The term popular music suggests three different sense of ‘popular’. In part it means ‘widely liked’, and it should be clear that the mass popularity that some music-makers can achieve is central to the growth of major record companies, and ultimately, because of the political economy of recorded music, to the increasing tendency to concentration in the record industry. It is also clear that the second sense of popular, as texts of poor cultural value, is often applied to the records produced by these large record companies. It should be no surprise, then, to discover that there is also a whole range of record industry activity associated with the third sense of popularity, the idea that music belongs to ordinary people and should express their aspirations. We can see this idea reflected in some aspects of the idea of independence and alternativeness at the heart of DIY music. That is, the idea that the political economy of music should be in the hands of those who make and consume music; musicians and music fans should be doing it (the music economy) for themselves.

In this formulation it is easy to see why independent companies were seen by many to avoid the tendency (as they saw it) of mass music popularity to undermine its cultural value. This is clearly the basis of the support for those independents in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s. DIY music culture is often traced back to the late 1970s, as ideas of the alternative society were applied more systematically in popular culture, and especially in anarcho-punk culture. The punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, and Mark P’s (1976) encouragement to DIY activism, is often seen as an emblematic moment in the development of DIY: “don’t be satisfied with what we write. Go out and start your own fanzine or send reviews to the established papers. Let’s really get on their nerves, flood the market with punk-writing!”
However, as George McKay (1998) has shown the idea of DIY music culture goes back much further, and is not restricted to anarcho-punk or punk. His example from skiffle, mod culture and house music, along with Tony Mitchell’s (2007) examination of Australian Hip Hop, show how widely idea has been used. Nevertheless, the idea has been particularly strong in anarcho-punk. Lucy Nicholas (Nicholas, 2007: 1) has summed this up succinctly thus:
“This DIY ethic originates from the rejection by punk bands of the apparent compromise of signing to major music labels, choosing instead to record, release and distribute music, and organise gigs, themselves. It has been extended by participants in the punk scene to other cultural creations and to everyday politics, wherein participants avoid the ethico-political compromise of participation in institutions and practices they consider exploitative, doing as much as possible themselves, according to an autonomous anarchist ethos”.
Pete Dale (2008) has shown how these important parts of anarcho-punk ideology grew out of earlier punk and continued in less politically charged forms. Most helpfully he examines the connection of the idea from earlier decades with its deployment in connection to online technologies and social media. Dale engages with the utopian perspective which sees the internet as ‘circumventing’ the sorts of restrictions that were outlined above, casting doubt on the extent to which such optimism is rooted in reality and asking important questions about how we could research the area further.

If doubts have been cast on the potential of DIY music initiatives to secure independence, other theorists have opened up the question about the degree to which cultural aims as well. In particular the very male nature of many DIY music cultures has been highlighted by a number of commentators. Setting aside that this is a criticism that can, and has, been made against other music cultures which aspire to alternativeness, and to mainstream popular music, these authors make important points about the ability of DIY cultures to engage with questions about alternatives that go beyond the economic in anarcho-punk and dance music (Nicholas, 2007; Rietveld, 1998). The final section of this chapter picks up the questions about the degree to which the internet has increased the potential for DIY success.

There has always been a degree of utopianism about independence within the music industry, then. Since 2000, though, this became an increasingly strong theme in the way that both journalistic commentators and scholars have approached the potential of the internet within the record industry. While twentieth century small independent companies faced difficulties in getting records pressed in significant numbers, limitations in accessing funding, and the physical problems of distributing CDs or vinyl records, twenty-first century record companies could use the internet to distribute their records as digital files, removing these problems completely. Beyond this practical transformation, many writers have used Chris Anderson’s (2006) promotion of ‘selling less of more’, which he developed out of the idea of the ‘long tail’ (see Anderson, 2004). He suggests that the internet changes the economic imperative within the record industry, detailed earlier in this chapter, to sell large quantities of a very small number of releases. He argued it was possible to make money out of the ‘long tail’ of record releases that only sell in small numbers, and so transform the political economy of music. More generally, writers have pointed to the potential of the internet as a new medium of communication for musicians and small record companies to increase awareness of their music without the ‘gate-keeping’ role of traditional media.

This has lead writers such as Kembrew McLeod (2005) to contend that the falling costs of recording, production and distribution, and what he calls the ‘consumer-led file-sharing explosion’, has enabled small labels and independent artist-entrepreneurs to challenge major record companies and radio. However, like most of the contributions to this debate, McLeod offers only assertion and quotations from numerous advocates of independent record companies, rather than empirical research to support these claims.

Matt Manson (2008) picks out file-sharing as one of a number of ‘youth-led’ activities which he believes has radicalised the music industries. In particular, he cites the punk and DIY movements we discussed earlier, along with counterculture ideas, pirate radio, and street-level remix and re-use artistic culture, being transformed through the computer and the internet to offer artists and musicians as way of resolving what he calls ‘the pirate’s dilemma’. For Manson, this is the tendency of one group of capitalists to sell pirated products to undercut over-charging major corporations. Although this is strictly the dilemma faced society, rather than by producers who impinge on copyrights to produce facsimile goods, Manson believes an independent and alternative capitalism can undercut ‘pirated’ goods and promote artistic vitality at the same time.

However, we know far too little about the effectiveness of these new forms of online distribution and promotion to judge what their likely role in industrial change is likely to be. Given that CDs sold through conventional means still remain a buoyant sector in 2012, and the major companies still remain dominant, the utopian position clearly is not sufficient to understand what is going on. On the other hand, these new technologies clearly provide opportunities for small-scale enterprise, and many of the positive examples provided by McLeod and Manson, amongst other, show that imaginative entrepreneurs can make a living in this new virtual space. What is clear is that the internet and this utopian perspective have provided the basis for a whole range of technologies and services, which offer musicians the opportunity to be a DIY record industry. Putting aside that this often means that independent artist-entrepreneurs are not doing it themselves if they are signing up to online services which seek to replicate the activities of a record company, they do point to the importance of the internet as a space in which new forms of record industry activity take place.

Perhaps the more important conclusions that need to be drawn are three fold. Firstly, it is clear that this is an area which badly needs less hyperbole and more research. Secondly, the major change is not in the activities of record companies online, but in the consumption practices and culture of music fans. This in turn leads to the third conclusion, that the internet, and the way digital and online distribution change the cost structure of the record and radio industries, are enabling new forms of economic activity, rather than simply online ways to repeat the practices that developed to make money out of physical records on vinyl and CD. Certainly the development of the music services – like Spotify, Pandora and Last FM – and the role that new companies from outside the traditional record industries have had in this new economy, suggest this is the case.

A&R stands for Artists and Repertoire which, of course, means the singers and musicians and their songs and music. The term is a long-standing one within the music industry indexing the old Tin Pan Alley practice of finding separate individuals to perform songs from those who wrote them. It refers to the department within a company who finds and signs artists to the company, or licenses recordings from independent producers, foreign divisions or other smaller companies, and then decides which records should be released on the label.

