcast of its particularities as an aesthetic medium. Instead, broadcasting would become merely 'a medium of dissemination' with few distinguishing qualities, since the same presentational strategies would be found in the transmitted content and its 'real' counterpart (for example, attending a lecture versus viewing a lecture transmitted live via television), the only difference being mode of transmission (Arnheim 1936: 276).
Accounts of how the radio industry and its programming changed in response to the advent of television hint at other complications in understanding radio's 'nature', 'essence' or even uses.
L. BOGARTWriting on television in 1956, Leo Bogart was already noting that radio *ha[d] been virtu ally transformed into a different medium' through the advent of television (Bogart 1956: x). Previously a domestic appliance around which the family gathered for many entertainment purposes, radio was becoming a more personal medium.
FORNATALE AND MILLS; DOUGLAS New technologies for radio reception, delivery and programming (such as the transistor radio, the clock radio, FM, and automation systems like RCS Selector) all changed the industries and the output of radio at various points in its history, arguably remediating earlier technologies and approaches along the way.
Historical overviews of radio (e.g. Fornatale and Mills 1980; Douglas 1999) underscore the fact that the content and uses of the medium are not fixed and have been subject to changes as a result of economic and other imperatives.
TACCHI ; BLACK; BECK; PRIESTMAN ; 2004More recently, however, the arrival of digital audio broadcasting (DAB), satellite radio and Internet radio have occasioned a moment of particularly vigorous reflection within the industry and among scholars writing about radio (e.g. Tacchi 2000; Black 2001; Beck 2002; Priestman 2002, 2004; Atton 2004).
Whereas previous analyses contended with the challenges of conceptualising radio with the advent of
* new receivers,
* new transmission technologies,
* new forms of programming and
* new economic models,
in the past decade or so radio theorists and commentators have experienced an additional complication:
* a change in radio's mode of trans mission.
For all its diversity (from ham radio to commercial broadcasting, from all-talk to music-based formats), radio could once be ultimately understood as over-the-air transmission. The advent of new means of transmission (especially digital) of what was previously less-problematically termed radio complicates this premise.
PADDY SCANNELLWriting in the mid-1990s, radio theorist Paddy Scannell urged researchers to privilege phenomenological models that focus on
* what radio is for,
* rather than what it is,
gesturing
* away from mode of transmis sion as the standard for judging 'radioness' (cited in Priestman 2004).
JO TACCHIIn an even bolder move, in 2000, reflecting on 'radio theory in the digital age', Jo Tacchi wrote provocatively that 'radio is what history says it is:it has no essence since it has already taken, and continues to take, different forms.
* Radio is what it is
* at a given time,
* in a given context of use and
* meaningfulness' (Tacchi 2000: 292).
She called for more studies of the 'radio-like' on the Internet and advised her peers not to dismiss Internet-based radio-like forms out of hand.
TACCHI; BECKSeveral writers have heeded Scannell and Tacchi's advice by looking into case studies of 'radio-like' services on the Internet and elsewhere in the media landscape. The very creation and use of terms such as 'radio like' [as well as others that have been advanced, such as 'radiobility', 'radiogenic' and 'radioworld' (Tacchi 2000; Beck 2002)] in academic discourse points to an increasing contemporary understanding of radio as a spectrum.
However, sketching the borders of 'radioness' has involved the assertion of criteria whereby a given media object or event is more or less radio-like.
In recent years, it is in writers' encounters with automated music channels that these criteria have been most strongly affirmed.
Radio on the Internet and the criteria for radioness
In emerging typologies for radioness, some key themes are seen as crucial to the concept, regardless of the platform. Among them are the ideas of
* 'liveness',
* 'human communication' and
* 'intentionality',
tests which auto mated music channels - music-only offerings commonly referred to as radio - tend to fail in the eyes of several theorists.
For Chris Priestman (2002), for instance, liveness is a key feature of radio which, in assessing web radio, becomes a 'make it or break it' factor. Even when accessed as an archived stream, he writes that 'it is the integrity of the live experience of listening to the radio that lies at the heart of Web radio' (Priestman 2002); in other words, the feeling of something having been recorded as it happened.2
Drawing from Alan Beck and Paddy Scanner, Priestman has identified what he sees as a bifurcation of radio into what he terms
* 'radio-as-conversation' and
* 'radio-as-music delivery' (Priestman 2004).
