Welcome to the Sweating in a Brazilian “Winter”, Too Many Tabs Open in Firefox Link-dump Edition of Scanning the Dial. Freshness of items may vary.
Mark Ramsey on the future of music radio: “The ‘next big thing’ in radio is the gradual disappearance of music stations to be replaced by non-music stations, whether they are Talk, Sports, or new formulas yet to be devised.”
Greetings from Brazil, all, where I’m sojourning for several weeks in the company of my daughter. It’s my first time here and it’s quite an adventure. I’m in Barra de São Francisco, a town of 40,000 in the state of Espírito Santo. As I write this I’m being ceiling-fanned and mosquito-bitten in my modest hotel room. Which might not sound like much fun, but in general I am having a great time — even without a passing ability to speak Portuguese.
I’ve been told that of the four radio stations here, none play any classical music. Not that I even have a radio for verifying this. But I’ve been trying to keep up on happenings in our beat here at Scanning the Dial, and there’s lots going on. The impending changes at WUFT-FM in Gainesville, Fla., for one.
Ever since the news that WUFT at the University of Florida in Gainesville is switching from classical music to news/talk, Mike and Mona and I have been privately batting around a discussion about what classical stations need to do to survive and thrive. We thought you might want to join the discussion.
You care about music, right? Well, you’ll care about this. And thus I justify a somewhat off-topic post, but this is too cool not to write about.
Archaeologists have dug up a 35,000-year-old flute that is believed to be the oldest musical instrument yet found. Unearthed in a cave in Germany, the five-holed flute was made from the radius bone of a griffon vulture.