A&R staff tend to express their role in relationship to the artists they work with, succinctly summed up by one A&R staffer’s self-description as “a groupie with a cheque book” (Frith 1983: 102). But they often also share the notion with popular music scholars that they are gatekeepers who decide who to sign, what to record or licence and what to release with a keen sense that only one in eight of the records they release will make a profit (Negus 1999: 32). Following the analogy of a gatekeeper, who decides who will go through, some theorists have examined the way that the discourse of A&R workers constructs their activities as a transformational process in which music is turned into other organisational products – ‘property’, ‘demo’, ‘tape’, ‘cut’, ‘master’, ‘release’, ‘product’, and finally (they hope) ‘hit’ – through each stage of production (Ryan and Peterson 1982).

Negus argues that the analogy of the production line is too superficial, and instead casts A&R staff following Bourdieu (1984) as ‘cultural intermediaries’. This emphasis shifts the attention from the function of A&R as part of a popular music system and to the relationships of A&R within a wider popular music culture. Negus suggests that “the boundary between the recording industry and potential artists is not so much a gate where aspiring stars must wait to be selected and admitted, but a web of relationships stretched across a shifting soundtrack of musical, verbal and visual information” (Negus 1992: 46). This allows him to present such record company workers as far more creative and autonomous than in other analyses (Negus 1996: 36-65). He is particularly interested in the way that the roles of A&R staff, musicians, other intermediaries such as DJs, managers and journalists, and and the roles of fans are blurred, often within the person of a single individual, and how networks of contacts, and knowledge about pop’s past and potential future are utilised to exchange information (Negus 1992: 47).

Musicians themselves are often presented as working with an idea of creativity and commerce as polar opposites. In an interesting ethnographic study of bands playing in Liverpool in the 1980s, Sara Cohen observed that the musicians made strong distinctions between the creativity in music that they wanted to pursue, and the commercial restrictions they felt limited them (Cohen 1991). Of course Cohen’s study focused on local bands who did not necessarily have a record contract at all, and it may be one of the characteristics of commercially successful performers that they do not make such a distinction, or that they are far more concerned with the pursuit of celebrity and fame, than they are with their own creativity. Jason Toynbee (2000) has attempted to rethink the idea of creativity through the notion of ‘agency’, and what he sees as ‘institutional autonomy’. In his analysis agency is the possibility to ‘select and combine’ musical material, and to speak with a distinctive musical ‘voice’ within a restrictions set by the popular music system and popular music culture.

However we understand A&R – either as gatekeepers in a production process, or as parts of an autonomous and amorphous network of cultural intermediaries – an issue remains about the implications of their ideas and practices for the kind of music the corporation records and releases. Negus suggests that staff classify artists into one of two groups which more or less map on the classic distinction between Rock and Pop music (Negus 1992: 54). The first category, which he defines as an ‘organic’ ideology of creativity, positions A&R as discovering and nurturing of new talent, while in the second A&R is as bringing together different talents (writing, choreography, image-making, singing, playing, producing) to synthesise a new star image. For Negus these two ideologies fit with a wider notion of the rock tradition that was still prominent in the 1980s when he conducted his research. Under these conditions even a mediocre rock band would find it easier to get a record contract than music-makers outside this polarity.

Negus’ analysis is now well over twenty years old, and his work is based upon interviews with staff who probably joined the industry in the late 1970s or early 1980s, bringing with them a rock versus pop binary that was dominant in their adolescence. The landscape of popular music culture has changed quite radically since then. There are at least two noteworthy issues that arise from these changes. First, form many young audiences rock no longer has the same resonance, replaced by a postmodern sensibility in which the ‘inauthenticity’ of ‘manufactured’ pop groups is not a negative quality, and no-group, no-star, no-song dance music is now possibly the most common form of music-making. If anything, the notion of networks of information and the blurring of boundaries suggested by Negus are even more prominent in this contemporary context than they were in the mid-1990s. Ideas about creativity have themselves been transformed. And yet the major corporations still seem much happier with the idea of a group with a lead singer that writes its own songs, than it is with the new sensibilities of dance music.

Having said that, there is a second strand of contemporary popular music discourse which seems to run in the other direction. The ability for music-makers to communicate directly with fans through the internet, and for music fans to actively search out new musical experiences, has enabled the idea of the ‘unsigned band’ to become more widespread. Signing, of course, means making a contract with an A&R department to record with a record company. The fan discourse around ‘unsigned bands’ imagines a group of music-makers who have been untainted by the creative compromises forced upon them by A&R, or whose raw talent and direct communication with fans articulates the ideology of popular music far more effectively than corporate record labels can. Carey Sargent (2009) has linked this explicitly by to the cultivation of local audiences through the exchange of ‘social capital’ both on- and off-line, and details the difficulties involved in using this method to attract wider audiences. It is no surprise, then, that this discourse is used by music companies to promote less well-known music-makers. There are now a large number of web services which offer exposure, and even management and promotional services, to ‘unsigned bands’. While most of the bands whose music can be experienced at these sites will not have a major record company recording contract the very fact that they have established a relationship with a music industries company stretches the idea that they are ‘unsigned’ beyond its original use.
So while the idea of the unsigned band may have its origins in the discourse of DIY music, it has become an important art of traditional corporate A&R departments as well as an extension of what it is to be a music industries company. In one dimension, then, the idea of unsigned band has just become one of the ways in which corporations spread risk, and just as the major record companies increasingly relied on independent producers and small labels for indie rock and dance music in the 1990s, the industrial networks around ‘unsigned’ music have become an important part of industry practice. It is interesting to ponder if ‘unsigned band’ functions for younger western consumers in a similar way to ‘world music’ does for their older counter parts.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Cohen, S. (1991). Rock culture in Liverpool : popular music in the making. Oxford ; New York, Clarendon Press : Oxford University Press.
Frith, S. (1983). Sound effects: youth, leisure and the politics of rock. London, Constable.
Negus, K. (1992). Producing pop: culture and conflict in the popular music industry. London, Edward Arnold.
Negus, K. (1996). Popular music in theory: an introduction. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Negus, K. (1999). Music genres and corporate cultures. London, Routledge.
Ryan, J. and R. A. Peterson (1982). “The product image: the fate of creativity in Country music.” Sage annual review of communication research(10): 11-32.
Sargent , C. (2009). “Local musicians building global audiences: social capital and the distribution of user-created content on- and off-line
.” Information, Communication & Society 12(4): 469-487.
Toynbee, J. (2000). Making popular music : musicians, creativity and institutions. London, Arnold.

Here I want to present a critical approach, which balances an analysis of the political economy of record production with a cultural economy of music consumption allows us to deal with changes in the ways in which we access and experience music. Here we are obviously talking about the way we listen to music that we have downloaded as digital music files using our computer or mobile phone. In an overview of popular music production this involves us looking at the way that music retailing is organised, and even questioning if the future of the music business lies in retailing music at all.

