When I began my research into Apple-centric tech podcasting in 2019, I wanted to know what fuels the kind of podcasts that I enjoy consuming (and now, producing). What makes RSS such a desirable and powerful protocol for such independent creators, as opposed to working with bigger studios or broadcasters? Before undertaking my methodological design and subsequent narrative interviewing, however, I needed to understand what came before open podcasting through RSS, which meant an exploration of podcast and radio studies in my literature review. Such scholarly research was also crucial to unpacking my own early motivation and bias as a researcher and fan of the medium that I have been exploring since. Over the last several years of constructing my thesis, I have learnt that I am very political in my thinking and approach to media—perhaps more than other members of the online community and even my own participants.
As I delved into the field of podcast studies, I discovered that much of the early literature sought to distinguish the medium from radio, which is an issue that has long since been settled; more recent work has analysed the varying forms, genres, creative practice of the medium. Still, I am grateful to have spent the time understanding the connection between podcasting and radio, as it encouraged me to explore the history of former and appreciate that all of this has happened before and is happening again. The thing that made open RSS-based podcasting its own distinct medium from radio and a political technology is ironically the same thing that made radio so appealing in its earliest days: experimental formats for niche audiences by amateur enthusiasts, as an alternative to (or in defiance of) more centralised broadcasting and programming. Menduni (2007) offers a complex critique of the state of podcasting, explaining that it is at once a reminder of radio’s past, bringing back the amateur radio broadcasters of the 1910s and 1920s, while also failing to live up to its democratic and communicative potential as major broadcasters, political groups and cultural organisations have adopted it to market and facilitate closer relationships with their customers and followers. Based on the Web, the amateur podcasts and networks that I describe can function with relative ease, either as voluntary personal-interest projects or as successful online businesses, with various tools for hosting such as Libsyn and Buzzsprout, along with website-building tools ranging from WordPress to Squarespace.
The spirit of today’s independent podcast projects can be connected to earlier major examples of British and American radio communities, which adopted the approaches of either pirate activists or more professional alternative businesses. Unlike those with access to today’s prevalent digital technology, earlier networks and communities were confronted with the challenge of establishing their own terrestrial stations within or against industries that were governed by explicit, restrictive broadcasting legislation—an issue that is circumvented by the delivery protocol of RSS.
In this article, I present a brief history of pirate radio as the precursor to the use of RSS for Apple-centric tech podcasting. By reflecting on and understanding their stories, we can see a direct philosophical connection from radio networks of the past to the digital network models of the present, which are explored further in my thesis.
Radio Pirates in the United Kingdom
The first significant example is the story of ‘pirate’ stations Radio Caroline and Radio London in the 1960s, which sought to challenge the established monopoly in British broadcasting that was (and still is) the BBC. Further contextualising this grip on broadcasting, Clark (2014) explains that in the United Kingdom at that time, the only place where fans of popular music and culture could hear alternative commercial programming was from a small range of continental European stations in Luxembourg, Andorra and Monte Carlo, the most well-known of which was Radio Luxembourg. The United States had a diverse mix of commercial stations at this time and Australia, with its dual system of public and private broadcasting and where I am based, had the choice of numerous alternatives. In the United Kingdom, the only way for any independent terrestrial radio station to operate was for it to be run outside state boundaries with external advertising revenue (Clark, 2014). Beyond the question of independent stations, the restrictions on music playback at the BBC were the result of the Needletime Agreement in 1960, which was a contract between the BBC and Musicians’ Union to ensure that the broadcaster limited its broadcasting of recorded music each week in favour of live performances—decreasing from 28 hours per week on each station to 20 hours per week in 1964 (Miley and Read, 2017).
Hendy (2020) claims that it was Radio Caroline that pioneered the establishment of a floating pirate radio station in 1964 outside state boundaries, beginning an offshore trend that was followed by the likes of Radio London, Radio Atlanta, Radio Scotland and Radio 390, which built a collective audience of millions of listeners, most of whom were young people looking for change during the post-war period. The most famous examples, Radio Caroline and Radio London, shared a similar motivation to provide Britons with an alternative model and range of popular content, however they approached pirate broadcasting in two different ways. Radio Caroline presented as a more activist alternative that was synonymous with the 1960s counterculture, while Radio London followed a more professional model, seeking prestige, the possibility of being absorbed into the official broadcasting system and to be the catalyst for an entirely new, legal system for commercial broadcasting in the United Kingdom (Chapman, 1990).
In direct conflict with the Needletime Agreement and copyright law, Radio Caroline, which was established by countercultural Irishman Ronan O’Rahilly, played a range of alternative, jazz and popular music that was once purely the domain of the BBC in particular time slots. As told by popular Irish radio and television broadcaster for the BBC, Terry Wogan, who knew O’Rahilly (Hendy, 2020, np):
The Beatles had arrived and you didn’t have to listen to the BBC or Radio Luxembourg to hear it anymore. Suddenly it was on every day and all day and it was being played in a context and being introduced by people with whom young people could identify. ... And the penny dropped, obviously, as far as the BBC was concerned, that this was happening and they were losing audiences during the day disastrously. They were losing all of the young audience to the pirate stations.
Radio London was established nine months after Radio Caroline in 1964 and immediately gained an edge in commercial sales due to the extensive industry experience of its Managing Director, Philip Birch, who had held the position of Media Director and Accounts Executive at J. Walter Thompson in the 1950s, with a range of corporate advertisers. Whilst Radio Caroline had brought attention to commercial possibilities in the United Kingdom, it was Radio London that sought truly to professionalise it and make it more efficient, attracting big advertisers away from Radio Luxembourg. Furthermore, by winning over these advertisers, Radio London aimed to sound like a long- and well-established station upon launch.
Radio Caroline did succeed in attracting advertisers and although both stations sought to challenge the orthodoxy of broadcasting style and who should be a DJ, Radio Caroline pursued what Chapman (1999) calls ‘embryonic anarcho-capitalism’, as it saw a higher turnover of DJ staff with varying levels of experience and in the late 1960s, as the BBC introduced its own competing popular music offering, called Radio One, Radio Caroline slipped into a position of purely defending its pirate status and resisting regulators.
The end of the pirate story came in December 1966, when the governmental White Paper on Broadcasting Policy introduced a total ban on UK citizens listening to offshore pirate stations. Commercial alternatives like Radio Caroline and Radio London had instigated a revolution in commercial broadcasting and advertising but the BBC ultimately profited from the conflict, as the aforementioned Radio One was established in September 1967 to offer a completely legal option for popular music and culture, thereby filling the gap in the BBC’s offerings and rendering pirate stations less attractive (Hendy, 2020).
In an interview with the BBC’s reformist Director of Sound Broadcasting, Frank Gillar, Robin Scott, then BBC Joint Controller of the Light Programme and Popular Music Service (which went on to become Radio One and Two), recounted the way that the BBC took ideas from the pirate stations and built on its own listening experience to attract younger audiences (BBC, 1981, p. 3):
And by the time the pirate ships had effectively disappeared all except Caroline, I had a very sound idea of who I wanted to engage for Radio One, because pretty soon I realised that it was a case of taking the best from those people and putting them on the new channel that they already had an audience which they would bring with them. That, as in the case of religion's over the years, if you want to make a religion successful you build your church on the ruins of some previous religion or you take into your church some of the taboos and the ceremonial that is associated with the previous religion and you build on that. And obviously this was the thing to do with the new Radio One, although at that stage it was not called Radio One it was the Popular Music Service, I think was the internal word for it.
Community Alternatives in the United States
Whereas offshore pirate stations in the United Kingdom sought to establish commercial possibilities beyond the BBC’s vision for broadcasting, in the United States, community stations and the low-power/microradio movement challenged the mainstream, commercial hegemony in broadcasting to grant agency to more diverse ethnic groups and minorities (Barlow, 1988) (Howley, 2000). Numerous local community stations and projects emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, calling for more grassroots participation, wider contribution to democratic discourse and an increased focus on educational content. Such developments can be mapped to the contemporary rise of independent podcast networks. Countercultural and anti-war movements were also instrumental in the rise of community stations’ popularity, with examples such as KRAB-FM, which was founded by Lorenzo Milam in 1962. As a former volunteer at Pacifica Radio, a non-commercial network that focused on the topic of pacifism, Milam was dubbed American community radio’s ‘Johnny Appleseed’ and made a concerted effort over the first decade to build a network of ‘KRAB Nebula’ stations to challenge radio commercialism (Barlow, 1988). In his exploration of the history of American community radio, Barlow (1988) links the movement’s motivations to Gramsci’s (1983, p. 74, in Barlow, 1988) idea of forming new ‘cultures of resistance’:
To create a new culture does not only mean to make original discoveries on an individual basis. It also and especially means to critically popularize already existing truths, make them, so to speak, social, therefore, give them the consistency of basis for vital actions, make them coordinating elements of intellectual and social relevance. That masses of people be led to evaluate in a coordinated way the present reality is, philosophically speaking, a much more important and original fact that the isolated philosophical genius’ discovery of a certain truth, which is then left in heritage to small intellectual groups.
Over time, microradio (or low-power broadcasting) has been seen as a continuation of the community radio movement and even insurgent movements of the 1930s. It is an effort to go beyond the stereotype of the amateur and to explore radio’s ability to perform as a locally-oriented medium in what Hägerstand (1986, in Howley, 2000) calls the ‘possibility space’ of radio, as the medium’s potential to engage with local communities has been unrealised. Pioneering microradio broadcasters included Mbanna Knatanko (a blind African freedom fighter) and Stephen Dunifer, the second of whom established Radio Free Berkeley to confront unsatisfactory, uncritical American news reporting of the Gulf War. Dunifer challenged the mainstream media from 1993 after he ascended the Berkeley Hills in California and began transmitting alternative news; in the years that followed, Dunifer expanded his broadcasting to a community-wide effort and took the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to the Federal District Court to challenge regulations and galvanise microbroadcasters around the country (Howley, 2000). In the end, Dunifer’s Free Radio Berkeley was closed after a Federal District Court decision to rule in favour of the FCC’s case. At the end of the decade, however, even with opposition from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the (now mainstream) NPR, the FCC shifted its position to create a new, non-commercial educational service that came out of microradio/low-power movement, called Low Power FM (LPFM), It was legalised and established in 2000 by the FCC in 2000 (Howley, 2000).
