Keep Texas Radio Unique

One consequence of all the time dedicated to saving KTRU is that I’ve fallen way behind on my primary means of procrastination and time wastage: RSS feeds. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been fully caught up on my Google Reader (and before that, Bloglines) queue of saved articles, each one ever so interesting and full of information that could one day prove useful.

I finally allowed myself to wade back into the morass over the weekend, and noticed a couple highly topical articles. First, Ars Technica‘s excellently titled “Earth to tech bloggers: FM lives! (In fact, it’s growing)“, which makes a number of very salient points, including that:

We sometimes brand things “obsolete” or “dying” based not on their actual use, but on the fact that something else has come along that we think is (or will be) better.

Sure enough, broadcast radio has lost advertising revenue. And mobile devices offer a range of functionalities that no FM station can match. But broadband radio has limits as well—one problem being bandwidth costs to reach millions of listeners, while traditional radio signals can be sent once and received by many. Another: unlike broadcast stations, streamers have to pay royalties to artists (both terrestrial and Internet radio pay the songwriters, but only Internet radio currently pays the artists).

Meanwhile, the FCC keeps issuing old school, noncommercial educational FM licenses, for which nonprofits fiercely compete. Just about every other week somebody starts a new pirate FM station. And the number of actual licensed FM signals keeps growing, too—6,494 FM commercial and 3,223 FM educational stations existed in June, as opposed to 6,316 and 2,911 respectively just two years ago.

Bottom line: lots of folks have yet to join the great iPhone/Android/tweetorama-fest. One big reason—they can’t afford to. Another—they like their car FM radios and pay TV systems just fine, or at least “fine enough.”

It goes on to note that radio had previously been declared dead upon the arrival of TeeVee, before concluding:

it’s hard to believe that consumers and media entrepreneurs will completely turn their backs on a technology as elegant and effective as FM radio. They haven’t yet. And before they do, they’ll certainly want more than a pony.

Next, a tasty link from David Byrne‘s journal entry “The End of News, Part II” to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s Home Broadband 2010 report, which notes that one third of Americans lack a home broadband internet connection, and fully 44% of African-Americans have no home high-speed internet. Meanwhile, I’d wager that somewhere near 100% of Americans have access to a FM radio, seeing as how you can pick one up in a dollar store.

And finally, I’d like to dedicate this next video to David Leebron & The Rice Board of Trustees: