Music Breaks In. Essays on Music Radio and Radio Music in Finland .

Music Breaks In

Music Breaks InEssays on Music Radio and Radio Music in Finland

Edited by

Vesa KurkelaMarkus Mantere Heikki Uimonen

Department of Music AnthropologyUniversity of Tampere

2010

© 2010 writers

English language consultation by Virginia Mattila and Jouni Luoma

Layout by Joonas KeskinenCover design by Anne Rissanen

Musiikintutkimuksen laitoksen julkaisuja 3University of Tampere

ISSN 1796-685 XISBN 978-951-44-7972-4

Juvenes PrintTampere 2010

CONTENTS

Introduction

Re-Negotiating Music Content

Pirates and the New Public Service Radio Paradigm

Popular Music and Radio. Case Finland

Controlled Tunes. !e Regulation of Music in Public Radio in Finland, United Kingdom and Canada

Radioscape and Re-Regulation

Screaming Sopranos in Radio. Irritating and Pleasant Voices in Early Radio Broadcasting in Finland

De-Monopolizing Finland. !e Changing Contents of Finnish Commercial and Public Radios 1980–2005

From Local to Commercial

Local Music and Music Broadcasting

Music Selection and Corporate Cultures in Finnish Commercial Radios

!e Changing Music Cultures of 1990s Commercial Radios in Finland

Going Digital

DAB Was a Dud – So What?

Lost and Challenged Contents? Music Radio Alternatives and Cultural Practices

7

Vesa Kurkela, Markus Mantere Heikki Uimonen

Introduction

!e relationship between radio and music has drawn particularly little attention from scholars in the "eld of communications and media studies, considering the prominence that music has in today’s radio programming. !is lack of research may be due to theoretical and methodological shortcomings – music may not be approached with the same scholarly toolkit as other radio con-tent. !is collection of writings is an attempt to contribute to the obvious lack of scholarly literature on the topic – all the essays in this anthology focus "rst and foremost on music. Over the past few years, radio channels have practically turned into jukeboxes, and listeners tune in and prefer some channels over others based on the music stream o#ered by the stations. !is, in and of itself, is not as new a phenomenon as it may seem. As early as the late 1920’s, the decade when Yleisradio (!e Finnish Broadcasting Company) was established, the rela-tive share of music out of all radio content was more than 50 %.1 !e music, of course, was not the same as today: !e decades fol-lowing the 1920’s were the heyday of classical music, opera arias, choral singing and 19th century salon music. !e new urban dance music – jazz and schlager – was being blocked from the airwaves in the name of folk enlightenment, an ideology much in force those days in radio programming administration. Music was also seen as secondary to other radio content. Speech was the

1 Eino Lyytinen (1996) “Perustamisesta talvisotaan.” Yleisradion historia 1926–1949 1. osa. WSOY painolaitokset. Yleisradio. pp. 7–128.

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INTRODUCTION

real substance of radio, while music was, above all, material with which to "ll programme time. Since the beginning of the 1960’s, music has gained more and more popularity, even to the extent of dominating everyday radio broadcasting. During the same period, music, in its many styles and forms, has begun to dictate the programme $ow of to-day’s radio channels. In Finland, the legitimation of music as the new substance of radio became obvious in 1985, which is when the Finnish Broadcasting Company lost its monopoly in the country and dozens of commercial radio stations were established, ideologically and aesthetically based on the appeal of popular mu-sic on the listeners. However, it is worth noting that some of the "rst radio entrepreneurs did not consider music the main content of commercial radio. By the mid-1990’s, the breakthrough of music in Finland was sealed by an American import – the hit radio format. Interna-tional media corporations found lucrative business opportunities in the Finnish airwaves, and commercial radio in Finland lost its initial trademark – locality. !e Finnish Broadcasting Company quickly followed this trend and ventured more and more into en-tertaining the listeners with the latest hits. !e competition for listeners has been "erce all through the 1990’s, and not much has changed in the "rst decade of the third millennium. At around 2005, Finnish listeners had the luxury of close to 90 radio stations to choose from, most of which were music radios. !is means that music made up 80 – 90 % of Finn-ish radio content. If this is not enough for some listeners, they can also delve into hundreds of Internet radios, many of which concentrate on a particular musical genre. Furthermore, via the Internet, the average listener can build one’s own interface of mu-sic consumption with MP3s, RSS feeds and streaming audio. Talk radio can be completely avoided. Many radio scholars and elder listeners have expressed their distaste towards new radio. According to the most extreme views, the new music radio does not even remotely satisfy the most el-ementary criteria of radio journalism. When talk on the airwaves only consists of ads, short news clips, weather reports, sports and DJ banter between music tracks, one obvious question arises: where did the real radio disappear?

