ABSTRACT
Since Lee de Forest’s first experimental music and voice broadcasts in 1914 (Douglas 1999: 51), music on the radio has meant many things: a Beethoven concert in a rural family’s parlor, Chuck Berry on a teenager’s transistor radio, Dionne Warwick underscoring a dentist visit, and Last.fm’s “Lorde and Similar” playing on computer speakers. Such scenarios embody an array of new social possibilities, as well as the ways that radio has profoundly reshaped music’s cultural role. In attempting to understand these changes, as well as the complex structural forces that shape radio programming, scholars have initiated numerous lines of inquiry. Cutting across a range of historical and cultural contexts, their questions cluster around four key concerns:
Audience: What individuals and groups constitute radio’s listeners? How are their identities understood in terms of gender, age, race/ethnicity, nationality, class and taste? What agency do they have in interpreting—and influencing—music that is broadcast? Should they be conceptualized as consumers of a product, a market for advertisers, citizens participating in the public life of a democracy, a community or a brainwashed mass?
Production of Culture: How have structural factors—“technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organizational structure, occupational career, and market” (Peterson and Anand 2004: 313)—influenced what music is broadcast and the meanings that it takes on? What are the differences between public service and commercial radio? Between local stations and national networks?
Musical Genre: What role does musical genre play in shaping radio organizations and audiences? What roles do radio organizations and audiences play in constituting musical genres?
Listening Practices: How does music heard on the radio affect the everyday lives of listeners? How do listeners—and broadcasters—negotiate different modes of listening, ranging from attentive to distracted? How does radio listening affect music’s cultural roles and meanings?