Through this division, Priestman advances a view of radio as communicative practice, defined in such a way as to edge music radio out of the framework in the process.
He moves away from discussing radio as
* connected to any particular receiving apparatus,
* transmission type, or
* political or
* economic model,
using (following Scanner!) an approach that is attentive to the ways that radio is built into our everyday lives.
Our relationship to radio, for Priestman, is determined by a certain expectation that it will be
* authentic,
* sociable, and
* display intentionality and sincerity.
Radio-as-conversation, he says, is
* 'a less mediated form of public conversation', the definition of which
* 'reaches beyond spoken word
* to include exchange of cultural information in the broadest sense' - including music (Priestman 2004: 84).
But an automated music channel is not up to par, due to
* 'the absence of the sociable
* plus the emphasis on the listener's own music selection' (Priestman 2004: 86).
Importantly, Priestman is
* not suggesting that it is automated technology in and of itself that leads to less sociability but
* instead the lack of intentionality he discerns in the producers of these channels.
His discussion, in Web Radio, suggests that his view of intentionality is, however, a function of his perception of radio as 'human communication', where one senses that the voice of an announcer creating the threads between various other broadcast elements becomes a key point:
[The 'automated web jukebox' constitutes a] contradictory phenomenon to define in radio terms, since it is quite clearly an extension of music format radio but, in doing away with any form of presenter or news or indeed any kind of radio studio at all, it removes the essential element of broadcast communication: one human person talking directly to another or sharing with them some form of entertainment. (Priestman, 2000)
For Priestman,
* neither the communication present in recorded music,
* nor the programming of algorithms or other forms of automation, themselves initiated by humans with, arguably, a certain communicative intention,
are sufficient to be considered forms of 'human communication' in the sense he uses the term.
Pace Priestman, radio’s ‘liveness’ can be considered something of an illusion even in the context of traditional broadcast, since the delocalisation of radio and the widespread use of automation in analogue stations has meant the use of deceptive practices for feigning liveness.
TIM WALL
One of the few writers to include a full-fledged discussion of computerised channels as Internet radio offerings is Tim Wall (2004). Wall includes automated music channels and personalised audio streaming services (he refers to them as 'bespoke services') as part of the family of Internet music radio services.
He traces a lineage between traditional radio stations and Internet-only services, sketching out, following several other commentators, the differences in business models that might be used by these services as compared to conventional radio. Not coincidentally, his article is based on the assertion of music on the radio as a significant angle of analysis and integrated into a perspective on the public good. As he points out, too many analyses leave out or underestimate the role of music on the radio, and this bias is no doubt responsible for some theorists' a priori exclusion of automated music channels as 'unradio-like'.
DAVID BLACKA different approach to examining radio on the Internet is demonstrated in David A. Black's treatment (2001). Contemplating 'internet radio' as a potential 'new medium' distinct from its predecessor, Black argues that, despite the apparent common sense of the term 'internet radio', the 'radioness' of audio streaming is not a given:
Why should an audio signal delivered through the Internet be called 'radio' in the first place?
* Is it self-evident that making money from the delivery of such signals has anything to do with radio?
* Do listeners to Internet audio streams count as radio listeners?
* Or is 'Internet radio' a different medium from 'radio'—and, if so, why has it borrowed the name?
* Which comes first, the name or the medium?
* Indeed, whose idea was it to call it that?
* In short: who gets to decide when a new medium has arrived—where it begins and the old media end—and what it will be called? (397)
On the one hand, Black warns, the association of a potential new medium with an older one can close off possibilities with respect to the nascent form; because of semantics,
'Internet radio' might be viewed as something in which only established radio industry players can participate. On the other hand, the new form might lack key attributes of the medium with which it is being aligned and yet be strategically positioned such that this loss is explained away or its importance minimised.
Theoretical and historical conceptions of radio
A dynamic and diverse medium that has 'frequently reinvented itself (Hendy 2000: 6), radio has always posed a definitional challenge to its the orists and commentators.
RUDOLPH ARNHEIMWriting in the 1930s, Rudolph Arnheim under stood 'wireless' as a broadcast medium with certain characteristics, the most of important of which was its 'blindness'.
