next »

[Ann VerWiebe]

WUMB, Boston's respected folk music radio station, is adding shows with an eclectic, electric mix.  The Boston Globe says that the station will drop its "long-time identification as 'folk radio' for a livelier, more electric sound."  In my mind, it means that WUMB is moving towards Americana and Triple A formats.  The assertion that folk is boring is perturbing and WUMB is one of the few radio stations in the U.S. to concentrate on folk music, so that doesn't seem like the station is confident in the future of folk.  Any WUMB listeners out there?  Is this a bad move, or a move that could bring more people to folk music through the station's new additional programming?

[nhpeacenik]

Classical and Jazz stations around the country are also dropping the words "classical" and "jazz" from their self-descriptions. I suspect that WUMB will also shy away from any new genre name, including "Americana". In the grassroots radio community list, we have had some discussion of the fact  that what WUMB is doing is changing its slogan and description in order to qualify, on paper, for future CPB funding, not necessarily changing its actual programming. All public radio stations are hurting for funding, and CPB is looking for evidence that a specific "community" is being served with "diverse" programming; apparently their latest definition of "community" is geographic and doesn't encompass widely scattered people who prefer a specific style of music. This may mean, paradoxically, that only commercial broadcast stations will be able to specialize in a single genre in the future. Public  stations will have to "diversify".  WUMB already has several specific-subgenre web streams, and I assume they will stay more or less as they are. Streaming on the web may be the wave of the future for folk, and WUMB might be seen as a "competitor" of Folk Alley. On the other hand, complying with CPB guidelines will not make WUMB a genuine community station, like WUML in Lowell or WSCA in Portsmouth, which serve identifiable geographic and ethnic communities and don't get CPB funding.

[volchris]

I noticed the words "City Folk" purged from WFUV's web site.

[plnelson]

WUMB, Boston's respected folk music radio station, is adding shows with an eclectic, electric mix.  The Boston Globe says that the station will drop its "long-time identification as 'folk radio' for a livelier, more electric sound."  In my mind, it means that WUMB is moving towards Americana and Triple A formats.  The assertion that folk is boring is perturbing and WUMB is one of the few radio stations in the U.S. to concentrate on folk music, so that doesn't seem like the station is confident in the future of folk.  Any WUMB listeners out there?  Is this a bad move, or a move that could bring more people to folk music through the station's new additional programming?

I live in a suburb of Boston and I'm a member of FSSGB and frequently attend their concerts and I've never even HEARD of WUMB!   Just as a test I went to 91.9, which their website says is the frequency, and there was nothing but static.  I get a very strong signal from WHRB and WERS, two small local stations I sometimes still listen to on the air so there's nothing wrong with my receiver.

So maybe they are just too small and weak to attract enough on-air listeners.    Frankly I and most people I know listen to very little broadcast radio anymore.  It just doesn't have much of a future.  Almost all the "radio" I listen to is on the Internet, and WUMB only has a 56K stream which means I wouldn't bother with them no matter how good their programming was.

Broadcast radio is so 20th century.   Stations like Folk Alley are the future.   Whenever I go on a long trip I just load hours of Folk Alley, along with other stations, into my iPod  and listen as I travel.   No static or reception problems and I can pause anytime I have to stop for food, fuel or bathroom breaks, or "rewind" to hear a song again. 

I won't need to do this much longer - most modern cellphones already have broadband capability (e.g., EVDO on my my Verizon phone) - currently the carriers are bandwidth-constrained but that's about to change thanks to the recent FCC auction.  And the iPhone has set the new standard for wireless internet appliances and all the other companies are responding in kind.   The technological landscape is undergoing shifts of a tectonic scale and local broadcast radio has only a few years left to find a new raison d'être.