Connecting to the Podcasts of Today
Radio Caroline endured and continues to operate to this day; however, Radio London, like many other offshore, independent efforts lowered its sails and even saw its staff becoming an attractive resource for the BBC (Chapman, 1990). Linking this history to the philosophy, staffing and listening experience of independent audio today, Relay FM is the host of a number of my podcast case studies. It is an example of an independent online business and network, which, like Radio Caroline, enlists a range of producers and special guests without experience in broadcasting. Yet, like Radio London, Relay FM pursues professionalism and long-term relationships with a range of big-name advertisers to fund its creative content. Like Radio Caroline, small networks like Relay FM have used the contemporary technology of RSS and connected social media and websites to circumvent any scheduling constraints, national regulators and be self-determining in their audio production, while also retaining power in their own advertising, branding and promotion.
Microradio and community radio in the United States succeeded in challenging centralised broadcasting, paving the way for more diverse and unorthodox presenters. It is important to note, however, that there have been numerous other similar community efforts throughout the West. In Germany, for instance, Radio MultiKulti pioneered the broadcasting of diverse migrant voices, challenging a range of ethnic and cultural stereotypes (Kosnick, 2012). In Australia, Fisher (2012) draws on research by Fanon (1959) and Feld et al. (2004) to describe how various Indigenous Australian communities have formed stations such as 4AAA, both representing diverse Aboriginal voices and creating a ‘voice consciousness’ to create a collective identity. As expressed by Ginsburg (2012), although community radio may try to establish a sense of collective identity, whether politically-motivated, culturally diverse or otherwise, listeners who fall within the desired audience may indeed hold a variety of beliefs and subjective ideas.
I began this article with an explanation of how early podcast studies literature sought to distinguish it from radio. Ironically, today it may be argued that radio studies is marginalised, as that medium now faces definitional ambiguity. With the advent of Web radio in the 1990s and numerous methods for audio transmission, such as websites tied to terrestrial stations, online-specific services and ‘thematic’ radio that mimics on-demand pay-TV systems, the question is raised as to what constitutes radio and what audio signals should be called (Menduni, 2007) (Black, 2001).
In my research over the last seven years, I have been exploring how open RSS now challenges further what it means to produce and listen to audio through podcasting—disrupting the traditional model of radio broadcasting and providing an alternative to big-tech-owned hosting platforms, like Spotify and YouTube. Interestingly, whereas pirate radio in particular emerged as a protest against major broadcasters like the BBC, I suggest that RSS has adopted that role over time as online producers have focused on using it as an antidote to more centralised, proprietary offerings. What began as a novel convenience for real-time updates has become a community-driven challenge to the contemporary hegemony of digital content delivery. The question is: does the community intend its creative practice to be interpreted this way or is it a side-effect of the RSS protocol's original design?
It has happened before and it is happening again. I hope that this aural narrative archive at Really Specific Stories and the eventual written thesis will capture this moment in time, showing how producers and listeners co-operated to build the content and community that they wanted.
References
Barlow, W., 1988, ‘Community Radio in the US: the Struggle for a Democratic Medium’, Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 81–105.
Black, D.A., 2001, ‘Internet Radio: a Case Study in Medium Specificity’, in Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, pp. 397–408.
Chapman, R., 1990, ‘The 1960s Pirates: a Comparative Analysis of Radio London and Radio Caroline’, in Popular Music, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 165–178.
Clark, R., 2014, Radio Caroline: The True Story of the Boat that Rocked, The History Press.
Fisher, D., 2012, ‘From the Studio to the Street: Producing the Voice in Indigenous Australia’, in Bessire, L. and Fisher, D. (eds), Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, New York University Press, pp. 69–88.
Ginsburg, F., 2012, ‘Radio Fields: An Afterword’, in Bessire, L. and Fisher, D. (eds), Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, New York University Press, pp. 268–278.
Hendy, D., 2020, Part 1: The Pirates — History of the BBC, BBC, viewed 14 June 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/100-voices/radio-reinvented/the-pirates.
Howley, K., 2000, ‘Radiocracy rulz! Microradio as electronic activism’, in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 256–267.
Kosnick, K., 2012, ‘“Foreign Voices”: Multicultural Broadcasting and Immigrant Representation at Germany’s Radio MultiKulti’, in Bessire, L. and Fisher, D. (eds), Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, New York University Press, pp. 179–196.
Menduni, E., 2007, ‘Four steps in innovative radio broadcasting: From QuickTime to podcasting’, in The Radio Journal — International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 9–18.
Miley, F. and Read, A., 2017, ‘Financial Control, Blame Avoidance and Radio Caroline: Talkin’ ‘bout My Generation’, in Accounting History, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 301–319.