ARGENTINA: War of powers in the capital

Radio Gráfica, a station in the capital city broadcasting on 89.3 MHz, interviewed an FM Reconquista manager and published a long interview on its website
Radio Gráfica, a station in the capital city broadcasting on 89.3 MHz, interviewed an FM Reconquista manager and published a long interview on its website
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This is one of the many stories of small local stations being overwhelmed by the signal of a more powerful station. In FM, such situations occur when the airwaves are not regulated, but it is surprising if both stations are authorised by the regulator. It is happening in Greater Buenos Aires, the metropolitan area with almost 15 million inhabitants, comprising 15 municipalities and 48 districts.

FM Reconquista is the first and only licensed radio station run by an organised women’s association, and the only non-commercial one in the General San Martín department
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Since September 2020 FM Reconquista, a community station operating on 89.5 MHz in José León Suárez (7 km from the urban area) has beencoveredby Mucha Radio‘s signal. The distance between the two antennas is less than 14 km, but the difference in power is enormous: the community station, on the air since 1988, transmits with 1 kW, the commercial one with 40 kW. Yet both were authorised by Enacom (Ente Nacional de Comunicaciones), which regulates telecommunications in Argentina.

Mucha Radio is a commercial station that used to operate on 97.1 MHz and has moved to 89.5 MHz. It broadcasts from the Colegiales neighbourhood. The station is part of Grupo Octubre, a multimedia company that owns newspapers, medium wave and FM radio stations and a football team
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As long as Arpeggio FM (a classical music station, now closed) was on 89.5 MHz, there were no problems: its antenna was in a historic 18-storey skyscraper located at 651 Uruguay Street, 21 km from José León Suárez (7 km further than Mucha Radio’s), and according to FM Reconquista the station used a power of 5 or 6 kW (compared to the 20 kW authorised). This was explained by Margarita Palacio from the organisation that manages the station, in a lengthy interview that appeared on the website of Radio Gráfica, another station in the capital that broadcasts on a nearby channel, 89.3 MHz.

VENEZUELA: Another uncomfortable voice has been turned off

Another uncomfortable voice has been turned off
The news of Selecta FM’s closure was spread by the journalists’ union in two tweets.
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The repression of President Nicolás Maduro’s regime has claimed another victim: Selecta FM, which operated on 102.7 MHz from Machiques, in the state of Zulia, in the northwest of the South American country. It was deactivated by Conatel (Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones) officials, who seized the equipment on the evening of Friday, 5 March 2021. This was reported by the SNTP (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Prensa), which wrote on Twitter that the station had already been intimidated on 26 February, when its premises were attacked during an interview with an opposition leader. More details in the Swissinfo.ch article.

Selecta continues broadcasting on the web

Another uncomfortable voice has been turned off
On the radio station’s website, you can see to the right of the station’s name the words “online”. But if you scroll down the page you see the image of the app for Android smartphones which still mentions the FM frequency (in the following image).
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SPAIN: Pandemic dries up budgets and radios cut back

Commercial radio stations have lost more than 20 percent of their turnover and need to save money
Pepa Bueno and Carlos Herrera, like other Iberian radio stars, risk a cut in their salaries for the whole of 2021: commercial radio stations have lost more than 20 percent of their turnover and need to save money
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The economic crisis caused by the pandemic is having an impact on broadcasters’ turnover, which according to the InfoAdex study on advertising investment in Spain in 2020 will drop by 22.9% for all stations. This is a total of 111.5 million euros that will be lost and which will impact mainly on the large commercial networks such as Cadena Ser and Cope (which have lost 25.4 and 24.4% respectively). Broadcasters consider intervening again in the contracts of the big stars (including Pepa Bueno and Carlos Herrera), cutting them for the second consecutive year and probably until the end of 2021. And the situation shows no sign of improving, as the January 2021 InfoAdex figures put the decline at 26.7%.

More details on the smaller radio stations in the article by the independent newspaper El Español.

SPAIN: The Prisa Group divests abroad

The Prisa Group divests abroad
Prisa, Spain’s leading media group, is present in 24 countries. The radio brands are Cadena Ser, Los 40 Principales and Cadena Dial
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Before splitting its activities into two branches, the company with the largest number of radio stations in Spain divests abroad. If in the domestic market the Grupo Prisa refuses offers, abroad it has divested three radio and television companies. After Panama, with Los 40 Principales, the divestments continued in Portugal with the Media Capital group, which in addition to radio stations (Comercial and M80) owns a TV chnnel (TVI), an audiovisual production company (Plural) and a portal for digital natives (Iol.pt). In Argentina, instead, it has sold two radio stations in the capital: Radio Continental (104.3) and Los 40 Principales (105.5).

More details in the article of Economia Digital.

IRELAND: RTÉ shuts down DAB but channels continue on digital

RTÉ shuts down DAB but channels continue on digital
Like public radio stations in other countries, RTÉ has allocated a specific portion of the FM band to the main channels. Radio 1 can be heard between 88 and 90 MHz; 2fm between 90 and 92; lyric FM (classical music channel) between 96 and 99 and Raidió na Gaeltachta (in Gaelic) between 93 and 95.
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As we anticipated in 2019 (news here), Ireland’s public broadcaster (Raidió Teilifís Éireann or RTÉ) will switch off the DAB channels on 31 March 2021, but will not close the RTÉ Gold, RTÉ 2XM, RTÉ Radio 1 Extra, RTÉ Pulse and RTÉjr Radio channels, which it will make available on other digital platforms. The decision was taken for three reasons: to reduce costs, the small number of listeners in the DAB band and the fact that RTÉ is the only Irish broadcaster in the digital band. The majority of Irish people (77%) listen to FM radio, compared to 0.5% for DAB. This is according to the latest radio listening survey (JNLR, Radio in a Digital World), conducted by market research institute Ipsos MRBI.

