Radio JournalPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00052_2
Ellis Jones, J. Morris
{"title":"Competing sounds? Podcasting and popular music","authors":"Ellis Jones, J. Morris","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00052_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00052_2","url":null,"abstract":"Podcasts and popular music are different kinds of sonic media, but they are increasingly in direct competition for our listening time within the ‘audio market’. Audio platforms like Spotify, Apple and Google host both podcasts and music (and other audio media) so their distribution\u0000 decisions and infrastructure have a significant impact on musicians, podcasters, record labels, podcast networks and other industrial entities. Despite this convergence, podcasting studies and popular music studies have not regularly been put in conversation; podcast studies has drawn primarily\u0000 on radio studies, and overlap between this work and popular music studies has to date been minimal. Our introduction to this Special Issue on popular music and podcasts suggests that framing music and podcasts as ‘competing sounds’ permits new contributions to several important\u0000 areas of media study, including platformization, creative labour, media representation and the role of sonic media in everyday life.","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79824652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00054_1
Amy Skjerseth
{"title":"Ride-along listening: Inclusive modes of musical analysis in Switched on Pop","authors":"Amy Skjerseth","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00054_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00054_1","url":null,"abstract":"Popular music and pop song-dissection podcasts often compete for top 40 listeners’ attention, but podcasts interject hosts’ opinions of songs that listeners may not share. This article introduces a phenomenon I call ‘ride-along listening’, where podcast hosts play isolated musical features to closely examine a song’s production and reception. Hosts’ instantaneous explanations of musical terms have the potential to make pop podcasts more inclusive for non-musically trained listeners. As I show, Switched on Pop’s Episode 80 dissects Janelle Monáe’s ‘Make Me Feel’ by playing the single’s harmonies and rhythms back-to-back with those of the blues, Michael Jackson and Prince. But guest host Lizzo – a classically trained flutist, songwriter, singer and rapper – especially makes Monáe’s social message of fluid sexuality palpable for specialist and non-specialist listeners alike. By foregrounding performing musicians’ embodied listening and knowledge, ride-along listening can provide inclusive ways of dissecting the medium and the message of pop music.","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84065447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00055_1
L. Giuffre
{"title":"Lessons on popular music form, creation and reception through the Song Exploder podcast","authors":"L. Giuffre","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00055_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00055_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article positions Hrishikesh Hirway’s Song Exploder as an archetypical example of how musical exploration, examination and education can come together in podcast form. Song Exploder’s combination of content and format allows audiences with a range of musical\u0000 experience and interest to gain insight into how popular music is created at the level of individual songs, and more broadly in terms of genre and industry reception and delivery processes. Originally conceived as an audio-only podcast, versions of Song Exploder have also been staged\u0000 ‘live in concert’, and in audio-visual format for Netflix. To demonstrate Song Exploder’s success, I situate it alongside similar music/media crossovers in print, radio and film and television, while also presenting findings from my five years experience of using Song\u0000 Exploder as a teaching tool for undergraduate students in Australia.","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91095776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00056_1
H. Wolfenden, H. Sercombe, Adrian Renzo
{"title":"Banging tunes in the basement: Finding online community in COVID-19 lockdown","authors":"H. Wolfenden, H. Sercombe, Adrian Renzo","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00056_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00056_1","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unique restrictions on human sociability. In response, exceptional initiatives using a range of existing technologies and platforms have emerged to mitigate lockdown isolation. Basement Traxx, a kind of hybrid DJ set streamed from a Glasgow basement, was one of these initiatives. As the lockdown was extended, it became a virtual gathering space, with unexpectedly powerful impacts on its audience. This research seeks to define and describe this phenomenon. In this study, we find new permutations of engagement in space, in time and in presence. We find expressions of joy in the show’s particular sociability. In the isolation of lockdown, here is an experience in which participants felt affirmed, validated and re-constituted as subjects and actors. In their response, we find an enthusiastic push-back in favour of communal musical spaces and against a political economy of music that has pressed relentlessly towards isolation, individuation and commodification.","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"148 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88660944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00057_1
Kate Galloway
