I am writing a book on New Jersey independent listener-supported freeform radio station WFMU and the rise of online music. I post my writing and archival finds here.

Essays:

Freeform Radio and the History of Music Streaming.” Preprint. Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Radio Studies, edited by Michele Hilmes and Andrew Bottomley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024). – about WFMU’s early experiments in “streaming” music via telephone, gopher, and the web in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Provincializing Spotify: Radio, Algorithms and Conviviality,” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 18, no. 1 (2020): 29-42. – about the Free Music Archive.

The Past and Future of Music Listening: Between Freeform DJs and Recommendation Algorithms,” in Radio’s New Wave, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2013), 62-76. – about WFMU’s relationship with music recommendation apps.

Interviews:

Interview on Mack Hagood’s Phantom Power podcast, talking about radio audiences, freeform radio station WFMU, and the plundering of open source software movements by big tech, November 17, 2023

Online:

WFMU Live Benefits Map

This map-in-progress chronicles live performances at rock, avant-garde and international music venues such as CBGB’s, Maxwell’s, Lauterbach’s, the Ritz, the Bottom Line, Roulette, PS 122, S.O.B.’s, Wetlands Preserve, ABC No Rio, and others. It lists participating NYC-area and NJ musicians and bands, playing alternative rock, hardcore punk, experimental music, folk, anti-folk & more. It includes links to first-person accounts and/or audio recordings whenever possible.

Research Finds:

The paradox of noncommercial radio’s symbiotic relationship with the music industry goes back to the late 1960s. In 1968, Billboard announced a fundraising marathon for listener-supported college station WFMU.

According to Radio-TV editor Claude Hall, WFMU played “progressive rock” (the magazine’s term for freeform radio at the time) and had “some of the best programming available in this format anywhere in the nation.”

The best station in the nation, already in 1968!

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WFMU Music/Art Convergence

Program and catalog for the WFMU Music/Art Convergence silent and live auctions and benefit performances at the Germans van Eck Gallery, May 26-30, 1992. It includes interviews with Cindy Sherman and Jim Jarmusch.

Joe Biden bails out venture capitalists but leaves independent media to fend for themselves. Keep WFMU on the air!