He felt that its effects could be replicated in other situations where the visual was absent and the aural highlighted, such as listening to records or even, he speculated, in a darkened theatre (Arnheim 1936: 276). But the arrival of pictures in broad casting complicated this conception; Arnheim believed that television stripped broadcast of its particularities as an aesthetic medium. Instead, broadcasting would become merely 'a medium of dissemination' with few distinguishing qualities, since the same presentational strategies would be found in the transmitted content and its 'real' counterpart (for example, attending a lecture versus viewing a lecture transmitted live via television), the only difference being mode of transmission (Arnheim 1936: 276).
Accounts of how the radio industry and its programming changed in response to the advent of television hint at other complications in understanding radio's 'nature', 'essence' or even uses.
L. BOGARTWriting on television in 1956, Leo Bogart was already noting that radio *ha[d] been virtu ally transformed into a different medium' through the advent of television (Bogart 1956: x). Previously a domestic appliance around which the family gathered for many entertainment purposes, radio was becoming a more personal medium.
FORNATALE AND MILLS; DOUGLAS New technologies for radio reception, delivery and programming (such as the transistor radio, the clock radio, FM, and automation systems like RCS Selector) all changed the industries and the output of radio at various points in its history, arguably remediating earlier technologies and approaches along the way.
Historical overviews of radio (e.g. Fornatale and Mills 1980; Douglas 1999) underscore the fact that the content and uses of the medium are not fixed and have been subject to changes as a result of economic and other imperatives.
TACCHI ; BLACK; BECK; PRIESTMAN ; 2004More recently, however, the arrival of digital audio broadcasting (DAB), satellite radio and Internet radio have occasioned a moment of particularly vigorous reflection within the industry and among scholars writing about radio (e.g. Tacchi 2000; Black 2001; Beck 2002; Priestman 2002, 2004; Atton 2004).
Whereas previous analyses contended with the challenges of conceptualising radio with the advent of
* new receivers,
* new transmission technologies,
* new forms of programming and
* new economic models,
in the past decade or so radio theorists and commentators have experienced an additional complication:
* a change in radio's mode of trans mission.
For all its diversity (from ham radio to commercial broadcasting, from all-talk to music-based formats), radio could once be ultimately understood as over-the-air transmission. The advent of new means of transmission (especially digital) of what was previously less-problematically termed radio complicates this premise.
PADDY SCANNELLWriting in the mid-1990s, radio theorist Paddy Scannell urged researchers to privilege phenomenological models that focus on
* what radio is for,
* rather than what it is,
gesturing
* away from mode of transmis sion as the standard for judging 'radioness' (cited in Priestman 2004).
JO TACCHIIn an even bolder move, in 2000, reflecting on 'radio theory in the digital age', Jo Tacchi wrote provocatively that 'radio is what history says it is:it has no essence since it has already taken, and continues to take, different forms.
* Radio is what it is
* at a given time,
* in a given context of use and
* meaningfulness' (Tacchi 2000: 292).
She called for more studies of the 'radio-like' on the Internet and advised her peers not to dismiss Internet-based radio-like forms out of hand.
TACCHI; BECKSeveral writers have heeded Scannell and Tacchi's advice by looking into case studies of 'radio-like' services on the Internet and elsewhere in the media landscape. The very creation and use of terms such as 'radio like' [as well as others that have been advanced, such as 'radiobility', 'radiogenic' and 'radioworld' (Tacchi 2000; Beck 2002)] in academic discourse points to an increasing contemporary understanding of radio as a spectrum.
However, sketching the borders of 'radioness' has involved the assertion of criteria whereby a given media object or event is more or less radio-like.
In recent years, it is in writers' encounters with automated music channels that these criteria have been most strongly affirmed.
Radio on the Internet and the criteria for radioness
In emerging typologies for radioness, some key themes are seen as crucial to the concept, regardless of the platform. Among them are the ideas of
* 'liveness',
* 'human communication' and
* 'intentionality',
tests which auto mated music channels - music-only offerings commonly referred to as radio - tend to fail in the eyes of several theorists.