{"title":"The sonic strategies and technologies of listening alone together in The World According to Sound’s Outside In: A Communal Listening Series","authors":"Kate Galloway","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00057_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00057_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines three dimensions of Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett’s practices for producing, sharing and listening to audio in collective and social ways for The World According to Sound’s Outside In: the sonic strategies and soundscape design used to engage communal and collective listening, how Outside In adapts and transforms traditional paradigms using the broadcast medium of the podcast to aesthetically engage with liveness and the corporeality of sound, and how the COVID-19 pandemic afforded space for ‘unpopular’ soundwork based on everyday aural architectures (e.g., field recordings, ambient music, experimental music based on everyday sounds, soundscape collages) that are popular, as in, of the community. Using varied examples drawn from The World According to Sound’s soundwork, I illustrate a particular set of sonic strategies to imagine sonic space, listen relationally to sound events, and enact a sociality of collective listening.","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82224469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00053_1
C. Hamilton, Simon Barber
{"title":"Rate and review: Exploring listener motivations for engagement with music podcasts","authors":"C. Hamilton, Simon Barber","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00053_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00053_1","url":null,"abstract":"Podcasts have become an important part of music reception practices, providing new ways of engaging with reviews and recommendations, artist interviews and popular music histories. This article presents a replicable working methodology that can be applied to study the data associated\u0000 with podcasts of any genre. In our analysis, we explore approximately 16,000 listener reviews of the Top 50 podcasts in the Apple (UK) music chart in order to discover what it is about music podcasts that draws listeners to regularly engage with their favourite shows. This method, based on\u0000 unsupervised machine learning algorithms, automates data-scraping for podcast reviews and ratings. We describe and critically reflect on this process in order to understand not only how listeners describe their range of motivations for engagement with music podcasts, but also the limitations\u0000 of this approach in a media and cultural studies context.","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78090118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00049_5
S. Sahai
{"title":"Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves, Kanchan K. Malik and Vinod Pavarala (eds) (2020)","authors":"S. Sahai","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00049_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00049_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves, Kanchan K. Malik and Vinod Pavarala (eds) (2020)New York: Routledge, 294 pp.,ISBN 978-1-138-55853-3, h/bk, $65.42, e-book, $48.95","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85564550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00048_1
Abigail Wincott, Jean Martin, Ivor Richards
{"title":"Telling stories in soundspace: Placement, embodiment and authority in immersive audio journalism","authors":"Abigail Wincott, Jean Martin, Ivor Richards","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00048_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00048_1","url":null,"abstract":"There has been an increase in the use of immersive or spatialized audio formats for radio and podcast journalism. Immersion is used to put audiences at the heart of a story, enable richer experiences and encourage empathy with others, but it can disrupt the ‘grammar’ of\u0000 broadcast formats and the codes that structure the relationship between audience, journalist and story. Immersive journalism research has not tackled the impact on audio-only storytelling, and the lack of research by and for audio journalists means programme-makers have until now lacked a\u0000 conceptual framework and terminology to describe how space is constructed in immersive audio, the creative and editorial choices available and their effects. This article, based on analysis of immersive output and interviews with those who produce it, critically examines the differences between\u0000 mono/stereo space and immersive audio space and argues they are not only a matter of aesthetics or comfort, but communicate differential authority over the story and merit further attention when journalists are trained in immersive audio.","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88124805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00044_1
Rachel-Ann Charles-Hatt, Thomas Sayers
{"title":"Reframing public service radio: The case of BBC Sounds","authors":"Rachel-Ann Charles-Hatt, Thomas Sayers","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00044_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00044_1","url":null,"abstract":"This study analyses the public service broadcast terrain within a changing sector that is driven by digital media convergence using the case of the BBC Sounds. From the findings, we demonstrate that the BBC Sounds promotes the idea of a visible media, an inter-medial platform providing\u0000 agency to some of its listeners as they choose what content they want to listen to, while questioning whether this new streaming service offers more control than choice. In this study we identify issues surrounding accessibility for all when exploring on-demand content, and what impact this\u0000 has on the public. Finally, we highlight the blurring of podcasts and radio and whether all live radio shows become, or risk becoming, podcasts.","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"193 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75852121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Radio JournalPub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00050_5
Donna L. Halper
{"title":"Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship, Laura Brueck, Jacob Smith and Neil Verma (eds) (2020)","authors":"Donna L. Halper","doi":"10.1386/rjao_00050_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00050_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship, Laura Brueck, Jacob Smith and Neil Verma (eds) (2020)Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 338 pp.,ISBN 978-0-47205-434-3, p/bk, USD 44.95","PeriodicalId":38660,"journal":{"name":"Radio Journal","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73067208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}