9

INTRODUCTION

It did not but one can hardly deny the change that has tak-en place. !is anthology of essays is an outcome of the research project titled “Music cultures and corporate cultures: the change in radio music from 1963–2005”, funded by the Finnish Acad-emy of Science from 2007 to 2009. !e scholarly basis of the project is obvious in its very name: on one hand, the change in radio music is scrutinised through the impact that commercial ra-dio had on Finnish music culture – its canons, conventions and practices. On the other hand, however, a crucial theoretical point of departure for our project is the idea of corporate culture guid-ing the mediation of music while also making economic pro"t, the e%ciency of which we call the “quality” of business. Quality culture, in its turn, is a set of de"nitions by which a company sets the criteria of successful commercial enterprise.2

Di#erent art forms de"ne their quality in di#erent ways. !e "lm and recording industries have, since the beginning of the 20th century, measured quality by product sales – a good product is one that sells well and reaches a large (consumer) audience. !is ideology obviously does not match that of “high” culture – in most countries, classical music, for instance, is a state-subsidised art form, which can not rely on sales to guarantee its existence. !us its quality has nothing to do with economic factors. Similar di#erences between corporate cultures apply to ra-dio stations. Comparing the Finnish Broadcasting Company of the 1960s and earlier to today’s radio stations, one quickly gets the picture: even though the company was a media corporation, it was run more by the ideological principles of 18th century En-lightenment than those of modern market economy. Particularly in radio broadcasting, the FBC provided services with no com-petitors, and its funding was guaranteed through the yearly radio and television license fee subject to all citizens with a radio set and issued by the Finnish Parliament. It is obvious that the qual-ity culture of a corporation such as this was worlds away from one based on free market enterprise. !ere was no need, just to men-tion one di#erence, for marketing the service since there was no competition.

2 Cf. Marko Ala-Fossi (2005) Saleable Compromises. Quality Cultures in Finnish and US Commercial Radio. Tampere: Tampere University Press.

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INTRODUCTION

!e FBC’s monopoly provided the company an opportunity to develop a quality culture that was ideologically based on the ideals of the historical conventions of the art world, on one hand, and on the Grand project of folk enlightenment, prominent in the post-world war Finland in arts and letters on the other. Qual-ity was seen to reside in two important aspects of radio program-ming: high artistic standards and general comprehensibility of information disseminated through the radio. In the 1960s, the FBC’s programming displayed a principle of diversity, a kind of something-for-everyone principle guiding its production. !is call for diversity meant the "rst kiss of death for the hegemony of classical music. Pentti Kemppainen’s research shows in great detail how – and through which kind of media-political struggle – one particular programme, Sävelradio, managed to make a di#erence in the FBC’s traditional culture of quality. !e quality of the music radios around us seems to be built on entirely di#erent grounds, the roots of which are in the his-tory of the entertainment industry. To simplify things just a little: the changes that took place in the recording and "lm industries at the beginning of the 20th century, only happened in radio at the end of the century. Quality based on the ideals of the art world and the Enlightenment was replaced by quality based on targeted marketing to ideally growing audiences. !is new quality culture shifts the emphasis on business administration and strategy. Ap-plied to radio programmes, these ideals rate the success of any given radio programme by the number of listeners it manages to attract, particularly within its target group. Commercial radio is mainly funded by ads, and the success of each station depends on how successfully the music mediated by the channel, a part of its personal “sound”, manages to lure the listeners to stay on the channel. One could even argue that today’s music radio does not construct programmes but audiences and target groups. Finnish radio has been in a state of turmoil for nearly three decades. !ere are no signs of the situation settling down – on the contrary. !e Internet provides brand new possibilities for all radio companies. At the same time, the tie between music radios and the recording industry gets more dominant. !is collection of essays does not aim to predict the future, but the analyses pre-

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INTRODUCTION

sented herein certainly give food for thought and help in grasping the future of radio in Finland.

