London's Radio Pirates Changed Music. Then Came the Internet. (nytimes.com) 92
Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a story which looks at the ways a network of illegal radio stations changed British music, and wonders where young people are going to make culture now, now that the internet is killing off the pirate radio. An excerpt from the story: Ofcom, the British communications regulator, estimated there are now just 50 pirate stations in London, down from about 100 a decade ago, and hundreds in the 1990s, when stations were constantly starting up and shutting down. Ofcom considers this good news, because illegal broadcasters could interfere with radio frequencies used by emergency services and air traffic control, a spokesman said.
But pirate radio stations also offered public services, of a different sort: They gave immigrant communities programming in their native languages, ran charity drives and created the first radio specifically for black Britons. Pirate radio was also the site of some of Britain's most important musical innovations, introducing pop to the airwaves in the 1960s and incubating the major underground British music trends of recent decades, up to and including dubstep and grime: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Skepta all launched their careers on the pirates.
But pirate radio stations also offered public services, of a different sort: They gave immigrant communities programming in their native languages, ran charity drives and created the first radio specifically for black Britons. Pirate radio was also the site of some of Britain's most important musical innovations, introducing pop to the airwaves in the 1960s and incubating the major underground British music trends of recent decades, up to and including dubstep and grime: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Skepta all launched their careers on the pirates.
seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
and wonders where young people are going to make culture now, now that the internet is killing off the pirate radio.
It has never been easier to promulgate "culture" (e.g. audio) that you make.
It has to be a $%^&load easier for more people to make music with today's tech and put it out on the internet than it was to do it with older tech and try to get it onto "pirate radio".
Re:seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Online it's much harder to get noticed too. There are people on Twitch to stream to no-one for weeks on end, just hoping that they will eventually get a viewer. Pirate radio had much higher listening figures.
I wish people stop using the word "pirate" (Score:1, Insightful)
For example, the sole reason of this word being in the title, because it evokes modern usage of "piracy" as incredibly stupid but accepted word for "copyright violation".
Obviously, when you are using a radio frequency without paying for it, you are actually taking somebody's resource: nobody else can use this band in that area.
Modern copyright infringement does nothing of that sort.
Result: confusion, obfuscation, disinformation, propaganda.
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Many of the early "pirate" radio stations in the UK were in fact broadcasting from actual ships. Radio Caroline [wikipedia.org] comes to mind immediately.
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For anyone who likes a lighthearted movie based on this premise I can only recommend: The Boat That Rocked [wikipedia.org]
That said I know British humour and American humour differ slightly so it may not be everyone's cup of te.... black watered down thing you call coffee.
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>The term "Radio Pirate" was used in the 1960s, it had nothing to do with copyright violations
I know. I wish you and at least 4 other people know how to read. That's exactly the point I am making.
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> I suspect this is why it translated so easily over to other kinds of unlicensed activity, including copyright infringement.
That might be true, but what is more important is the difference between two activities that I pointed.
Re: I wish people stop using the word "pirate" (Score:4, Funny)
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a radio transmitter is a good guy with a stronger radio transmitter?
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Or a good guy with a radio triangular and a gun.
You mean the FCC with the US Marshals in tow?
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This rarely happens in the USA. A bigger transmitter doesn't really help, and jamming the signal, while trivial, is a cat and mouse game.
Radio regulations are plausibly damaged. Here's why. These voices need to be heard, and a diversity of them. But there isn't a lot of spectrum.
With podcasts and online videos, you can develop audiences. Fame is what some "pirates" go for. Others just love the music and/or content and want to disseminate it. Radio is crowded enough, with enough advertising/political/religio
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This rarely happens in the USA. A bigger transmitter doesn't really help, and jamming the signal, while trivial, is a cat and mouse game.
It's only cat and mouse when the service being disrupted isn't something like the military, police or emergency. THEN they do have a history of being rather quick about dealing with the issue and show up with the US Marshals to deal with the problem and confiscate the equipment. It's rather rare, but it has happened a couple of times in my lifetime. They can and do find folks and if they ignore the warnings and fines, can and do take equipment. But usually it's a couple of years before they get to that
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A pirate radio station on a public service frequency is plainly stupid, because no one listens to those frequencies for that kind of content. Sure, if you jam those frequencies, they'll hunt you down like a dog, and for good reason.