This is actually quite a difficult area to think through with some clarity because, unlike the ‘hidden’ detail of the organisation of record companies and music corporations, the detail of record retailing seems to be a very public issue. It is certainly a common media story, either reporting on the closure of a high street chain of record retailers, or presenting a report from an industry body that shows that record sales are falling, or the political discussions about the downloading of music files from the internet. The problem here, though, is not that the information we want is hard to find, but that it is obscured by an almost overwhelming quantity of opinion and, at times, hyperbole.

The fact that the use of the internet to access music is a pervasive theme of this book shows how important it is. Louis Barfe (2004), attempting a historical and contemporary overview of the music industries, has even suggested that we can understand internet to access music as causing the fall of the record industry, by which its rise can then be examined. Writing just over a decade ago, like many commentators, he evidences this ‘fall’ by pointing to a decline in record sales and he implicitly accepts the standard industry argument that this is the result of online music sharing. However, as we saw in chapter three Technological change has been a major characteristic of the record industry throughout its century-long life. From acoustic, through electronic to digital recording techniques, through shellac, vinyl, tape and then CD music formats, and the various media forms on which the music can be accessed, it is hard sometimes to see it all as the same industry. We should also recognise Barfe’s history, using a metaphor of ‘rise and fall’ derived from stories about the lives of prominent individuals or even whole civilizations, as the sort of as totalising story we analysed in chapter one. As we try to understand the modern music industry it is quite easy to accept arguments like this, particularly as they are so pervasive. However, such stories obscure more than they reveal.

In discussing access to music attention has most often been placed on the consumers of music as undermining the music industry through ‘illegal’ downloading, or on the industry as failing to respond to the realities of a new world. It is, though, much more productive to think about this as a change within the music industries, one characterized not by the ‘fall’ of a once powerful industry, but of another shift in the political economy of the industry and the cultural practices of music consumers. More specifically, then, we need to identify what is changing in the record industry and in the wider music industries.

Rather surprisingly, part of the answer is that not a lot has changed. Taking Britain as a fairly typical example, at the time of writing over 80% of recorded music sales were in the CD format, and while this represented a decline of a third over a decade it still accounted for around 100 million CDs in a single year. The downloading of digital music files from retail sites was growing steadily towards 20% (BPI ref). In the area of music radio, 90% of the British population still listened to radio with 85% of that listening via over-the-air, overwhelmingly AM and FM, broadcasts (RAJAR ref). Part of the answer, though, is that much is changing. By the time you read this, it is likely that the process of declining CD sales will have continued and that people will be using an array of new online music services instead of more traditional forms of listening to physical records or on over-the-air radio. In chapter 12 we will return to the implications of this change for our experience as music consumers, but there are also some important changes in the institutions which provide these music services, and in music retail as a whole.

At the level of political economy control of music consumption is moving away from the traditional music corporations and media outlets to a new generation of corporations with their roots in the computer industry. These new music industries institutions have grown from small companies very quickly because they have offered new products and services which seem to understand the cultural practices of their consumers far better than the traditional record and radio institutions have. While record companies and radio stations have interpreted the new technologies in terms of their existing practices, these new companies have completely rethought how they can make money out of music. It is not that the new companies have completely reinvented how to consume music, almost all their services are built upon existing cultural practices, but they have used the new technologies to extend them and to find new ways to make money out of them.

At the time of writing there are some quite prominent examples of these new institutions, and they are presented here with the usual qualification that you will need to reassess their place in the music industries as it is at the time that you are conducting your own analysis. Given how quickly the new organisations and institutions have emerged, it is just as likely that they have been replaced by new ones.

New forms of record retail
For a century records were purchased primarily through shops on the high street. These stores changed from the furniture or department stores which sold the first phonographs, through first specialist record shops, and then specialist music record shops, to the mega stores of the late twentieth century. There have always been mail order record retailers, either for record buyers who lived in relatively isolated areas or who had specialist music tastes, and the largest record vendors had always been general merchants, but the rise of online retailing is still worthy of note. Not only are its most successful organisations completely new to the market, they also represent the twin strategies of record retailing.

The first re-imagined the retail experience through the possibilities of greater interactivity and data management. The most successful company here was Amazon, which extended its book retailing business to records and subsequently a wide range of products and services, including music file downloads. At one level the Amazon site offers a simple search and purchase facility, but this is underpinned by a series of technologies aimed at encouraging music discovery. Data collected on your activity on the site is used to make further suggestions of things you may want to buy, the online store’s customers are recruited to review products and the services of its various associates, and through a combination of automated and responsive systems the website is tailored for individual customers. In doing this, the online retailer adapted many of the ways in which offline shoppers had decided what to buy. Customers would be influenced by the opinions offered by friends, the recommendations of staff in a specialist store, or paths of music discovery built in the music experience. While most of these techniques are in widespread use now the company’s innovation allowed it to attract customers and build the necessary scale for such an enterprise to succeed.
The second, was a service built into the technology of music organisation and listening, where the whole process of accessing and consuming music was re-organised. The most successful company here is the Apple computer company with its iTunes Store. Again, the ideas were not usually original – there had been many music file download companies before – but Apple built its retailer around its iMac computers and mobile digital file players, the iPod and later iPhone. As an integrated component of the iMacs’ iTunes music ripping organisation and playout software it was actually easier to buy a track than rip it from CD, and the use of Amazon-derived music discovery and recommendation systems extended the offline iTunes experience into a wider virtual world of music retail. Fundamentally, though, the success of Apple in becoming the world’s largest record retailer derives from the widespread popularity of it iPod and iPhones, and the usability and integration of the software services.

New forms of music service
If the first set of organisations that emerged in the new age of music consumption re-institutionalised previous activities of buying, collecting and listening to records, the second set re-institutionalise radio listening within a new political economy. There’s a more detailed examination of these music services in chapter seven, but here we need to outline the companies involved and how they became an important institution within the record industry and larger music industries. Because most of the focus of public debate has been on downloading, the fact that new forms of music consumption built around data streaming have been formed into new music industry institutions seems to have been lost. The fact that these services are often perceived to be extensions of radio services, and often present themselves as such, may also account from their critical neglect in debates about the record industry.

When the US broadcasting and internet services corporation, CBS, bought the relatively new online radio-like service and music fan website, Last.fm, in 2007 it paid $ 280m. Even though the deal was given some coverage in the business media, the significance of the deal in highlighting a new institutional form in the music industry was lost in all the public debate around downloading. As other seemingly similar services – like Pandora and Spotify – attracted more consumers, and the user base of this new way of listening to music expanded the brands became better known. Nevertheless these services have not been given the critical attention they deserve, even though they represent profoundly new ways to organise and make money out of records. It would not be too much on an exaggeration to claim that, along with iTunes and its store, these music services represent the most significant change in the institututional structure of the music industries since the original development of records and radio broadcasting.
Last.fm, founded in 2002, rhetorically claimed to be the ultimate radio station: both the end point of music radio’s evolution, and the only radio station listeners would need from now on. The .fm suffix cleverly suggested the service had its origins in over-the-air music radio and its future on the internet. Because its uses streamed audio content structured in a playlist-like running order it does feel like listening to radio but, as regular users know, a radio station made just for the individual listener. Utilising a range of data scraping, music discovery and responsive technologies, along with a social media world in which music fans can interact, the music services makes money out of music consumption by offering the full service for a subscription. Like Pandora and Spotify, there are free and advertising-supported levels of the service, but these companies business model if firmly rooted in the idea that consumers will pay for a flow of music that balances what we know with what we might like and an access to this music where ever we are and without the restrictions of a record collection we have to manage ourselves.