Acknowledgements

!e writers wish to express thanks to a number of scholars and friends who brought inspiration, probing dialogue and intellec-tual contribution to the project: Henrik Otto Donner, Hannu Saha, Pekka Gronow, Pekka Oesch, Paula Karhunen, Arto Vilkko, Marko Ala-Fossi, Hanna-Mari Hieta, Kaarina Kilpiö, and Mika Virkkala are just some of the dear colleagues who deserve to be mentioned in this context.

Finally, it should not go unnoticed that this work would prob-ably never seen its "nish without the generous "nancial support provided by the following institutions: Academy of Finland, Folk Music Department /Sibelius Academy, Department of Music An-thropology /University of Tampere, Arts Council of Finland, Uni-versity Consortium of Seinäjoki, Finnish Cultural Foundation’s South Ostrobothnia Regional Fund, and Niilo Helander Founda-tion.

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Pentti Kemppainen

Pirates and the New Public Service Radio Paradigm

For the short period that it existed almost half a century ago, the pirate radio phenomenon created a strange, golden and revolu-tionary episode in the history of European radio. It is not too much to say that o#shore commercial radio changed the face of European radio. !ese illegal radio stations were operating most-ly from old vessels in international waters. !ey claimed immu-nity from national broadcasting statutes because they operated outside national territorial limits. !eir light music programming forced national Public Service monopoly radios to reconsider their program policy and to increase the amount of popular mu-sic powerfully in their program formatting. !e pirates acquired a sort of romantic Robin Hood image, robbing the rich, bringing pleasure to the poor. !ey brought “energy and excitement. Bringing us everything we know in radio today. !e top 40 format, ad-libbing personalities, playlists, im-aging and responsibility to shareholders for the "rst time” as Paul Burnet, one of the pirate veterans put it. “We were just doing it. It was a lot of fun”, Roger Day, another early pirate veteran re-members. “We were young guys without mortgages and "ghting the government. What more does a 20-year-old want, apart from sex – and we made up for that onshore”. But, of course, as well as the good times pirate radio, with its bubbling output, created commercial radio which was also a new branch of business, albeit a risky and not always so pro"table one. It also established a new way of making radio programmes in Europe, a way which was to become essential to the future development of European radio.

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KEMPPAINEN

It all started in the North. !e "rst pirate, Radio Mercur, be-gan to broadcast test transmissions to Copenhagen in July 1958. !e programmes used on the boat were recorded in studios in Copenhagen, as Danish law only forbidding the terrestrial broad-casting of material, and the boat was outside of territorial waters. Skånes Radio Mercur targeted southern Sweden in Swedish later the same year from the same boat. DCR – Danmarks Commer-cielle Radio soon followed to merge with Radio Mercur. In March 1962 Skånes Radio Mercur changed its name to Radio Syd. !ese were all FM stations. Other pirate stations broadcast on AM in the Nordic region, in the English Channel and international wa-ters surrounding UK.1

From the Finnish point of view, the most important of the Nordic pirates was Radio Nord. It was on air only for sixteen months, from March 8, 1961 to the end of June 1962. Transmis-sions came from M/S Bon Jour, renamed Magda Maria, originally an old German cargo boat anchored in the Almagrundet shallows in the international waters o# Stockholm.2

Radio Nord was the only pirate radio that could be heard in Finland. Even though it was broadcasting in Swedish, it became very popular in Southwest Finland where it could easily be heard. In the last part of this paper, I will focus on Radio Nord’s e#ect on the programming policy of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Oy Yleisradio Ab, YLE), which at that time had a radio monopo-ly in Finland.