But jamming an AM/FM pirate radio station doesn't work. Usually, the jammers bleed onto other adjacent frequencies (or harmonics of them) and are usually illegal themselves. Various governments used to jam each other's signals. One solution is the megawatt Chinese station that re
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which broadcaster's signal is stronger.
The Mexican border blasters.
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pirate pirate pirate
You keep using that word... I don't think that word means what you think it means....
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Obviously, when you are using a radio frequency without paying for it, you are actually taking somebody's resource: nobody else can use this band in that area.
And why would a non-corporate person care??? Its an unused radio frequency. If it was a radio frequency used by a commercial entity (the only "people" who can legally obtain a radio frequency to propagate their positions/culture), they would blot out the pirate station with the kilowatts of electrical power used to broadcast.
This journalist is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This journalist is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
...or maybe this is more complex?
Rather than being the promised burgeoning of the "long tail", the web has become a giant (western)world-wide game of winner takes all.
Go to a council estate in London/Manchester in the 1990s and you would find local culturally relevant microcosms of expression. Those expressions would hold and find resonances in thousands of people in the local area. Some of them take root in a wider sense and give rise to "stars", but it is that expression of a local identity that was the value.
Go to youtube now and you will find 40e6 videos with 10 views, and 10 videos with 40e6 views, posted per day. That isn't a long tail, that is a delta function.
Winner takes all. Diversity wiped out, homogeneity rules. The web is the enabler of that, for better and (more likely) worse.
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Re: How the times have changed (Score:2)
I don't think they would mind as much if the people doing the overrunning came bearing advanced knowledge and technology rather than an old book and ancient superstitions. I for one would gladly accept some expansionist alien overlords looking to enrich themselves while improving us.
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Have you actually been to London?
Of course he's never been to London. He probably thinks driving to the next crappy flyover State is "travel".
None of those idiot A/C's who post nonsense about muslims have ever been anywhere. Why bother when you can stay at home and have Alex Jones and Fox News tell you what to think?
Interference inference (Score:2)
So, they used the phrase "could interfere" with regards to emergency broadcasts. That sounds like excuse wording. At the very least it's unclear wording. Why not 'did' or 'sometimes' interfered?
We're at the tail end here. DID it interfere with critical infrastructure, or was that an excuse used to attack interference with purely commercial broadcasters?
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We're at the tail end here. DID it interfere with critical infrastructure...?
No. In interfered with culture by exposing good English people with ethnic American folk music, causing them to spontaneously start dancing. And not some English dance where you spin in a circle with your back as straight as your upper lip, but rock and blues dancing, a sensual experience involving the whole body, and laying bare emotional exuberance.
But they couldn't stop it, because America, and WWII. So in the end they had to suffer not only the Rolling Stones, but even the Beatles.
They should have been
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So, they used the phrase "could interfere" with regards to emergency broadcasts. That sounds like excuse wording. At the very least it's unclear wording. Why not 'did' or 'sometimes' interfered?
In the past, some did, sometimes. For the future, you use future tense words like "could".
We're at the tail end here. DID it interfere with critical infrastructure,
No, dear, it is an ongoing problem, not the tail end.
or was that an excuse used to attack interference with purely commercial broadcasters?
You don't believe that interfering with licensed broadcasters is a bad thing?
Ofcom considers this good news (Score:5, Informative)
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Most of them probably also knew that if a specific pirate station was KNOWN to interfere with emergency services and someone died as a result there would be nowhere to hide. None of their fans would protect them in that case.
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I think the Ofcom statement is simply a regurgitation of some self-serving bureaucratic mythology.
At this point it might just be a self-driving bureaucratic mythology, since the internet makes moot any continuing practical government interest.
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At this point it might just be a self-driving bureaucratic mythology, since the internet makes moot any continuing practical government interest.
The internet makes government interest in the radio spectrum moot? You've got to be kidding.
Re:Ofcom considers this good news (Score:5, Interesting)
I was an SWL (short wave listener) from the 1950s until about 1990 and I can't recall any "pirate" radio station that could possibly interfere with emergency services or air traffic control.
