Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015

This article describes an unusual form of student instructional radio, which is organized to run as a fully commercial broadcaster. Drawing on the case of a New Zealand student station, Mode 96.1FM, we look at how it functions in a highly competitive commercial environment. The student-run station reformats itself every year and attempts to emulate the styles and success of much larger national and local commercial music stations. We investigate two aspects. First, the tensions this creates between commercial, industry and educational objectives. Second, how students become located within the commodified speech practices intrinsic to marketing and branding. We also discuss how the station attempts to reconcile these in terms of seeking out diverse listening publics.

Campus radio falls under the ‘community’ sector of Canada’s broadcasting system alongside the public and commercial sectors. Campus radio evokes a notion of ‘alternativeness’ in order to indicate its role as a sector rooted in a local community and to define its programming as distinct from other stations. This article uses Underground Sounds, a campus radio show broadcast by McGill University’s CKUT-FM, to explore the construction of ‘alternativeness’ in campus radio programming. This ten-week analysis of Underground Sounds took place in early 2008 and focuses on the artists and songs featured, the interviews conducted by the show’s host and on-air discussion of the show’s role in relation to the Montreal music scene. The findings highlight how ‘alternativeness’ is conveyed but also demonstrate its limitations and boundaries. For instance, new albums and upcoming concert dates factor into setting the limits of ‘alternativeness’, as being of current relevance significantly increases the chances that an artist is programmed. However, programmed artists are predominately represented by independent labels and are often local bands without much financial support. The goal of this article is to consider how ‘alternativeness’ might be conceptualized in relation to campus radio and the programming of ‘local’ and ‘independent’ music.

In the United States, the term ‘college radio’ invokes a specific, influential subset of student radio. In the early 1980s, ‘college radio’ appeared in popular discourse to refer to non-profit student stations which championed music marginalized by mainstream, commercial radio. College radio programming enacted a critique of the music industry’s political economy, reflecting participation in the late 1970s and early 1980s Do-It-Yourself (DIY) rock underground, an association of independent labels; independent record stores; small clubs; ‘zines; and those college stations which embraced punk and its offshoots. This subcultural identification carried tensions, namely, college stations functioned within the music industry they often sought to critique. As college radio communities negotiated this terrain, they helped shape ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ culture – loosely defined but emblematic subsets of late twentieth-century US popular culture. Here, I examine the development and deployment of the ‘college radio’ signifier in the US public sphere, review the ­ existing academic literature on the sector and suggest avenues of future research.

The 1920s were boom years for college radio, with at least 90 college radio stations in the United States by January 1924. This period was also the heyday for radio at Haverford College, a small, all-male Quaker College near Philadelphia. Its first radio station, WABQ, was launched by students in 1923. In the early years of the station, students embarked on a series of ambitious projects, including international wireless experiments. WABQ was sold to a commercial radio group and in its wake other stations (WHAV and WHRC) formed at Haverford. In the 1940s the station was part of one of the first intercollegiate radio networks. By the 1980s WHRC was a campus-only AM carrier-current station. As technology evolved WHRC abandoned carrier-current for Internet-only broadcasting and by 2009 even this netcast faded away. Following some experiments with transforming the station into a podcast-only DJ club in 2009–2010, WHRC was again resurrected as a streaming radio station in 2012. This article covers the more than 90-year history of radio at Haverford College from the 1920s to the present. It draws from historical documents and interviews with WHAV and WHRC participants from the 1940s through 2014. The story of Haverford College radio adds another voice to the currently very limited literature documenting both the very early history of college radio and the evolution of college radio in general.

Siren FM is based at the University of Lincoln, in the centre of the historic cathedral city in the East Midlands, UK. It was one of the first full-time community radio stations to be founded by a British university and be fully located on the university’s campus. Once a student radio station, it was re-launched with a full community radio licence, with students forming one of the communities served. Using Siren FM as a case study, this article will document the challenges and potential benefits to operation and governance specific to a community radio station located on a university campus. It will look at the ways in which the station has been used as a mechanism for curriculum delivery and assessment, and explore how the students themselves engage with the station.

The article will argue that Siren FM, and other community radio stations that are located on university campuses, offer an interesting model for the relatively new third tier of radio in the UK, placing the stations in a unique position to effect social gain by enhancing students’ learning experience and empowering young people.

The earliest student radio stations in Poland were set up in the early 1950s. They broadcast as closed-circuit stations in student hostels and were accessible only by inhabitants of the campus. The level of freedom of speech at such stations was higher than in other types of media, not only because of special concessions with reference to students, but also because of a large number of such initiatives in Poland that were difficult to control. This type of student broadcasting lost a significant part of its audience in the early 1990s because of the development of the commercial radio sector. However, at the same time new possibilities for student broadcasting emerged. The Act on Radio and Television Broadcasting in 1992 introduced a new way of transmitting the signal – on air, with a licence. Contemporary student radio stations can be divided into two main groups: licensed and non-licensed (closed-circuit and Internet streaming). Between these two groups there are significant differences concerning organizational, financial and management issues, as well as the social functions they perform. Today, student radio is one of few mediums that broadcast spoken word programming and alternative music, as well as promoting participation, dialogue and marginalized voices.