“The Theory of Listener-Sponsored Radio”

By Lew Hill

Link.

Everyone interested in the idea of the Internet as a new, more democratic, communication medium should read this essay. It turns out the same struggle for content to poke through the commercial wall of meaningless sound is really a very old problem. And since radio is the most intimate of media, with the announcer speaking directly into your ear, the significance of seeking an honest communication between announcer and listener.

I imagine we can agree that if a sound is worth passing through the magnificent apparatus of a microphone, a transmitter, and your receiving set, it ought to convey some meaningful intelligence. There are innumerable ways of wasting time and generating nonsense, and there are also uncounted ways of making money, many of which may be pursued in broad daylight. But the elaborate machinery and the peculiar intimacy of the radio medium have better and more basic uses. The theory I want to discuss rests on two particular assumptions: first, that radio can and should be used for significant communication and art; and second, that since broadcasting is an act of communication, it ought to be subject to the same aesthetic and ethical principles as we apply to any communicative act, including the most personal. Of course we know that in American radio many obstacles stand in the way of these principles. When I have examined some of the obstacles, I shall try to indicate briefly how listener sponsorship offers a means of surmounting them.

What does stand in the way?

When we ask this question we usually think at once of the advertiser or of the mass audience. We feel that one or both of these demonological figures must account for the mediocrity and exploitation which on the whole signify radio in the United States. And since, as we know, no one can reform the advertiser or confer with the inscrutable mass, we are more or less accustomed to thinking of improvement as utopian.

The Pacifica Foundation, and their flagship station, KPFA in Berkeley, were founded to provide what would call “truly public radio”, as opposed to NPR which accepts corporate sponsors, or the CBC which is funded by the government. While CBC and NPR certainly produce orders of magnitude better quality radio than we find in the commercial world, there is still a compromise that takes place in the backs of the minds of every show producer who wants to please his boss, and in turn every station manager who wants to please his sponsors and / or the government official who ultimately makes the hiring decisions.

The goal of purely listener-sponsored radio was to find an answer to the question “what if you had the medium and the capabilities to produce, to the best of your abilities, the very best quality content you could?”

The former head of McDonald's Corporation recently made a $100M donation to NPR. Now, even if there were no specific strings attached to that money, do you not think that this bit of generosity won't be weighing on the conscience of the radio producer thinking about doing a story critical of the fast food industry? This is why the Pacifica foundation refuses corporate donations.

The weight then falls to the listeners themselves to directly pay for what they are receiving, only voluntarily, and only to the extent of their abilities or wishes, but it is very clear to a listener that he or she is paying for exactly what he or she is hearing, and is not merely the third-party victim of a transaction between advertizer and medium. When you made a donation to such a station, you knew that the station was acting only towards the goal of its mission statement, and not acting in a way so as to please its more influential corporate donors.

There is actually a very familiar parallel in the world of television that works on a similar model, one tat you probably hadn't thought of in this way before. HBO. While they have a much more familiar goal, they aim to make money, they do it as a one-to-one relationship between subscribers and the station. When you subscribe to HBO you are purchasing the ability to watch TV programs made by producers who simply want to make the best program they can, without worrying as much about appealing to lowest common denominator audiences or advertizer-driven demographic considerations. Shows have tighter budgets than major network shows, but actors and actresses, and directors, all know that a slightly slimmer paycheque is part of the deal when signing on to do an HBO program. In exchange they get, hopefully, uncompromized creativity.

The HBO model has even proven superior to more-well funded public broadcasters, as they don't have to answer to largely conservative, squeamish civil servants who are fearful of angry letters from citizens complaining about a naked breast that offended them so. Could CBC ever produce the Sopranos or Six Feet Under? CBC and other similar models merely exist as an attempt to offend the fewest people possible.

Bloggers are getting a bit of a free ride these days. Thanks to the generosity of Google, bloggers can publish their own content on fast servers, don't need to worry about their hosting company reaming them up the ass if they actually do write something that a lot of people want t read and their traffic for that month jumps unexpectedly. And they're nice enough to have even turned off the ads on free blogspot blogs, and given bloggers the chance to, if they choose, grab a share of advertizing revenue if they choose to allow advertizements, through the adsense program.

It is unclear how viable this is as an economic model, as Google may be simply attempting to become the market leader early on, the same idea that sunk so many dot.coms in the late 90s.

Ultimately, however, it does cost money to host a web site, and will people be willing to pay for the privilege of reading a blog? The subscription-only model won't work, because half of what makes a blog good is the cluster of sites that link to each other and send traffic back and forth. Making a commercial transaction out of this exchange of readers and thoughts would corrupt the ideal just as mathematicians jealously guarded their theorems from their colleagues in the middle ages.

The nice thing about Google ads is that they are separate from the content itself. I can write about whatever I like, and not have to clear it with the person placing an ad on my site first, purely an electronic exchange of a bit of space on a page for hosting costs. Perhaps a blogger not actually receiving money from advertizers is better because it doesn't motivate them to alter their unique content to give it more mainstream appeal.

Though Pacifica has more than its share of problems, KPFA still produces some very unique programming, and I often find myself listening online for hours at a time to their music programming. There's something to be said for the purity of motive behind Pacifica, in Canada everyone expects the government to sign a cheque before they'll produce any kind of art or performance. This engenders the idea that people wouldn't support art and other quality content if the government didn't step in and help out. But Pacifica provides at least one counter example. And HBO proves that it doesn't even have to be out of some high-minded idealism, and could simply be a better way to make money doing what you want to do.