For Chris Priestman (2002), for instance, liveness is a key feature of radio which, in assessing web radio, becomes a 'make it or break it' factor. Even when accessed as an archived stream, he writes that 'it is the integrity of the live experience of listening to the radio that lies at the heart of Web radio' (Priestman 2002); in other words, the feeling of something having been recorded as it happened.2
Drawing from Alan Beck and Paddy Scanner, Priestman has identified what he sees as a bifurcation of radio into what he terms
* 'radio-as-conversation' and
* 'radio-as-music delivery' (Priestman 2004).
Through this division, Priestman advances a view of radio as communicative practice, defined in such a way as to edge music radio out of the framework in the process.
He moves away from discussing radio as
* connected to any particular receiving apparatus,
* transmission type, or
* political or
* economic model,
using (following Scanner!) an approach that is attentive to the ways that radio is built into our everyday lives.
Our relationship to radio, for Priestman, is determined by a certain expectation that it will be
* authentic,
* sociable, and
* display intentionality and sincerity.
Radio-as-conversation, he says, is
* 'a less mediated form of public conversation', the definition of which
* 'reaches beyond spoken word
* to include exchange of cultural information in the broadest sense' - including music (Priestman 2004: 84).
But an automated music channel is not up to par, due to
* 'the absence of the sociable
* plus the emphasis on the listener's own music selection' (Priestman 2004: 86).
Importantly, Priestman is
* not suggesting that it is automated technology in and of itself that leads to less sociability but
* instead the lack of intentionality he discerns in the producers of these channels.
His discussion, in Web Radio, suggests that his view of intentionality is, however, a function of his perception of radio as 'human communication', where one senses that the voice of an announcer creating the threads between various other broadcast elements becomes a key point:
[The 'automated web jukebox' constitutes a] contradictory phenomenon to define in radio terms, since it is quite clearly an extension of music format radio but, in doing away with any form of presenter or news or indeed any kind of radio studio at all, it removes the essential element of broadcast communication: one human person talking directly to another or sharing with them some form of entertainment. (Priestman, 2000)
For Priestman,
* neither the communication present in recorded music,
* nor the programming of algorithms or other forms of automation, themselves initiated by humans with, arguably, a certain communicative intention,
are sufficient to be considered forms of 'human communication' in the sense he uses the term.
Pace Priestman, radio’s ‘liveness’ can be considered something of an illusion even in the context of traditional broadcast, since the delocalisation of radio and the widespread use of automation in analogue stations has meant the use of deceptive practices for feigning liveness.
TIM WALL
One of the few writers to include a full-fledged discussion of computerised channels as Internet radio offerings is Tim Wall (2004). Wall includes automated music channels and personalised audio streaming services (he refers to them as 'bespoke services') as part of the family of Internet music radio services.
He traces a lineage between traditional radio stations and Internet-only services, sketching out, following several other commentators, the differences in business models that might be used by these services as compared to conventional radio. Not coincidentally, his article is based on the assertion of music on the radio as a significant angle of analysis and integrated into a perspective on the public good. As he points out, too many analyses leave out or underestimate the role of music on the radio, and this bias is no doubt responsible for some theorists' a priori exclusion of automated music channels as 'unradio-like'.
DAVID BLACKA different approach to examining radio on the Internet is demonstrated in David A. Black's treatment (2001). Contemplating 'internet radio' as a potential 'new medium' distinct from its predecessor, Black argues that, despite the apparent common sense of the term 'internet radio', the 'radioness' of audio streaming is not a given:
Why should an audio signal delivered through the Internet be called 'radio' in the first place?
* Is it self-evident that making money from the delivery of such signals has anything to do with radio?
* Do listeners to Internet audio streams count as radio listeners?
* Or is 'Internet radio' a different medium from 'radio'—and, if so, why has it borrowed the name?
* Which comes first, the name or the medium?
* Indeed, whose idea was it to call it that?
* In short: who gets to decide when a new medium has arrived—where it begins and the old media end—and what it will be called? (397)
On the one hand, Black warns, the association of a potential new medium with an older one can close off possibilities with respect to the nascent form; because of semantics,
'Internet radio' might be viewed as something in which only established radio industry players can participate. On the other hand, the new form might lack key attributes of the medium with which it is being aligned and yet be strategically positioned such that this loss is explained away or its importance minimised.
SEE ALSO FREIRE- EMERGENT FORM'S ADOPTION AND USE OF THE TERM "RADIO"
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