Big Picture

WITF in Harrisburg – Update

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We told you about the switch from classical to news/talk in Harrisburg PA on WITF a while back.  Well, the change happened this morning.  A few interesting observations from the Pennlive.com blog post today: 1. The rationale for changing formats was that there were twice as many news listeners as classical listeners. I hear this a lot.  It assumes that because more people listen to news/talk than classical, that those people want talk all the time.  In 2004 the PRPD did an audience segmentation study, separating listeners in “NPR Activists” and “Classical Monks” and concluded there was limited overlap in the two … Continue Reading

Performance Royalties – The First Domino Tumbles

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Until recently, musicians and record companies have had a mutually-beneficial agreement with radio stations.   No money needed to change hands because the artists and record companies got free publicity and the radio stations got free product. With music moving to the internet and the change in media ownership rules, however, that delicate balance has shifted.  Record companies have lost out to file-sharing.  Big money now owns most of the broadcast spectrum. Radio has never paid royalties to the artists, which made sense when radio was little mom and pop companies.  But you can see why it’s … Continue Reading

World’s Biggest Online Classical Destination?

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Radio Today  reports that Classic FM in the UK has launched a new website with the claim that it will become the “world’s biggest online classical music destination.” I went to the site here, and got a screen saying they only have rights to air in the UK. This is not the first time I’ve heard that an online station was going to dominate the world.  When NPR dropped most of its own original classical music programming and gathered a coalition of stations to contribute content to NPRmusic.org, they said it was going … Continue Reading

NEA Shows Little Love for Classical Radio

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In what was a surprise to virtually all the major producers of classical radio, the National Endowment for the Arts has taken a hard left turn, and diverted long-standing television and radio funding to gaming, mobile, and web projects. A detailed and scathing article in the New York Times gives examples of organizations that have lost some or all of their funding after years of building partnerships with the NEA.  The MET Opera, PBS, and American Public Media (Performance Today and SymphonyCast) all had their funding decimated.  Some of these organizations regularly received large grants, but … Continue Reading

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