Such services are a radical departure from the usual form of record retail based upon acquiring and organising a physical record collection, and even the mass broadcast form of over-the-air radio, and adds the cultural practices of sharing music which have been a central part of music fandom for decades (see Wall, 2012).

These music services are relatively new, and the lessons of history tell us that they are more likely to take their place in a consumer ecology that includes traditional forms of record ownership and music radio, rather than replace them. Nevertheless they offer a radically different political economy of music consumption and an innovation in the form of music consumption culture. In themselves they do not mean that record companies will become redundant, but they do indicate that record companies need to respond beyond imagining that online services must be controlled to simply reproduce the retail function of the record shop and the promotional function of the radio station. Along with companies like Amazon and Apple, they do show that the biggest changes in the music industries are taking place at the point at which record companies connect to music fans, and that it is companies from outside the music industries who seem to understand what needs to be done far better than those within the traditional structures that create and supply music.

Barfe, L. (2004). Where have all the good times gone?: the rise and fall of the record industry. London, Atlantic.
Wall, T. (2012). Specialist music and the internet. New Perspectives on Radio. N. Gallego Pérez and T. García.

The years between 1955 and 1965 marked a seminal moment for American culture. Traditional narratives, both in academic work and in popular representations like American Graffiti, have focused on this as a moment of newness – the rise of the teenager, the creation of rock and roll, the transistor radio. Prominent in this picture is the car, in particular the car as a focus and locus of music, and as a symbol of cultural capital. Yet many of the elements of this story, and especially those which reinforce the car’s centrality, had an existence which pre-dated their employment in this context. That epitome of car culture, hot rodding, dated from the 1930s; music poured from car radios which had been available in some form since the 1920s; and even songs which reflected car culture had a long history – Chuck Berry’s 1961 hit Route 66, for example, reprised a Nat King Cole number from 1946.
This paper therefore seeks to examine the moment of rock ‘n’ roll not as one of newness but instead as one of convergence, of bricolage and of reappropriation. We consider the histories of the various technological and musical aspects of the construction of rock ‘n’ roll culture, which were intertwined during the period and later valorised in a number of nostalgic depictions. In doing so, we situate the association of cars and music, so popular in histories of rock ‘n’ roll, in a continuum of history, shedding light on the social and culture pressures which drove the gradual convergence of mobility and entertainment.

Developed and produced by Dr Nick Webber from an original idea by me.

The expansion in the number of radio stations available to listeners over the last decade is based upon an increase in the number of channels through which radio could be distributed. In turn, this expansion in channels is associated with technological innovations in both distribution and consumption, together with quite radical changes in the national regulation of broadcasting. Most important has been the development of technologies for distributing streamed audio. This has been a century-long development, but the speed of change has become exponential. Up until the 1960s, innovation in radio technologies was aimed at extending geographic coverage and the distribution of programming content through network technologies. Inventions aimed at increasing the number of broadcast channels or improving audio quality, like the discovery of frequency modulation (FM) in the 1910s, were neglected within national radio systems driven by the pursuit of universality of reception and centralisation of programming (Faulkner 1993). It was not until the 1970s that FM was increasingly used as a means to expand the number of audio broadcasters, and then enlarged further by using a wider range of frequencies beyond 100Mhz. Likewise, digital systems of encoding/decoding the audio signal were only deployed from the mid-1990s to allow transmissions to be placed closer together on adjacent frequencies, and in DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) systems to enable several stations to be broadcast on a single frequency through compression and multiplexing technologies (Ala-Fossi, Lax et al. 2008). The major expansion, though, came with the contemporaneous start of internet broadcasting. While over-the-air broadcasting, even using digital codecs, had always limited the number of transmissions that could be received in one geographical area, the wired network-based systems of online radio allowed access to thousands more streams of audio. Initially these were accessed through a desktop computer over a telephone wire or cable feed, but the ability of mobile devices to access broadband data has increased both access and mobility for listeners.

It is actually hard to see these changes in distribution as separate from the shifts in the technology listeners have used to access radio programming. Though the distribution technology is important in enabling expansion or innovation in broadcasting practice, cultural aspiration and use are far more determining. As I have shown elsewhere, for instance, the physical and cultural mobility of young people and the development of a post-war commuter culture in large US cities were more important than the availability of car or transistor pocket radios in creating the idea of listening on the move (Wall and Webber 2011). Likewise, the lag between the availability of FM and over-the-air digital distribution technologies and the establishment of sizable institutional and listener support for the opportunities for wider programming both suggest that the machines we use to listen to radio have been more influential on the number of stations than innovations in distribution.

In the same way, the existence of the internet cannot in itself explain the remarkable expansion in ways to listen to radio. Internet radio has piggybacked on the purchase of computers for their email and web search functions, and utilises the adoption of broadband lines, offsetting the relatively high cost of a desktop computer as a radio receiver at a time when lower-priced digital radios struggled to find a sizable market. In this context, it is no surprise that the first services were from existing over-the-air stations creating online simulcasts. US college stations WXYC and WREK both make claims to being the first over-the-air station online in 1994 (WREK dkn; WXYC dnk), and the UK Virgin Radio station claims to be the first full simulcast broadcaster in Europe in 1996 (Bowie 2008). Internet-only stations did quickly emerge, however, and as I indicated in the introduction, used very different models from over-the-air radio to create their music programming. Specialist music radio was particularly prominent, either as part of multi-channel portal systems like AOL’s, or enthusiast-curated like Live365’s.

At the same time, public service broadcasters, like the BBC, also invested heavily in ways of providing time-shifted listening through ‘listen again’ or ‘podcast’ services on the internet. The rhetoric of the first suggested listeners could re-listen to a programme they had already enjoyed but, increasingly, listeners would use the system as their main way of enjoying radio. With the BBC in the vanguard, developing its iPlayer from 2005 to a major launch in 2008 (BBC 2008), most significant broadcasters now provide this form of access. The podcast model was an even greater move away from traditional listener models. Combining the idea of timeshifting derived from video recorders with the mobility of portable mp3 players like the iPod, users set up automated scheduled downloads of a programme and then play it when and where they want.