1 See e.g. Stephen Barnard (1989) On !e Radio. Music radio in Britain. Milton Keynes: Open University Press; Robert Chapman (1992) Selling !e Sixties. !e Pirates and Pop Music Radio. London and New York: Routledge; Paul Harris (1968) When Pirates Ruled the Waves. London: Impulse Publication Ltd; Ralph C. Humphries (2003) Radio Caroline. !e Pirate Years. !e Oakwood Press; Fredrik Karén (1999) Piratdrottningen. [Pirate Princess. A Book about Britt Wadner and Radio Syd]. Lund: Mattias Bokström Förlag; Pentti Kemppainen (2001) Radion murros. Julkisradioiden kanavauudistus Norjassa, Ruotsissa ja Suomessa. [Radio in the change. Channel reforms among public service broadcasters in Norway, Sweden and Finland]. Helsinki University, Department of Communication, Viestinnän julkaisuja 4; Keith Skues (1994) Pop Went the Pirates. She%eld: Lambs’ Meadow Publications; Gunnar Palm (1994) Vågornas frihet. Från Radio Syd till Radio City. [Freedom of the Airwaves. From Radio Syd to Radio City]. Stockholm, AB Timbro.2 Jack S. Kotschack (1963) Radio Nord kommer tillbaka. Stockholm: Roos förlags AB; Kemppainen (2001).

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PIRATES AND THE NEW PUBLIC SERVICE RADIO PARADIGM

Pirates had a window of opportunity

Pirates were not the "rst radio stations in Europe with music format programming. Commercial Radio Luxemburg had been broadcasting light music since 1929 and began transmissions to Britain in December 1933. It became very popular particularly amongst female and working-class listeners. Radio Luxemburg broadcasted the "rst Top 20 in 1949.3 On Sundays the number of commercial radio listeners exceeded those who stayed tuned to the BBC. It was the "rst sign of the fall of BBC monopoly.4 In Finland, jazz and popular music enthusiasts for the most part had found Colourful 208 Radio Luxemburg long before the time of the pirates. !e role of radio was under change in many ways. Television had started in the mid-50’s and gained momentum in the "rst years of the 60’s. Until then, radio had been the most important electronic medium and had had no serious competitors. Now its role changed. !e television set replaced the radio on the corner table in the living room. Gradually radio lost the competition and simply supplemented television. Television triumphed and radio needed to go through big changes to survive. In the shadow of television, radio created a new life for it-self. Radio remained the fastest news medium until the recent developments, which saw mobile messaging and the Internet. Radio’s music format programming created new audiences, largely amongst young people. Radio became mobile. !e transistor was invented in 1948 and by the beginning of the 60’s this new small electronic bit had made it possible to create a whole new role for radio. Small pocket radios, car radios and portable radios with new transistor technology were widely available in. Transistor technology made radios smaller, cheaper, and more reliable, with less battery con-sumption than radio sets using the old technology. !e number of car radios increased, a development, which paved the way

3 Richard Nichols (1983) Radio Luxembourg. !e Station of the Stars. London: W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd.4 Andrew Crisell (1986) Understanding Radio. London and New York: Routledge, p. 24.

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KEMPPAINEN

for new listening habits. VHF-technology made room for more radio channels. Listening habits changed. Television conquered the evening prime time. Radio became a daytime media. Morn-ings were an especially good time for radio and music was the best sound to wake up to. It was not only technology that created the new radio. Young people have always looked for new things. But in the middle of last century, youth as we see it today did not exist as a concept. When childhood ended, working life began and continued on into old age. “Youth” was to become a social force with a great economical potential. Its power was particularly evident in music and fashion. Young listeners were the "rst to adopt the new radio technology. Portable and pocket radios, alongside tape recorders and vinyl record players, became the channel for the new youth music and culture. !ere was usually just one radio station for each nation state – a state run public service radio company. It held a monopoly position, broaching no competition. !e programming policy of the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yleisradio as well as that of other Nordic monopoly radios was very conservative and high-brow. Radio was there to inform and to educate… but to enter-tain? Broadcasting companies, in their spirit of enlightenment, had almost totally neglected the possible wishes of young audi-ences. Before the days of pirates, radio broadcast mostly serious and classical music. !e most popular music program in the early 60’s was “Lauantain toivotut levyt” or “Saturday Favourites”, where listen-ers’ requests were played from "ve to six pm on Saturday after-noons.5 !e concert-programme was organised in such a way that the last three records were usually pop music. Every single teenag-ers in the country knew that turning on the radio around 17.50 would mean you could hear something interesting: perhaps Paul Anka’s Crying In !e Wind, Elvis singing !e Walls Have Ears or Brian Hyland’s Sealed With A Kiss. But that was about it for the week.