More details here.

UK: The 80s atmosphere of London pirate radio stations comes back to life

London pirate radios
Ten years of London life are reinterpreted through advertisements aired on pirate radio stations
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Thanks to the patience and intuition of Luke Owen, defined by The Guardian as a “musical archivist”, it is possible to relive the atmosphere of London in the Eighties by listening to the commercials aired by London pirate radio stations between 1984 and 1993, which have been collected on two CDs. Owen in fact recorded the free-range and unprofessional commercials that were aired and that, given the lack of professionalism, were considered a boring interlude between one song and another. And yet, listening to them again, one finds a London that has disappeared, in an era in which there was no web, and in which listeners, in order to be informed about the musical events taking place in the city, had pirate radio stations as their only resource: programming of public or official radio stations was only musical, aiming at the English middle class and did not represent the different ethnic groups present in the capital.

Space also for minorities

On the site of the record label Death Is Not The End you can listen to excerpts from the two CDs, available for £ 8 each
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Thus are curious the advertisements in Greek, the news about raves or the advertisements of stores that allow to reconstruct a map of alternative shops. The two CDs are published by the London label founded by Owen: “Death Is Not the End“, which is also the name of a program broadcast online by the London internet radio station NTS Radio.

More details in the Guardian article.

USA: In the 1920s, radio was one of the sectors of the new economy

In the Twenties radio was one of the sectors of the new economy
In the roaring years of radio, RCA had a boom comparable to that of technology companies. But this did not prevent it from being overwhelmed by the crisis of 1929, although the purchase of radio equipment continued to grow, as the article of elEconomista.es explains.
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A study of the stock market capitalization shows that in the Twenties of the 20th century the performance of radio companies was comparable to that of today’s technology companies. In the summer of 1920 commercial broadcasters had started their activity in the United States, so it was imagined that the purchase of receivers would have led to a strong development for the industry. The analysis conducted by Jim Reid, a specialist at Deutsche Bank, reconstructs the performance of the stock of RCA (Radio Corporation of America), whose profits had risen from 2.5 million dollars in 1925 to 20 million in 1928, causing the value of the shares to soar by 700% (from cents in 1921 to ten dollars in 1926). 

HONDURAS: Community radio stations ask for international help

Community radio stations ask for help
In the photo reproduced by the magazine HolaNews, which devotes an extensive report to the situation of community radios, the studios of RDS Radio, a radio station in Tegucigalpa that broadcasts on 88.9 MHz FM
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With the pandemic, many Honduran radio stations have had to suspend broadcasts for four to five months because staff became ill and because of the economic crisis that has forced many companies to close, increasing unemployment. Now, fearing that the situation in the South American country will worsen, Carlos Enamorado, secretary of the Community Media Association of Honduras (AMCH), is asking for international aid to survive. In Honduras today there are more than 50 community broadcasters (not all of them authorized), of which 35 are active, and three community television channels, authorized but not yet operational due to the investments required to start broadcasting. More than 400 non-Community radio and television stations are active in the country. The HolaNews article discusses the situation in detail.

ITALY: Aid to broadcasters should be distributed fairly

Aid to broadcasters should be distributed fairly
The article in Start Magazine examines in detail the decision of the guarantor on funds for broadcasters
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The 50 million EUR allocated by the Italian government to support broadcasters affected by the drastic drop in advertising due to the pandemic have not been distributed fairly. Stopping the decision of the old executive (Conte II) is Agcom, the Italian Communications Authority. The “Fund for emergencies relating to local broadcasters” had been established by Article 195 of the Decree Law of May 19, 2020, but the implementing decree had been issued by the Ministry of Economic Development only on October 12, 2020. The text defined the procedures for the allocation of the contribution, reserving 95% of the resources for the first hundred television stations in the ranking, and dividing the remaining 5% among those from the hundredth place onwards.  This choice, which had already aroused controversy, was rejected by Agcom because it could create market distortions, and the authority hopes to divide it into two portions: one among all the broadcasters meeting the eligibility requirements, in proportion to the score in the ranking list, and the other, in equal parts among the broadcasters, taking care to ensure that the latter portion of resources has a sufficient amount to guarantee adequate subsidizing for the smaller broadcasters.

INDIA: No one listens to digital radio DRM

In India no one listens to digital radio DRM
Europe has chosen Dab, India opted for DRM because it is less expensive to cover such a vast country. But receivers cost too much and the project is stopping Source

After the great enthusiasm for digital broadcasting in the DRM standard, the Indian government is rethinking the technology to be chosen for the future. Digitization began in 2010, and since then three shortwave and 35 mediumwave systems have been activated; the latter can serve an area of 300-350 km each and two or three are sufficient to cover one of the 29 federal states. However, there are few listeners because the receivers cost too much for the purchasing power of the average Indian: the price is at least 3000 rupees (equal to 42 US$), a huge amount considering that in the country one person out of four lives on 12 US$ per month (below the poverty line). India has been penalized by the fact that it was among the first countries to choose DRM because the industry, concentrating on DAB+ (a technology not considered usable in the country, given the vastness of the areas to be covered) has not realized economies of scale and the price of receivers has remained high. Yet the DRM technology could also be used for the FM band.

Further details in the interesting article by Sreejiraj Eluvangal appeared on ultra news, which reports the statements of Ruxandra Obreja, president of the DRM Consortium and Prakash Javadekar, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

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