However, the internet and digital broadcast systems have allowed niche radio formats, and even some imaginative alternatives, to exist in the margins of commercial radio. Two instances provide informative examples. In the UK, the XFM and Jazz FM commercial stations have established themselves as exemplars of specialist music provision within an increasingly competitive commercial sector. At one level they can be seen as a perfect example of the Hotelling principle, that commercial enterprises will tend to supply to the centre of the market until the point is reached that there is a benefit in providing niche goods or services (Hotelling 1929). However, they are both interesting examples of British attempts to move away from the dominant ‘certainties’ of US format radio. Both stations owe their origins to regulatory initiatives consolidated in the 1990 Broadcast Act, which aimed to extend the diversity of music played on British commercial radio (Wall 2000, 186-192). They also both provide exemplars of the twists of regulation, ownership and programming which have characterised British commercial radio since that date. XFM has remained a broadly ‘alternative rock’ station (Ofcom 2008), while JazzFM has dabbled in jazz eclecticism, jazz/R&B hybridity, smooth jazz formatting, and most recently jazz and soul as lifestyle music (FM 2011a).

XFM’s current incarnation carries many of the characteristics of British commercial radio. Their core output originates from a London-based FM licence which allows them to broadcast to the capital, and much of the output is also broadcast in Manchester on a second local licence which includes locally-originated, peak-time shows. In addition, the London programming is available on the DAB over-the-air radio system in most of the UK, through satellite and cable television, and as an online stream. It is owned by Global Radio, at the time of writing the largest UK radio group, who also hold a range of UK local licences around traditional US-style formats like AOR, Classical, Contemporary Hits, Gold, Talk, and Urban. So, in many ways XFM is Global’s niche alternative rock station. However, along with a second brand which plays Urban music, Choice FM, XFM’s origins as an independent broadcaster and its championship of specialist music is an important part of the station’s image and ‘total station sound’. It uses traditional strip programming around breakfast/midday/drive-time shows, with more mainstream programming in the day and more specialist shows in the evening (XFM 2011a). However, it does tend to employ presenters who are well regarded by the music’s fan base, and there are examples of innovation in programming, including music documentary series.

Jazz FM has had a more complex history but, perhaps, a more unusual contemporary existence. The station’s origins owe an equal debt to a music fan campaign and the new ‘incremental’ policy of the radio broadcaster to increase the range of musical output on commercial stations. Early incarnations of the station were driven by a strong commitment to a broad jazz music policy, but it ignored many of the conventions of broadcast formats and it struggled for financial viability. It went through numerous owners and a set of radical changes of name and music policy, until its final owners GMG took over in 2002, taking the station increasingly towards a US-style Smooth Jazz and then AOR format, and a rebrand to Smooth FM. Today the Jazz FM brand is actually licensed from GMG by its earlier management team. Unsurprisingly, then, the station has now returned to many of the programming features that characterised it in the early 2000s: a mix of classic and contemporary jazz heavy on vocalists, combined with soul and pop jazz in the day and specialist shows for a variety of sub-genres of jazz and soul in the evenings and weekends (Jazz FM 2011b). Although the station is often criticised for not playing enough jazz, and for playing too much smooth jazz, the station does not conform to the conventions or music playlists of the typical smooth jazz format (see Barber 2010 for a discussion of the Smooth Jazz format and its origins). Surprisingly, the station does not broadcast on FM, but on DAB, digital TV and the internet. In addition, the station is developing an interesting approach to radio in uncertain times by offering itself as a specialist music brand, by making strong use of its internet site, a record label and live promotions unit, and a strong emphasis on music as lifestyle consumption.

Ala-Fossi, M., S. Lax, et al. (2008) “The Future of Radio is Still Digital—But Which One? Expert Perspectives and Future Scenarios for Radio Media in 2015.” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 15(1): 4-25
Barber, S. (2010) “Smooth Jazz.” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 8(1): 51-70
Barnard, S. (1989) On the radio: music radio in Britain.
BBC. (2008). “Next generation BBC iPlayer launches.” from http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/06_june/25/iplayer.shtml.
Bowie, A. (2008). “A Brief History of Virgin Radio.” from http://onegoldensquare.com/2008/09/a-brief-history-of-virgin-radio-by-adam-bowie/.
Faulkner, T. (1993). FM: Frequency Modulation or Fallen Man. Radiotext(e). N. Strauss. New York, Semiotext(e).
FM, J. (2011a) Jazz FM playlist
FM, J. (2011b). “Jazz FM website.” from http://www.jazzfm.com/.
Hotelling, H. (1929) Stability in Competition.
Ofcom (2008) XFM Commercial Radio Station Format
Rothenbuhler, E. and T. McCourt (2002). Radio redefines itself, 1947-1962. Radio reader: essays in the cultural history of radio. M. Hilmes and J. Loviglio. New York, Routledge.
Sanjek, R. and D. Sanjek (1996) American popular music business in the 20th century.
Wall, T. (2000) “Policy, pop and the public: the discourse of regulation in British commercial radio.” Journal of Radio Studies
Wall, T. and N. Webber (2011). The transistor radio. Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound Studies. S. Gopinath and J. Stanyek. New York, Oxford University Press.
WREK. (dkn). “History.” from http://www.wrek.org/about/history/.
WXYC. (dnk). “History.” from http://wxyc.org/about/history.
XFM. (2011a). “XFM schedue.” from http://www.xfm.co.uk/onair/schedule/friday.

Both these versions of public good have been central to debates about radio and music since records and radio were first employed, and they became focused again as new technology started to shift the balance of power between musicians, record companies, radio stations and music fans in the twenty-first century. For instance, the idea that radio was a public good and that unrestricted over-the-air broadcasting would not deliver an ideal radio system was central to the review of radio in the UK conducted by the nation’s communications regulator, Ofcom (OfCom 2004). Likewise, the review is linked directly to the public good when it seeks to ‘develop an up-to-date set of public purposes for radio performances’ (49). In another example, policy makers in the UK’s public broadcaster, the BBC, used the idea of the public good to argue for the corporation’s continued existence and to explain the way the BBC’s radio, television and online output was organised.

Most interestingly, in both the Ofcom and the BBC cases, the arguments for treating radio as a/the public good were linked to arguments for the programming of more specialist music. For instance, in the last major consultation on radio, Ofcom’s 2004 document, says:

Radio has many of the characteristics of a public good … (and) there could still be an inefficient outcome if the preferences of listeners and those of advertisers were not perfectly aligned and hence the range of programmes offered would be too limited. In this case, there might be a justification for intervening to ensure that a sufficient range of programmes is supplied (47).

Further, it makes the case for radio providing a diversity of specialist music:

The nature of radio arguably makes it better at providing all sorts of music, from classical to folk, from jazz to rock, and at providing opportunities for new talent and for live performances (49).

Likewise, the UK government’s 2006 discussion paper on the future of the BBC identified the provision of “new and specialist music” as one of the ways in which the popular music station Radio 1 should distinguish itself from commercial music radio (DCMS 2006). The station’s ‘service remit’ is distinguished by ‘a mix of daytime programmes with wide appeal and specialist shows in the evening which operate at the forefront of new music’ aimed at 15-29 year olds, and claims ‘at least 40% of the schedule is devoted to specialist music or speech-based programmes’ (BBC 2007). There are similar service remits for the other national music radio stations 1xtra, 2, 3 and 6Music.

