Bellarmine Radio has been an Internet-only affair from its inception.  As Brian Fauteux convincingly argued in a  recent Antenna column, traditional (or “terrestrial”) college radio stations run the risk of losing their community focus as universities sell off valuable FM licenses. These stations then often turn to Internet radio. If college radio’s historical strength was an ability to focus on local culture, then what about stations like ours, which never had an FM license in the first place? Can an Internet station cultivate a local audience in such a diffuse media environment?

I had my doubts. My own connection to college radio was shaped by the pre-Internet scarcity of the music I heard. As a 1980s teen, I went to sleep in my west suburban Indianapolis home, listening to college radio from Cincinnati’s Xavier University. I kept a notebook by my bed to write down the most interesting bands I heard (V-E-L-V-E-T-U-N-D-E-R-G-R-O-U-N-D) and worked at deciphering Michael Stipe’s lyrics when REM was still a mystery.

It all felt like I’d stumbled upon a glorious secret: in the voices of college students I heard, in the information they had seemingly mastered, and in the music that opened up entirely new ways of thinking and feeling. Local commercial radio couldn’t compete, and even 1980s MTV paled in comparison. While my undergraduate school didn’t have its own station, my relationship to college radio continued when I started my own show on Bowling Green’s WBGU, fueled by conversations with generous and inventive colleagues and the university’s wonderful popular music library. After I left for Ph.D. work at the University of Texas, I listened to Austin’s KVRX, but considered my own college radio days to be over.

As a professor, I found myself involved in college radio again. When I arrived on the Bellarmine campus, I found eager students and a formidable task. Students had started the station on their own, but the previous faculty adviser had shaped the station to reflect Clear Channel-style corporate radio. The station was completely automated. We began to transform Bellarmine Radio into a college radio station, in which students would program the station and their voices would be heard on air – preferably live. We listened to other college radio stations, noting what we wanted to emulate (openness, experimentation) and what we wanted to avoid (snobbery, knee-jerk exclusion).

The majority of our listeners are connected to the university. This also includes study abroad students and alumni that check in from far away, sharing how much they appreciated hearing us on the other side of the world. We increasingly have the sense that our local focus in an online context has allowed us to reach a variety of listeners with Bellarmine and Louisville ties in far-flung locales, from Belfast to Shanghai. When my students ask if it’s OK they sound like they’re from Kentucky, I say yes. A given DJ’s Kentucky twang may not work in contemporary commercial radio, but we consider that a strength.

Selling our campus on college radio is an ongoing process. While Bellarmine has undergone dramatic transformations in the last decade or so, it is not particularly known for an adventurous campus culture. Because of this, we spend a lot of time trying to translate college radio to our specific context, explaining college radio’s larger mission. We do this through campus promotional activities and participation in larger initiatives such as College Radio Day. We playfully profess our approach in an unofficial slogan: Bellarmine Radio plays the hits and misses.

Program director Andrew Condia (left) and production director Shawn Gowen (right) touting Bellarmine Radio at a recent campus event. (Photo: Tatiana Rathke)

It is helpful for any college radio station staff to remember that many students arrive at college each fall having never heard college radio before. In 2011, my radio directors and I collaborated on a column for the student newspaper to explain Bellarmine Radio’s mission. “Think for a moment about your favorite song,” we wrote. “There was a time when you had never heard it before. You had to take a chance and listen for it to become meaningful for you. We would like to introduce you to your new favorites.” In an era when liberal arts colleges increasingly sell familiarity and comfort to attract students, we wanted to assert that college should be transformative – in ways that might be unfamiliar or even uncomfortable. We understand college radio as part of that transformation.

Our radio station has emerged during a period in which college radio’s future seems uncertain. As my former WBGU colleague Jen Waits pointed out in her 2012 overview for Radio Survivor, college radio remains vulnerable to takeovers by university administrations seeking a profit in selling off FM licenses. At the same time, traditional college radio stations reached new milestones, with continued support from universities. In 2012, the University of Minnesota celebrated 100 years of radio on campus.

On our campus, college radio still matters – even online. Bellarmine Radio is a work in progress mind you, but DJs leave their shifts feeling energized. We champion our favorite local bands, peruse Pitchfork and CMJ without letting it dictate our tastes, and ponder dubstep’s circuitous path from London to Louisville. And we are conscious that whether our listeners are across campus or around the world, it’s better to be rooted in who we are – and where we are – at any given moment.

