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.
Public radio broadcasters are mandated to act as vehicles for supporting and promoting national culture, including music. Despite a predominately national focus, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has partnered with public broadcasters from other nations in a song-sharing initiative called ‘Songs You Need to Hear’. The initiative includes a monthly blog post with embedded audio and brief descriptions of the music by radio hosts from CBC (Canada), BBC (UK), NPR (US), ABC (Australia), and RTÉ (Ireland). This article explores the ways in which a mobile, transnational song-sharing project emerged between 2000 and 2015 and what it reveals about the pressures and new models developed in this period of digital transmission. ‘Songs You Need To Hear’ represents the current state of public media in which the need to digitize, globalize, and universalize, combined with unreliable funding models, has resulted in the treatment of music on the radio as inexpensive and highly accessible content that straddles the line between the global brand extension of public media institutions and ideas about the fundamental role of public media in their support of national culture.
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