The BBC has certainly used the opportunities of new digital channels as a way of extending their provision of specialist music. In a study of the BBC’s output, I identified its digital-only 6Music and 1Xtra stations as offering significant opportunities for specialist music (Wall and Dubber 2009). This is the result of the BBC’s construction of its radio stations through documents which define their service and meet the BBC’s ‘contribution to public value’. So, for instance, 6Music has a remit to ‘reflect the evolution of popular music through extensive use of the BBC archive’ and to ‘reflect the breadth of work produced by iconic artists’ at the same time that it:

focus[es] on new music, particularly that made by UK artists, prioritising less familiar acts who may become enduring icons in the future but who do not enjoy commercial support, thus demonstrating its independence from commercial interests (Trust 2011b).

1Xtra’s service licence defines the station output as ‘contemporary black music aimed at a young audience, concentrating on new black music and new artists, particularly British ones’, while its public value is expressed in terms of its role as ‘a platform for a range of music rarely heard elsewhere’, to ‘support the UK black music industry’ and ‘live performances and club nights’, aiming to ‘identify and support new musical talent – particularly from the UK’ (Trust 2011a).

The idea of the public good has also been strong in the history of US radio, although its significance tends to be obscured by the domination of the commercial sector and network organisation. In early debates about radio, it was strongly related to the idea of cultural uplift and struggles over content in the 1920s (Doerksen 2005), and of course the US public broadcast service is rooted in such ideas (Mitchell 2005). There is an equally important tradition in US radio which bridges the public and community sectors in the diverse range of college radio stations, which since the 1960s have been an important part of specialist music broadcasting in North America. I have previously looked at the sector myself, identifying the importance of New York’s WFUV , based at Fordham University in establishing the Album Adult Alternative format around folk, world music and Americana, and Boston College’s WZBC, which sustains the tradition of freeform music broadcasting and its support to the avant-garde edges of rock music (Wall 2007). Although only accounting for just over 10% of US radio stations (Federal Communications Commission 1999), college-based broadcasters have played a significant part in introducing innovative programming and extending the forms of music available to the listener. This is particularly the case from the mid-1980s, when forms of alternative rock, and particularly British indie rock, were heavily supported by, and became strongly associated with, college broadcasting (Rubin 2011).

To a large extent, though, these examples are a continuation of approaches to specialist music and broadcasting established in the mid- to late-1980s and, as I indicated in the introduction, they now exist in a very different ecology of broadcasting. There are two main dimensions to these changes: firstly, the number of available channels for broadcasting has increased and with this enlargement the relationship between radio and recorded music has altered significantly. Secondly, and more recently, music radio has been challenged by those music radio-like services I took as the starting point for this discussion. In the next two sections I turn to these changes to examine how they have related to this senses of music as a public good and for the public good.

BBC Statements of programming policy 2007/8
BBC (2007) Radio 1 Service Licence. BBC
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Commission, F. C. (1999). “Broadcast Station Totals, 1990 – 1999 “, 2007.
DCMS (2006) A public service for all: the BBC in the digital age. D. f. C. M. a. Sport
Doerksen, C. J. (2005) American Babel: rogue radio broadcasters of the jazz age.
Mitchell, J. W. (2005) Listener supported : the culture and history of public radio.
Mosco, V. (1996) The political economy of communication : rethinking and renewal.
OfCom (2004) Radio — Preparing for the future (phase 1 developing a new framework).
Rawls, J. and E. Kelly (2001) Justice as fairness : a restatement.
Rubin, N. (2011) “U.S. College Radio, the ‘New British Invasion,’ and Media Alterity.” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 9(2)
Samuelson , P. A. (1954) “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure.” Review of Economics and Statistics 36(4): 387–389
Trust, B. (2011a) 1Xtra service licence
Trust, B. (2011b) 6 Music service licence
Wall, T. (2007) “Finding an alternative: Music programming in US college radio.” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 5(1): 35-54
Wall, T. and A. Dubber (2009) “Specialist music, public service and the BBC in the internet age ” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 7(1): 27-48

When Last.fm was founded in 2002, as an online radio-like service and music fan website, its very name set it up in contest with over-the-air radio. It rhetorically signalled its claim to be the ultimate radio station, both as the end point of music radio’s evolution, and as the only radio station listeners would need. The .fm suffix suggested music radio’s origins in over-the-air radio and a future on the internet. Of course music radio stations have continued to broadcast on FM frequencies, and more over-the-air stations have joined them on the digital systems introduced in most countries. Over-the-air services continue to capture over 85% of radio listening hours in a country like the UK. However, as the young entrepreneurs who established Last.fm understood very clearly, the global reach and interactive nature of the internet could enable a different relationship between listener and music than the one on which the century-old broadcast model was based.

When I first researched internet music radio between 2000 and 2003, I had neglected the fledgling music service, and instead focused my analysis on Live365.com ‘crowd-sourced’ radio and AOL’s portal radio service, then called AOL Radio@Network. Nevertheless, I interpreted the development and dominance of these ‘networks’ as evidence of an emerging model within online-only radio services (Wall 2004). On the basis of a comparison of internet radio’s lower fixed and higher variable costs relative to over-the-air radio, I revealed a number of important developments: more new entrants in ‘broadcasting’; a move to niche, streamed programming, often bundled and heavily branded; greater emphasis on automation and ‘amateur programming’ (p. 37-39). I also suggested that the technology enabled even more opportunities around bespoke radio services, built upon mining data about listeners, and an integration of streamed sound with what we would now call social media content (p. 39-40).

While both Live365 and AOL services continue today in modified form, the most notable innovations have been in the development of the radio-like music services, of which Last.fm has been the most successful. However, this emphasis on innovation can disguise how important over-the-air radio remains. Statistics for the UK, to take one example, are instructive here. Throughout 2011 radio listening continued to grow, both in terms of reach and listening hours. Although there have been significant increases in listening through digital platforms like DAB, digital television, computers and mobile devices, FM and AM listening still accounts for over 60% of radio consumption. And notably, 85% of consumption is of over-the-air services (both analogue and digital) (RAJAR 2011).

My purpose in the following posts, then, is to unpick some of the continuities and innovations that have characterised music radio over the last decade. In particular, I am interested in exploring how specialist music provision has prospered since 2002. The health of specialist music is one index of diversity in music programming, which is in itself an aspect of radio’s claim to contribute to the public good. To perform this exploration, I will cover three broad areas. Initially I want to develop the argument that specialist music programming is an important function of radio in promoting the public good. Here I examine the contributions of the public, commercial, unlicensed and community sectors over the last ten years, as well as the way that changing regulation has helped or hindered diversity. Secondly, I examine how the expansion of channels for audio distribution has extended the wide range of music radio available, and what implications this has for the future of musical diversity. Finally, I explore the relationship between music services and traditional music radio in some more detail, examining what impact activities like music recommendation and personalisation have had on the tradition of the specialist DJ and the promotion of musical diversity. It is worth noting that I have drawn my examples and case studies almost exclusively from UK and US radio. This will, by necessity, place a qualification on the usefulness of my analysis at a more general level. While the global reach of internet radio has offered an alternative, radio remains structured primarily at the level of the nation state, and each country has developed distinct systems. Nevertheless, the historic monopoly the BBC and its public service model in the UK, and the dominance of commercial network radio in the US, make these national systems excellent poles of broadcasting for a comparative analysis.

