Thread on WETA

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There’s an interesting thread about Washington DC’s classical station WETA on City-Data.com.  It’s in response to the somewhat snarky question, “Why is WETA so boring?”. This is not an attempt to criticize WETA in any way.  It’s a legacy station that rode to the rescue when WGMS dropped the classical format.  From 2005 to 2007, WETA switched to news/talk, angering a lot of listeners.  But when WGMS gave up on classical music, WETA didn’t hesitate to switch from the generally more lucrative news format back to classical.  I give them full credit for preserving and protecting … Continue Reading

5 Million Hours of Music on Public Radio!

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April is Public Radio Music Month (who knew?), and WDIY in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania has some great statistics about music on public radio stations. Across the country, public radio music sounds like: Nationally, more than 180 public radio stations have full-time music formats and another 400 or more play music as part of their programming lineups. A recent study of the public radio system found that 1 in 3 listening hours was to music. On the whole, local public radio stations air nearly 5 million hours of music per year, … Continue Reading

Good News in SF: KDFC Expands

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The University of Southern California is adding to its collection of stations  in the Bay Area with the purchase of KCNL 104.5 in San Jose.  The goal is to increase the coverage of classical KDFC into the South Bay area.  If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll recall that KDFC switched from commercial to public early in 2011.  You can read about it at Radiosurvivor.com and and a little more clearly at Radio-Info.com. It’s probably one of the most convoluted arrangements in the radio universe: KDFC used to belong to Entercom, who sold the brand and the programming to … Continue Reading

World’s Best Job: Pandora Music Analyst

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How would you like the job of listening to music all day and getting paid to judge what you hear without having to write a review? That’s what Pandora’s 26 human — not computer — analysts do all day.  They sort and catalogue Pandora’s library of some 350 genres, encompassing nearly a million tracks by 90,000 artists. There’s a great article about the Music Genome project here.  Michelle Alexander is a senior music analyst and supervisor. …music analysts go through thousands of songs, one by one, rating various music attributes. There are between 200 and 450 attributes for … Continue Reading

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