5 Rauno Endén (ed.) (1996) Yleisradio 1926–1996. A History of Broadcasting in Finland. Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society.

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Radio Nord

No wonder that when Radio Nord began to broadcast on March 8, 1961 at 10 am, covering parts of Finland with its signal – many youngsters tuned in to the middle waves to try and "nd a feeble new signal at 495 meters in the middle wave range some-where between Cologne, Stockholm, Brussels and Cairo. Behind the idea of commercial radio on a boat were the Finnish-born Swedish "lm company manager, Jack S. Kotschack, and Gordon McLendon from Dallas, who had built the second biggest US radio chain Liberty Broadcasting System. !ey had the backing of two Texas oil millionaires. Radio Mercur o# Copenha-gen was an encouraging example. !e original idea was to anchor the boat in the Åland Sea so that the broadcast could be heard well both in Sweden and Finland. Instead they started planning a pirate radio outside Stockholm, reaching the big audiences of the capital Sweden as well as the central regions of the country and southwest parts of Finland.6 !ere were big technical problems to overcome; often the Baltic Sea showed its bad temper and there were di%culties with the Swedish authorities as well as the Nicaraguan government un-der whose $ag the ship "rst sailed. !e main newspapers also saw the newcomer as a threat and competitor. But Swedish advertisers were interested in starting cooperation and audiences were abuzz with excitement, waiting to hear the sounds from the sea. And people got what they were longing for. Loads of light music around the clock from a whole new music format station. Nothing like it had ever been heard in these latitudes. Kotschack’s two main programming principles were that nobody should get tired of Radio Nord and that anybody could start or stop listen-ing at any time.7 !at means that nobody should have to switch o# the receiver because he or she is not getting suitable personal entertainment or music at the right time, and secondly that it was possible to tune in at any time without hearing a reference to something that has just gone. For a DJ on Radio Nord there was only the present and what would follow it. In practice this meant

6 Kotschack (1963), p. 12.7 Ibid. p. 123.

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KEMPPAINEN

a constant music mix of all suitable genres without any specialised music programmes. !e record archive was built in according with the American experience of middle of the road stations but it was peppered with rock and jazz to better correspond to the taste of Swedish listen-ers. Radio Nord paid record companies 10 crowns per piece of played music, which was paid in the form of commercial time in the programs. Royalties on the music played were also paid to STIM, in accordance with the contract between the company and the Swedish Composer’s Copyright Bureau. Radio Nord created also its own hits. !e most prominent example of this was “Putti Putti” sung by Jay Epae, which was number one in the Swedish singles chart in August 1961 and sold 50 000 copies in Sweden and a lot in other Nordic countries, too, where it also headed to the top of the charts. It was number one in the Finnish singles chart in autumn 1961. One of Kotschack’s programming principles was to avoid long periods of talk. One minute would be the maximum for DJs as well as for commercials. !ere would be no more than 20 per-cent of advertisements, which meant 12 minutes per hour. News an the top of every hour was the only exception with a maximum three minutes, while up-to- date news could be read at any time. News slots could be decided at very short notice. !e model came from McLendon’s $agship KLIF in Dallas, which had the motto: Tomorrow’s Newspaper Now. Every piece of news should be put out while it was burning hot. News editors worked in shifts in Stockholm and on board. !e station had also corre-spondents around the country. Newsgathering also took place by listening to international radio stations. Radio Nord was the "rst station in Sweden to tell of the "rst man in space – Juri Gagarin’s space $ight. Domestic news was gathered by listening to SR news transmissions and in some cases by ringing the police or the "re brigade. It was with this kind of program thinking that Radio Nord began to do battle with Swedish Radio’s two channels and the new media, television. Swedish Radio had started to build its sec-ond program in 1955, at the same time as television.8

