Years ago, I was bemoaning the difficulties of starting an Internet radio station: the royalty fees for broadcasting music online make it a difficult proposition for all but the most well-funded media organizations. My father, an old-school engineer, came up with an ingenious solution: use the Internet to distribute an online pirate radio station, broadcast over the airwaves by a distributed network of computers that would stream the radio through to low-powered radio transmitters. According to my Dad, the intricacies of the FCC laws concerning low-power broadcasting would shield me from any Pump Up The Volume-esque raids of my apartment.
Photo by Mediageek on Flickr.
Even though it was an ingeniously clever solution, I never acted upon it. The logistics seemed too difficult, and the onset of podcasting and mp3 blogs soon made the idea of pirate radio stations seem antiquated. Yet despite these new tools, pirate radio persists, one of the earliest examples of true broadcasting for the people, a grass-roots technology that is accessible to anyone with a low-powered transmitter and a few materials from Radio Shack.
This post over at Media Geek got me thinking about Pirate Radio once again. My home town of Santa Cruz is home to one of the most persistent pirate radio stations in the country, Free Radio Santa Cruz, which has broadcast out of dorm rooms and co-ops for decades, giving the town’s diverse (and admittedly eccentric) population a platform FCC-approved stations would never offer. While I never worked for Free Radio Santa Cruz, I was a long-time admirer, and jumped at an opportunity for my band to play in the station’s interim studio, located in the basement of a giant three-story Victorian house downtown. Though our band played acoustic, the station was busted by the FCC mere hours later--far from the first, or the last, time this happened. (Free Radio Santa Cruz and the FCC have been engaged in a long-running cat-and-mouse game.)
So what will you hear on Pirate Radio in 2010? A lot of stuff you won’t hear anywhere else. The voices of people who have found themselves on the ass-end of the digital divide. Activist shows such as Democracy Now, which are not broadcast in many media markets due to their strong progressive slant. Experimental and avant-garde music too jarring for even the tastes of college radio DJ’s. And, to be fair, a lot of hopelessly unprofessional broadcasters, with some rather eccentric things to say. Which is, of course, the key to the form’s charm.
Despite the plethora of media outlets enabled by the Internet--podcasts, streaming video, Internet radio, and aggregation services like the Hype Machine--there are plenty of Pirate Radio stations around the country. Media Geek points to the efforts of Jose Fritz of Arcane Radio Trivia to document the various stations across the country, recently surveying the scene in the Seattle area.
Perhaps the most legendary of the pirate radio stations is Berkeley’s Free Radio Berkeley, which has remained on the air for decades. The station was embroiled in a long-running legal fight with the FCC in the ‘90s, and was ultimately acquitted of all charges, a result seen as a major win for microbroadcasting at the time, though the benefits remained confined to the particulars of the case.
How To Make a Radio Station from Free Radio on Vimeo.
So why start a Pirate Radio station in this era, considering the various other online broadcast technologies available to us? After all, the fines and sentences can be steep--while it’s more likely the FCC will just try to shut you down with fines, some practitioners have faced criminal sentencing. Despite the downsides, the form has some benefits. Most notably, it bridges the digital divide--starting a Pirate Radio station is improbably easy and cheap, and though radio is a deprecated technology, people of almost all economic means have access to it.
In the end, I didn’t have the guts--or scofflaw attitude--necessary to realize my Dad’s clever idea. But Pirate Radio remains a democratic institution in a country where the broadcast channels are too often lobbied away from the people. And while I’m not endorsing willfully flouting the law, Pirate Radio remains a venerable tradition woven into the fabric of America’s media history. Despite its questionable legality, the Pirate form has served an important role for the communities it has served over the years.
Comments
Paul M. Davis wrote on 09.02.10, 11:33am:
Hi Josh, thanks for this thoughtful comment. Lots to think about here. I would say that my sense of the differentiations between pirate and college radio here are likely colored the distinctions I observed in my own home town of Santa Cruz. To (admittedly) generalize, the college station seemed to focus more on serving the student population than the pirate station, which endeavored to serve the entire population. There was certainly overlap, but my impression was that they served (and gave voice to) two discrete constituencies. Also, while Democracy Now is indeed broadcast over many licensed stations, in Santa Cruz it is actually broadcast on the pirate radio station.
I love your statement that pirate broadcasting is a completely reasonable reaction to a FCC licensing system that has grown out of control. And the commonalities that you draw between pirate radio and college radio are well taken--I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find a fair amount of overlap between the college radio and pirate radio staffs in many towns. They do share much more than they differ.
Thanks for this fine article. I agree wholeheartedly with the general sentiment, and in particular about the importance of this popularly accessible, easily developed, non-digital wireless technology.
As a longtime community/college radio broadcaster, I will also go out on a limb and say that generally speaking college and good pirate radio are not so far apart, and that the differentiations you're setting up don't quite hold.
For example -- Democracy Now! is not a pirate radio phenomenon. It's all over the licensed broadcast spectrum, all over the world, on more than 800 radio and TV stations, and only some of them, but not by any means all, happen to pirate.
Regarding cultural risk-taking, I will also assert that pirate radio in general is not so different from community/college-radio broadcasts.
It depends on how much latitude the college radio-station volunteers have in determining their own broadcast practices, and in developing a programmatic focus station-wide on cultural innovation.
But, generally speaking, college and small independent radio -- such as KALX, KUSF, KFJC or WFMU -- are at the pinnacle of performance for community-driven, underground radio that's still "legit" in that they actually have broadcast licenses. They routinely take all the creative risks your article attributes to pirate radio, and also aspire (but don't always achieve) a degree more composure, clarity and focus in their on-air manner.
It's also worth noting that some college/community radio stations -- for example, WXPN or KCRW -- are not at all close to the ground, they're more aspirational as 'alt-NPR' stations, and as such skim the surface of the truly underground/emerging music community to act as an "intake" system for music and culture that slot easily into more mainstream channels.
Thus the importance of truly underground radio, be it college, community or "pirate" (i.e. unlicensed), to provide the real alternatives to such mainstream-trending institutions.
The most important issue is in fact that of "latitude" -- how much freedom does the broadcaster have? And how responsibly do they use that freedom?
Both "Freedom" and "Responsibility" are loaded words, so I'll leave that to your interpretation.
But the rubber meets the road when the broadcaster has to deal with issues of "freedom" and "responsibility" in real time.
It is when that freedom is taken away that pirate radio's true moment of glory arrives.
While pirate radio can definitely match independent college/community radio in terms of creative adventurousness and even "professionalism" behind the mic -- I feel, in my own experience, that the real significance of pirate radio is the ultimately democratic imperative of simply flipping the bird to the people who control the outlets, and starting one's own.
The ultimate issue is state control of public resources; the FCC regulates (or should, anyway) the broadcast spectrum as a public resource held in trust.
Yet, for reasons we're all aware of, the licensing process, especially for local broadcasting, is oppressive and undemocratic.
Pirate broadcasting is an altogether reasonable reaction to this, and should be as easy as setting up a website. It is, in fact, barring the legal barriers to entry.
Beyond that, a good pirate radio station is generally as good as a good college or community radio station, and generally as bad as a good community or college radio station that's off its game.
It's the freedom and possibility, and what one DOES with that freedom and possibility, regardless of whether one's a pirate or a licensed community broadcaster, that makes the difference.