Does playing someone’s music on the radio hurt them or help them? And is it a “form of piracy”?
I’m a lifelong radio listener. Not like I once was, of course, but I still listen, especially during my morning commute. A couple of weeks ago I happened to hear “The Step and The Walk” by The Duke Spirit on Indie 103.1, and fell instantly in love with it. So, is that a good thing or bad thing for The Duke Spirit?
A logical person would say that it’s a good thing for the artist. Right? I’d never heard of them, and now I have.
Of course, as we’ve seen many times before, the Recording Industry is not made up of logical persons. As a matter of fact, not only do they see no benefit in their artists being played on the radio, they want compensation.
Otherwise, “it’s a form of piracy,” and any argument that playing music is a form of promotion is a “red herring.”
Those aren’t my words, but rather the words of a spokesperson for a recording industry umbrella group with the hilarious name of musicFIRST.
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This special Leap Day podcast features another vintage interview from the Medialoper vaults. Recorded in 1987, this is one of the more unusual Jonathan Richman interviews you will ever hear.
How unusal? Well, I think it’s safe to say that this is probably the first and only time that Jonathan Richman was ever interviewed by a janitor. Of course, these days we call them maintenance engineers, but back in the Reagan era things weren’t quite so politically correct.
The janitor in question is one Big Jim Hunsicker. Big Jim was head custodian in the Speech Arts building at CSU Fresno — home of KFSR FM.
Back in the early 80’s the college radio revolution was just taking off, and running a station that played only your favorite bands was every music geek’s dream come true.
There was just one problem. While we were happy to have complete control over our little slice of the airwaves, we couldn’t always be relied on to wake up at 6 am to turn the transmitter on. Fortunately, Big Jim was watching over us. Whenever the morning DJ would oversleep (which happened A LOT), Big Jim would put down his broom, turn on the transmitter, read the official station sign-on, and cue up Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man (that was the official Big Jim theme song).
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This edition of Medialoper’s occasional podcast features an interview with the legendary blues singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Jay passed away in February of 2000, but I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon with him back in October of 1987.
When I think back to that day, over twenty years ago, a few moments are indelibly etched in my memory. I remember standing in Jay’s kitchen, staring at the coffin propped up beside his refrigerator, and thinking “that’s Screamin’ Jay’s coffin!”.
Jay made quite a name for himself jumping out of that coffin and scaring the hell out of young, middle-class, white kids back in the mid-50’s when the whole Rock-and-Roll thing was just getting started.
As I was to find out, the coffin in Jay’s kitchen wasn’t THE coffin. Instead, it was one of many. For a guy like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, one coffin just won’t do. Jay had nearly a half dozen coffins squirreled away around the country, waiting to be deployed on a moments notice. Which is strange, considering that Jay claimed to have given up using the coffin as part of his act nearly 30 years prior to our meeting.
As it turns out, Screamin’ Jay was always willing to jump out of a coffin provided the price was right.
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A year ago, perhaps the hottest thing on the internets were the podcasts of the Ricky Gervais show. And why not? The weird comic rhythms of Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington had already been honed for a few years on XFM radio, even while Ricky & Stephen were making comedic history with the original BBC The Office.
The overwhelming buzz, however, died down somewhat when the podcasts went from free to paid.
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One of our goals when we started Medialoper was to look at independent efforts to create cool content for the new media audience — and Rocketboom was a prime example of how two people with a a camera, a broadband connection, and a good idea can succeed where so many media giants had failed.
The concept was simple: present interesting news in a cool format. It worked. The daily broadcast reached a huge audience. And then…the bottom fell out. Host Amanda Congdon left the program and the back-and-forth “he said, she said” stories flew across the Internet. It doesn’t really matter if Amanda was pushed or she jumped, not in the long run. After she left, the great Rocketboom experiment continued with a new host.
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