RAJAR (2011) RAJAR data release Quarter 1 2011
Wall, T. (2004) “The political economy of internet music radio.” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 2(1): 27-44

Paul Dunmall – Saxes
Keith Tippet – Piano
Paul Rogers – Bass
Tony Levin – Drums
WITH 11-piece jazz group The Georgian Ensemble

Brass Wind Bells 7:48
Thoughts to Geoff 7:44
Dedicated to Mingus/Tortworth Oak 19:47
A Loose Kite 8:05
Slowly the Sunrise 6:50
Cider Dance 11:42
The Irish Girl’s Tear 4:11
Septober Energy 7:32

Mujician – Spacetime Cuniform 162 2002

Paul Dunmall (soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone);
Keith Tippett (piano);
Paul Rogers (double bass);
Tony Levin (drums).

1 Spacetime, Part 1
2 Spacetime, Part 2
3 Spacetime, Part 3
4 Spacetime, Part 4
5 Spacetime, Part 5
6 Spacetime, Part 6
7 Spacetime, Part 7
8 Exquisitely Woven Spiritual Communication, Part 1
9 Exquisitely Woven Spiritual Communication, Part 2
10 Exquisitely Woven Spiritual Communication, Part 3
11 Exquisitely Woven Spiritual Communication, Part 4
12 Exquisitely Woven Spiritual Communication, Part 5
13 Exquisitely Woven Spiritual Communication, Part 6
14 Exquisitely Woven Spiritual Communication, Part 7
15 Exquisitely Woven Spiritual Communication, Part 8

Victoria Rooms, Bristol, England (02/24/2001).

Paul Dunmall Octet The Great Divide 2001 Label Cuneiform Records √

Paul Dunmall Tenor Saxophone
Evan Parker Saxophone
Elton Dean Alto Saxophone
Oren Marshall Tuba
Simon Picard Tenor Saxophone
Lee Goodall Alto Saxophone
Keith Tippett Piano
Paul Rogers Bass
Tony Levin Drums
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
A Passage Though the Great Divide

Paul Dunmall/Philip Gibbs/Paul Rogers/Tony Levin Simple Skeletons 2001 DUNS Limited edition 014 x

Paul Dunmall, soprano and tenor saxophone;
Philip Gibbs, guitars;
Paul Rogers, bass;
Tony Levin, drums.

Simple Skeletons (05.12)
Logers Rocked Out (35.20)
Salt Licks (17.12)

Recorded on 7 May 2001 in the Victoria Rooms, Bristol.

Philippe Aerts Quartet Back To the Old World 2002 Igloo IGL162 √

Philippe Aerts bass
Bert Joris trumpet
John Ruocco sax tenor, clarinet
Tony Levin drums

1 Keep hope alive 07:31
2 Circle step 06:22
3 Forward 05:37
4 Riff-raff 09:04
5 Landsmark 04:09
6 Mr.Jones 06:11
7 Giant steps 07:31
8 Upper west side 05:47
9 For heaven’s sake 04:58

Gerd Dudek ‘Smatter 2002 PSI Records x

Gerd Dudek (saxophone);
John Parricelli (electric guitar);
Chris Laurence (acoustic bass);
Tony Levin (drums).

Recorded in 1998.

Paul Dunmall Octet Bridging the Great Divide Live 2002 CLEAN FEED CF017CD √

Paul Dunmall – Tenor Saxophone, Bagpipes;
Paul Rutherford – Trombone;
Malcom Griffiths – Trombone;
Gethin Liddington – Trumpet;
Simon Picard – Tenor Saxophone;
Keith Tippett – Piano;
Paul Rogers – Bass;
Tony Levin – Drums.

The Great Divide
Wind

Recreates the 2000 five-part movement recording of Great Divide (Cuneiform) live at the 2002 “Jazz em Agusto” festival in Lisbon.

JUCE – Rich Core 2004 JUCE Records √

Pete Saberton (piano)
Fred T Baker (bass)
Tony Levin (drums)

1. You Do Something To Me – Cole Porter
2. Rich Core – Pete Saberton
3. Afternoon In Paris – John Lewis
4. Beautiful Feeling – Fred T . Baker
5. In Your Own Sweet Way – Dave Brubeck
6. Change Partners – Irving Berlin
7. Inner Urge – Joe Henderson
8. Processional – Fred T. Baker

Ali Haurand and Friends Ballads 2005 Konnex KCD 5145 x

Charlie Mariano
Gerd Dudek
Jiri Stivin
Alan Skidmore
Rob van den Broeck
Daniel Humair
Tony Levin

Deep Joy Trio Deep Joy Trio 2005 DUNS 041 x

Paul Rogers – 7-String Doublebass
Paul Dunmall – Bagpipes And Sax
Tony Levin – Drums

Disc A: 1. Don’t look down;
2. One more ledge to overcome;
3. Music for well being;
4. T.L.;
5. What have you seen yourself?
Disc B: 1. We care about this;
2. For you, us and them
Disc C: 1. The big giving;
2. Deep joy;
3. The eyes have it
Disc D: 1. The juggler;
2. One lifetime’s work;
3. Music for the Buddha;
4. How precious it is;
5. Courage friends courage

Mujician There’s No Going Back Now 2006 (Cuneiform) √

Paul Dunmall – Saxes
Keith Tippet – Piano
Paul Rogers – Bass
Tony Levin – Drums

There’s No Going Back Now

Recorded at Victoria Rooms, Bristol, England (06/12/2005).

European Jazz Ensemble 30th anniversary 2006 x

Charlie Mariano altosax
Stan Sulzmann saxophone
Alan Skidmore saxophone
Gerd Dudek saxophones
Jiri Stivin flutes & sax
Pino Minafra trumpet
Manfred Schoof trumpet & flugelhorn
Eric Vloeimans trumpet
Matthias Schriefl trumpet
Conny Bauer trombone
Rob van den Broeck piano
Joachim Kühn piano
Ali Haurand ld. & bass
Sébastien Boisseau bass
Daniel Humair drums
Tony Levin drums

Paul Dunmall, Miles Levin, Tony Levin The Golden Lake 2007 DUNS DLE055 x

Miles Levin – Drums
Paul Dunmall – Saxes
Tony Levin – Drums

As most Ellington fans and scholars will be well aware, on the 4th December 1927, Ellington’s band, the Washingtonians, opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City (Haskins 1985, 47). They were soon featured in the broadcasts of the local Manhattan-based radio station, WHN. The band could actually be heard on the station for some years leading up to their Cotton Club debut: from 1924 at the Hollywood Club, and again in January 1927 at the same location, by then renamed the Kentucky Club (Collier 1987, 55 & 96; Lawrence 2001, 81 & 409). Collier suggests that these broadcasts had been instigated by a young fan working for the radio station, although it is more commonly believed that the initiative belonged to Ellington’s manager, Irvin Mills. Collier’s story works well as mythology because that fan is identified as Ted Hushing, who became perhaps America’s best known ‘sportscaster’ from the late 1920s, while the Mills angle misses the point that the Washingtonians had broadcast before he took over the reigns of their careers. Lawrence states (but without a cited source) that the band played on Mondays between 11.30 and midnight, and on Wednesday and Friday evenings between 7.00 and 7.30 (Lawrence 2001, 113), while Collier is less precise, although he concedes that accuracy is difficult when relying on anecdotes from contemporary listeners.

