Spotlight: Radio, Audio Media, and Podcasting Studies Scholarly Interest Group

(RE-)SITUATING RADIO IN THE INTERNET ERA

A decade after its entrée into the music streaming business in 2008, Spotify sought to expand beyond its core music service. In 2016, the company experimented with providing short-form video content but abandoned that service due to lack of audience interest. Then, in 2017, Spotify co-founder and chief executive officer Daniel Ek had what, to him, was a startling realization: his customers enjoyed listening to spoken-word programming. What started with a small, accidental test with audiobooks in Germany grew into a massive effort to generate new subscriptions and become “the world’s number one audio platform” through a growing slate of exclusive podcasts.¹ While Spotify has been hailed for its foresight in investing in podcasts, it is arguably rediscovering an older business model: network radio. The technology may be different, but the company has all of the markers of a historical radio network such as NBC or CBS.

Radio studies is often regarded as a historical field, especially in the United States. Unlike other nations, where public funding has supported strong public service broadcasters, countering the growth of centralized behemoths like Clear Channel and I Heart Radio, American radio is frequently assumed to be past its prime. However, even if one disregards the existing and vibrant US and international radio communities, radio history is integral for understanding new media ecologies. To name a few supposedly modern media developments with historical analogues:

• • Amateur radio operators resisting corporate consolidation of the air-waves in the 1920s made arguments against early radio networks that are similar to those independent podcasters make about corporations like Spotify.

• • Technologies, program formats, and business models have always been intimately connected and influenced one another.

• • While the languages spoken have changed, ethnic and/or minority language radio continues to be a major source of information and community in immigrant communities.

As the radio and audio media industries face changes in listening habits and the services used to interact with audio programming, so, too, do radio scholars. What is radio in the streaming media era? To answer this question, we might look to Michele Hilmes’s term soundwork. As Hilmes explains, “No longer constrained by the technologies, institutions, and practices of the pre-digital era, radio must now be understood as soundwork: the entire complex of sound-based digital media that enters our experience through a variety of technologies and forms.”²

The Radio, Audio Media, and Podcasting Studies SIG was officially formed as the Radio Studies SIG at a meeting held during the 2012 annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Boston. Organizers like Bill Kirkpatrick, who became the SIG’s first co-chair along with Alexander Russo, argued that the formation of the SIG was a crucial step in sustaining the renaissance of radio scholarship that began in the 1990s and in solidifying radio studies’ position within media and cultural studies. We believe that SCMS remains the ideal institutional home for radio studies because of the opportunities for cross-media scholarship and the institution’s broad focus on industries and aesthetics. In 2020, the group voted to rename itself to reflect the diversity of audio media. Looking ahead, SCMS is also an ideal home for radio scholars as they contemplate shifts in media, terminologies, and conceptual frameworks (such as thinking about radio, in Hilmes’s terms, as soundwork).

As the Radio, Audio Media, and Podcasting Studies SIG nears its tenth anniversary, it is worth noting the consistent number of radio-related SCMS conference panels and papers, which have showcased a range of topics and themes, such as production cultures, media and domestic space, commercial sponsorship, media and gender, media history, and music radio. Over this period, research on podcasts and podcasting has also boomed. In 2014, the SCMS conference program included just two papers with “podcast” in their titles. The following year, a full panel was dedicated to podcasting; it later became the basis of a Journal of Radio & Audio Media symposium, “Podcasting: A Decade in the Life of...