Photo credit: Houston Press

In the media policy wars of the early 2000s, when the Michael Powell-led FCC was hell-bent on eviscerating ownership restrictions, one corporate villain stood out for its egregiousness: Clear Channel Communications (Hissssss).

And deservedly so: as Exhibit A for the dangers of conglomeration run amok, Clear Channel and its 1,200 stations hit a kind of media-monopoly trifecta, bulldozing the values of diversity, localism, and market competition. They bought up all the stations they could in a given market, making sure to hit the maximum number of demographic niches, then programmed them centrally (and unimaginatively) from some computerized studio located in who knows where.

“Thank god,” both music lovers and radio fans said frequently during the Bush II years, “for college radio.”

Well, don’t look now, but guess who just went to bed with Clear Channel: college radio. Clear Channel – destroyer of adventurous playlists, scourge of the live local DJ – has now signed up more than a dozen top college stations for its iHeartRadio distribution service, including such esteemed stations as Radio DePaul, Seton Hall’s WSOU, and the terrific station at my own college, WDUB at Denison. Public stations are available through iHeartRadio too, such as New York’s WNYC, and more are on the way.

Clear Channel is bringing these local stations to the mobile space, competing with satellite radio’s national programming by offering a plethora of interesting local stations over cellular networks. Whereas Sirius XM often replicates the narrow market segmentation and tightly controlled playlists perfected by terrestrial broadcasters like, well, Clear Channel, iHeartRadio counter-programs them with “GOFR”:  good old-fashioned radio, with real DJs in real local studios producing real local programming. The only difference is that the GOFR is arriving through your cell phone instead of your radio antenna.

To be clear: exploitation is still Clear Channel’s game. The company sells ads against these college radio streams, and none of that revenue is going back to the students or their institutions. In other words, the great enemy of radio localism has now found a way to co-opt localism, using these quirky local stations to add value to its national offerings but offering no revenue-sharing or other financial support in return.

Although one station manager I spoke with welcomed the potential for new listeners and greater exposure that will come from partnering with iHeartRadio, the material benefit to participating college stations will be minimal at best. Maybe alumni in Boston or Boise will tune in and, somewhere down the line, write a slightly larger check to their alma mater, but that’s about it.

In the meantime, the economic and policy supports for independent radio in the U.S. remain threatened, and ever more colleges and universities are selling off their radio stations. In fact, one of the college stations picked up by iHeartRadio, Rice’s KTRU, had its transmitter sold out from under it last year by the university; it has since streamed online and leased the local Pacifica affiliate’s HD radio capacity, which few can receive. In that specific case, distribution through Clear Channel seems like an improvement, but it is difficult to see how this deal does anything to preserve college radio nationally over the long term.

Be that as it may, the deal is further evidence that “radio” is undergoing more change, innovation, and excitement (for better and worse) than perhaps at any time since the 1920s.  All that talk of “convergence” and “revolution” in visual media?  As is often the case, it’s nothing compared to radio, which currently boasts more new platforms, technologies, business models, and programming forms than TV can shake a stick at.

Many people have a tendency to imagine, as they did in the 1950s, that radio is a dying form.  It’s easy to do: none of my students seem to listen to much traditional, over-the-air radio, and if it weren’t for NPR, neither would most of the adults I know. But if Arbitron’s latest survey can be believed, more than 93% of Americans age 12 and above still listen to some radio each week, and in some demographic segments (e.g. Hispanics) the radio market is positively booming as a growth industry.

In terms of infrastructure, you now have your choice of satellite, analog terrestrial, digital terrestrial, and internet distribution offering you local and national programming.  Sitting in your car, you can direct your own programming (e.g. Spotify and Pandora), choose your genre (Sirius XM and most terrestrial radio), listen to local stations from all over the country (iHeartRadio), or just plug in your phone or iPod and listen to your podcasts or your own music library.

We’re also seeing the effect on programming, such as the experimentation we’re seeing in the podcast space and innovative uses of audio in shows like 99% Invisible and Radiolab, and alternative business models such as “cottage networks” like TWiT and success stories like Jesse Thorn’s “Maximum Fun” podcast-based empire.

So while we continue to keep a wary eye on Clear Channel and the other behemoths in the radio industry, let’s also admit that, compared to a decade ago, it’s not the worst time to be a radio listener—or for that matter, a radio scholar.  I don’t heart iHeartRadio, but I still heart radio.