An interesting five-year experiment allowing radio listeners to (slightly) program their favorite stations ended over the weekend.
The online service, called Jelli, allowed listeners to nominate and vote for/against songs on a radio station’s playlist. Though a far cry from a 2000 Flushes-style listener takeover of a radio station, Jelli did provide a unique means of melding broadcasting, smartphones, and social media—something the radio industry itself has only recently begun serious investment in. Continue reading “Melted Jelli”
Tag: 2000 flushes
Crowdsourcing Community Radio
Sometimes futurists don’t look far enough into the past before proposing their next big idea.
Case in point: Eliot Van Buskirk seems pretty excited about the pending expansion of the LPFM radio service, and he suggests that stations look into crowdsourcing their programming: “using music apps to control low-powered radio stations within small urban (or suburban, or even rural) areas” seems like a great way to program a station on the cheap, and it would most likely sound like nothing else on the dial.
Initial reaction to the idea is mixed. But it’s not necessarily new: pirate radio’s already been there and done that, more than a decade ago. Continue reading “Crowdsourcing Community Radio”
Links: Separating Transmitter from Studio
The act of broadcasting without a license is a very public thing; it is going on the air that makes it a crime, not what a pirate station does once it’s on. Because of this, a delicate game of balance has to be played by pirate radio station operators. As a pirate garners more notice from a community, the risk of having the powers-that-be notice also rises. But if nobody knows about the station, then what good can it do?
To try and prevent (or at least partially blunt) the eventual enforcement action, pirates have experimented with unique ways of “protecting” their studios. After all, transmitters are replaceable; dedicated people are not.
The easiest way to protect a studio is to separate it physically from the transmitter. Radio authorities find pirates by the signals they produce, and the place where those signals are coming from is the first place they’ll visit. If that place is not the studio, it forces enforcement agents to at least take one extra step to catch a pirate. Continue reading “Links: Separating Transmitter from Studio”
Global Microradio
From its roots some seven years ago as a completely homebrew station cobbled together from spare parts and junk, 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio graced the Twin Cities airwaves with its own brand of dissent.
It dropped off the dial pretty quickly, though, making sporadic reappearances over the past near-decade.
Earlier this month, 2000 Flushes came back with a vengeance. Continue reading “Global Microradio”