As biographers and jazz writers, the authors of such accounts of Ellington’s life and music naturally focus more on the developing story and recording details. However, a more complex and more interesting sense of the social world in which Ellington operated emerges if we seek to understand both the nightclub and the radio station broadcasts in greater detail. In fact, by the time The Washingtonians were broadcasting from the Hollywood/Kentucky club, their shows were part of WHN’s extensive remote broadcast initiative, which embraced perhaps thirty theatres on Broadway and a good number of clubs in Harlem, including the three biggest: Connie’s Inn, Small’s Paradise and the Cotton Club (Doerksen 2005, 32). The Washingtonians were broadcasting mainly because of where they were, rather than who they were. A similar argument, by the way, could be made for their records. Ellington’s Vocalion releases were swiftly assigned first to the Kentucky Club Orchestra, and then to the Cotton Club Orchestra within a few days of his first appearance there. Their associations with key clubs was clearly very important in signalling who they were.

The evidence also suggests that the first Ellington broadcasts were made live from the radio studios in the mid-evening, while the later ones took the form of ‘radio remotes’ from the Cotton Club at around midnight, the time at which we know that the Ellington Orchestra was featured. Owned by a Brooklyn newspaper entrepreneur, but programmed by the publicist for the down-market Loew vaudeville theatre group, Nils Thor Doerksen, WHN developed a form of ‘cabaret broadcasting’, promoting first Loew acts and then those of other entertainment businesses through performances based in the studio, and subsequently relaying their performances live from the venue itself (Granlund 1957). In addition, WHN time-shared their frequency with two, and subsequently three, other stations up until 1934 (Jaker, Sulek et al. 1998, 124). In 1926, the station was broadcasting from 12.30 pm until midnight, and its programme schedule featured two ‘Dance Orchestra’ programmes: one at 7.00 pm and one at 11.30 pm (Jaker, Sulek et al. 1998, 84). However, its published schedule for late 1929 reveals that, by that date, one of the other time-share stations broadcast on the frequency from 9:30 pm to midnight (New York Times 1929). It is very likely, then, that the loss of the night-time broadcast slot meant that the Cotton Club remotes were no longer possible, and that this was the reason that, by February 1929, the Ellington band could be heard on WABC.

While it might have only been possible to hear Ellington’s WHN Cotton Club remotes for about a year, it is still significant that they started on that station. WHN features prominently in early radio histories, mainly for two controversies: one around its on-air style; and a second, but connected, dispute around its compliance with patents. Both highlight the adverse reactions to the station’s forceful commercial approach to the then new medium. We should therefore see the station, and the Ellington Orchestra’s musical broadcasts, as being at the centre of a series of connected struggles over the future of radio, struggles that were themselves indicative of competing cultural discourses of value in American society. In fact, it is not too fanciful to suggest that Ellington’s cultural practices at this time can be read as those of a bricoleur, manipulating visual and aural signs to construct a persona which he hoped could (but never would) resolve the tensions between competing black and white cultural values. The result was experienced by audiences through the mediation of a set of new technological forms of communication – records, radio and film – that would come to define what it was to be a modern American.

Perhaps what I mean by this will become clearer if I provide some background to radio, to its technological and economic base, and to the debates that raged around its implementation as a broadcast medium. In the early part of the twentieth century, it was not clear what purposes the relatively new wired and wireless technologies would be used for, and while by the 1920s wireless had been established as the basis of broadcast radio, and wired technology as the basis for point-to-point telephony, the owners of the patents in these areas were keen to ensure they controlled and exploited them for profit. The point at which Ellington’s band were broadcasting, then, was a transitional period, where radio broadcasts were dominated by small independent stations but the right to exploit the potential of these broadcasts was dominated by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). This corporation was an alliance of patent-holding companies, who pooled their technology with the radio assets of the US military to determine the post-war development of domestic radio and telephony. For land-based radio, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) was the most powerful, as they held the right to license the transmitter technology and approve the commercial exploitation of both wired and wireless broadcasting. In addition, the broadcast stations came under the regulatory control of the Department of Commerce, and after 1927 the Federal Radio Commission, with the former emphasising content and the latter frequency allocations.

WHN was, then, part of a much more diverse and unsettled radio system than that which would be apparent in the network systems of a decade later. At the time Ellington’s band first broadcast, only 7% of stations were profit-maximising commercial broadcasters like WHN (Dimmick 1986), and radio content was produced by broadcasters run by universities, religious groups, political parties, wireless manufacturers, and newspapers (Barnouw 1966, 4). Further, WHN could not broadcast when and to whom it wanted. It was allocated a time-shared frequency with another station based at a New Jersey Amusement Park (WPAP), with the Calvary Baptist Church (WQAO) and, after frequency re-allocations in 1928, with a station run by an electronics magazine publisher (WRNY) (Jaker, Sulek et al. 1998, 84).

The station was far from typical of the time. WHN’s experiments with remote broadcasting were a novel use of both wired point-to-point technology (to relay the performance to the transmitter) and wireless broadcast technology (to get the performance to listeners). Further, compared with even its time-share stations, WHN stood out for its emphasis on using broadcasts as a basis for direct revenue generation, its collaboration with New York clubs and cabarets, and its exuberant presentation style, which many saw as crass or even indecent.

It was these characteristics which defined the way in which radio listeners would interpret the Ellington band’s performances. While other stations followed WHN in establishing remote broadcasts of music, these tended to relay performances from midtown upmarket venues like the Waldorf Astoria, Biltmore, Lafayette Hotel, and Hotel Roosevelt, and when dance music was featured it would be from bands led by the likes of Paul Whiteman, Ben Bemie, Meyer Davis or Paul Specht. The Ellington band’s WHN broadcasts were in the company of other black entertainers like Ethel Waters, Clarence Williams and Eva Taylor, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, Florence Mills, LeRoy Smith, Charlie Johnson, Wilbur Sweatman, Leona Williams, and Fletcher Henderson’s Club Alabam’ Orchestra featuring Louis Armstrong (Doerksen 1999, 88). While other stations, in other cities, also broadcast such ‘hot’ jazz bands, it was far from a common activity (Barlow 1995).