Beyond the playlist: commercial radio as music culture

Abstract

This article presents the historical transformation of Finnish commercial radio popular music policies from 1985 to 2005 and contemplates the role of terrestrial radio in contemporary digital age. It argues that a sender-centred paradigm of early commercial radio was replaced swiftly by receiver-centred paradigm, which has been applied since the early 1990s. The change of radio music cultures is described in detail by dividing it into three different eras: Block Radio, Format Radio and Media Convergence. The study draws on the research project consisting of case studies analysing the music content of various radio stations. The primary empirical data is composed of 32 interviews of radio personnel and the analysis of 4,500 individual songs broadcast by popular music radio stations with newspaper and journal articles supporting the primary data. Radio music culture is approached theoretically from the ethnomusicological perspective and thus defined as all practices that have an effect on broadcast music, including the processes of acquiring, selecting and governing music. The empirical results of the study show that the transformation of radio music cultures is affected by economic, technological, legal, organisational and cultural factors.

A Virtual Ethnography Study: The Role of Cultural Radios in Campursari Music Proliferation in East Java

“…Radios program containing local culture are efforts to maintain cultural existence, amid the onslaught of popular entertainment programs. The practice of broadcasting by the four radio cultures enriches the analysis of radio as a reliable medium for maintaining local culture (Bosch, 2008(Bosch, , 2014Mu-azu and Shivram, 2017;Uimonen, 2017;Zein and Dewi, 2019). The presence of cultural programming broadcasts on the radio affirms the argument about the need to maintain local and national identities to stem foreign or global cultures (Morley and Robins, 1995).…”

Do I Sound Like a Broken Record?

“…Nevertheless, selecting songs is far from being an innocent choice; it is part of a cultural framework (Ala-Fossi, 2005;Gjerdingen & Perrott 2008). Recently, scholars explained radio's alliances with the music industry and the adaptation to audiences' preferences (Kaplan, 2013;Uimonen, 2017), thus arguing that the music in radios' playlists is far from diverse, especially on stations owned by the private sector. This article draws upon the premise that a more comprehensive approach towards this topic is needed.…”

“…Being our object of study two radio stations structured according to the music format, our main goal will consist of evaluating differences and similarities in Rádio Comercial and RFM's musical programming, in order to understand whether these two players are competing for market share by offering a very similar product to their audiences. Inspired by previous studies on commercial radio musical policies (Uimonen, 2017) including a methodological approach to characterize music diversity in radio (Hellman & Vikko, 2019), this research ultimately aims at identifying how the two most popular Portuguese commercial radio broadcasters manage their music playlists.…”

Practical Idealism: Live Music Associations and the Revitalization of the Music Festival Scene

“…In the 1980s, media exposure was crucial for any rock festival in Finland due to the scarcity of journalistic music media for popular music. During the early years of the decade rock music was broadcast for only a few hours per week on nationwide public service radio station until deregulation and reregulation of the media led to the founding of local and commercial radio stations (Uimonen 2017).…”

“…It established connections with festivals in Central Europe, Sweden and Estonia, reorganized its programme planning, and created an imaginary person to whom the programme would be targeted -thus paralleling the format radio practices of the mid-1990s such as the BBC's use in the UK of an imaginary couple called 'Dave and Sue' as 'virtual' listeners about whom programmers could think when planning their outputs and schedules (Kelner 2008;Uimonen 2010:11). The lively discursive culture of the associations, however, did not work well with professional festival organizations which required quick decision-making (Kotirinta 1993;Provinssi 1997;Tuulari 2000;Uimonen 2017;Yourope 2018).…”