While sorting through the news to find the subject of today’s roundup I found a terrific article on CNN’s website. The opening lines immediately endeared it to me:
In the age of digital audio, what does good old-fashioned radio still have to offer?
Plenty, according to the creators of RadarCultura, a community-based Web site and a daily three-hour AM radio program broadcast from Brazil’s São Paulo.
“Radio is ‘now,'” says 22-year-old Brazilian André Avorio, who implemented the Web site.
“[Radio] is generally quick and live. This adds a special dynamic to the medium. Moreover, it is still one of the most popular means of mass communication in Brazil. Combining it with the power of the Internet can result in many new possibilities.”
This is another beautiful example of the convergent evolution of radio and Internet. The parallels between the two are becoming more and more interesting in this new age of microblogging and text messages. The real time immediacy of radio is finally beginning to happen on the Internet, and these folks are pulling the two together. In addition to the three hours a day that the show is on the air the staff also blog, Twitter, and moderate their online community.
They have even enacted a policy that I was speculating about on this blog early last year: the entirety of their streaming content is released under a Creative Commons license. As our own battles with the RIAA over music broadcast royalties continue I’m sure that we will see this happening more often, but as far as I can determine at present they were the first to do so.
The radio show and website are a project of The Padre Anchieta Foundation which possesses the largest known archive of Brazilian music in Brazil (over 15,000 songs from the 1920’s to the present day). Add to that the technical innovations that the show is embracing (CoverItLive, Drupal, Archive.org, etc.), and we are looking at the birth of a powerhouse.
Go check out the Cherise Fong’s article, it goes much more in depth than I have room to do here, and paints a very interesting picture of radio’s potential in 21st-century Brazil. What do you think we here in the states could take away from this?
Image courtesy of DavidDennisPhotos.com, used under its Creative Commons license.
Radio 2020 