You appear to have a ham callsign as your ID. Words like "harmonic" and "spurious emission" should be familiar to you.
Most "pirate" broadcasters operated on frequencies in the domestic AM and FM broadcast bands
They had their primary emissions there. The fifth harmonic of 92 MHz is 460MHz, which is a US public safety allocation.
or in the Maritime Mobile bands.
The Maritime Mobile bands are involved in safety of marine operations, and indeed, people use those frequencies for emergency traffic.
None of the "pirate" stations wanted to interfere with anyone else
Maybe. Maybe not. But "want" is not "didn't". If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. The guy who thought it was a great idea to have a mobile cell jammer in his car to try to prevent other people from legal use of their phones in their cars "wished" he hadn't interfered with police and fire communications, I bet -- but didn't consider it until after he was caught.
because then they would suffer interference too. (Radio interference is a two-way street, you see.)
No, I don't see. If I am operating on 3.900MHz and getting splatter from the third harmonic of a pirate AM station on 1.300MHz, how is my operation interfering with him?
I think the Ofcom statement is simply a regurgitation of some self-serving bureaucratic mythology.
The fact that you don't understand the technology doesn't mean the regulators of that technology are ignorant. The fact that you understand so little about radio and yet appear to have a license to use it unsupervised does say something about Canada's licensing system.
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But none of the "pirate" stations that I could hear
You didn't claim you couldn't hear the interference they could be generating, you claimed:
"Could possibly" is a very strong statement. It implies you know something about the issue. You claim to be "very familiar" with spurious emissions and harmonics, and yet you cannot imagine any way that a pirate "could possibly" cause interference.
Whether you can detect harmonics of a station on the other side of the planet or not doesn't prove jack shit about whether they were interfering, and now you show a lack of
Off-shore unlicensed stations (Score:2)
Years ago I happened to stumble upon stories about how some of these "pirate" stations took up residence in offshore military installations left over from World War II. I spent the better part of a day reading about ingenuity and innovation of those stations in particular. To my knowledge we never had anything comparable in the USA, which is a big shame; apparently after the Revolutionary War we ceded our revolutionary mindsets back to British citizens?
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You forgot about the Bible Belt. Yes there where a few pirate radio stations in the 70s and 80s but not a lot.
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Years ago I happened to stumble upon stories about how some of these "pirate" stations took up residence in offshore military installations left over from World War II. I spent the better part of a day reading about ingenuity and innovation of those stations in particular. To my knowledge we never had anything comparable in the USA, which is a big shame; apparently after the Revolutionary War we ceded our revolutionary mindsets back to British citizens?
Actually, we did and still do, but they are mostly low power stations that broadcast over a very narrow area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Off-shore unlicensed stations (Score:2)
I guess you didn't spend enough time reading.
Radio "piracy" began with the advent of regulations of the public airwaves in the United States at the dawn of the age of radio. Initially, radio, or wireless as it was more commonly called, was an open field of hobbyists and early inventors and experimenters. ...
When the "Act to Regulate Radio Communication" was passed on August 13, 1912, amateurs and experimenters were not banned from broadcasting; rather, amateurs were assigned their own frequency spectrum, an
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So in other words people are distracted with other crap then spending time to listen to music.
Really not (Score:2)
As a kid I have many fond memories of sneaking a pocket radio with a cheap earphone out after bedtimes, just lying in bed listening to Radio Luxembourg fading in and out with the atmospheric changes. I would have loved to have been nearer to London so I could have gotten the legendary radio Caroline too, but Luxmebourg was it where I lived, take it or leave it. If you Americans want to know what I'm talking about, watch the movie "Pirate Radio/The Boat That Rocked".
It seems to me that the internet enables r
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Pirate Radio and Drugs (Score:2)
I'm surprised the neither the article nor this discussion mentions the connection between pirate radio and drugs.
By the time I personally encountered pirate radio, in the 1990s, it was essentially run by drug gangs. The radio played music, to get listeners, and "advertised" to those listeners by promoting (also illegal, unlicensed) raves, which were a major distribution venue for the then-popular synthetic drugs, Acid and Ecstasy, and some less common synthetics. (Not pot).
At the turn of the millennium I wa