8 Stig Hadenius (1998) Kampen om monopolet. Stockholm: Prisma, p. 184.

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Some of Radio Nord programmes, mostly news, were broad-cast live from the ship, but 90% of them were pre-recorded in Stockholm. !ree studios in Stockholm were equipped with microphones, Gates record players, Ampex tape recorders for re-cording the programmes, and Spotmasters for repeated material: commercials, features, jingles. Record tapes and other up-to-date material such as the latest newspapers were sealed in a waterproof canister daily and around noon a light aeroplane carried and dropped it in the sea near the ship, from where “the drop” was "shed up. !e ship was an old 134-foot German cargo vessel. It was converted into a radio ship in Hamburg. Studios, transmitter hall, crew and radio sta# quarters were built in the hold. !e station had a10 kW transmitter with an aerial in a 125-foot mast. Gales and windy storms tried to break the spirit of the pirate; some-times it got into distress but always survived. !e sta# was not recruited from the Swedish Radio. Radio voices were unknown to the audience when they started in Radio Nord. Most of them were newcomers in the radio business. Before Radio Nord there were no professional disc jockeys in Sweden, because the whole music format program was unknown to Swed-ish Radio. To get a better feel of what was happening on air, disc jockeys were their own technicians. !e station became immensely popular. In June 1961, "ve months after it began, 15–24 year-olds listened more to Radio Nord than to all the other Swedish Radio channels put together. !is in spite of the fact that at the beginning of May, SR had started special light music programming called “Melodiradion”. Late Saturday night was an especially good time for Radio Nord: three out of four radio sets were tuned in to 495. Sunday after-noon hit the jackpot when Radio Nord had more listeners that the combined two SR channels.9

9 IMU, Institut för Markandsundersökningar, "gures referred in Kotschack’s book.

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KEMPPAINEN

The Empire strikes back

But success did not come easily and was not long lasting. Of course, neither the Swedish state establishment nor the Swed-ish Radio (Sveriges Radio, SR) could tolerate Radio Nord and other pirate radios in the long run. !ey were beyond the reach of Swedish law and ran contrary to the Swedish Radio monopoly – and they were popular. At that time it was politically unthink-able to run commercial broadcasts inside Swedish territory, only public service radio "nanced by listener licences was allowed – as was the case in many other European countries as well. !e life of Radio Nord was made di%cult and hampered in many ways. Radiotelephone tra%c to the boat was forbidden, some of most popular programs were jammed, big advertisement agencies boycotted the station; artists were threatened with conse-quences if they performed on 495. SR director Olof Rydbeck made the con"dent pronounce-ment one month after the start of Radio Nord that he now saw that Radio Nord had made a breakthrough and was a success amongst radio listeners. Because of public opinion it was impos-sible to stop it broadcasting without giving something in compen-sation. !e only possibility was to beat the opposition at its own game. !e Swedish Radio had immediately to start light music programming to entice listeners away from Radio Nord. In less than two months after the "rst accords from Radio Nord, Swed-ish Radio started its own popular music programming under the name “Melodiradion”. From May 5, 1961 onwards Melody Radio "lled the breaks in P2 in 6 am to 5 pm. It would not have to be a direct copy of Radio Nord, Rydbeck added. SR and the state had a common interest and SR was hastily granted two million crones to build a competing music radio service for SR. Program director Nils-Olof Franzén admits in his memoirs10 that there would never have been a “Melodiradion” on Swedish Radio without Radio Nord. Actually SR copied the music for-mat of Radio Nord for its own new service. It also duplicated the most popular Radio Nord programs: Topp 20 became Tio i Topp in SR, De Tio became Svensktoppen etc. But there were also dif-

10 Nils-Olof Franzén (1991) Radiominnen. Stockholm: Natur och kultur.

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ferences because of working traditions and the fact that SR had more money to carry out the project. In Sveriges Radio, e.g. DJs worked with technicians on the other side of the studio window. Programmes also had their own producer. By starting Melody ra-dio SR doubled its broadcasting hours.

“Lex Radio Nord”

!e pirates triggered the Swedish authorities into adopting an anti-pirate Bill, “Lex Radio Nord”.11 According to the law it was forbidden to broadcast from open sea or aircraft in a way that would prevent or disturb other radio broadcasting in the Nordic countries. !e law also criminalized all co-operations with such a broadcaster. In Sweden majority backing for the law comprised the Social Democrats with the Centre Party and the Commu-nists voting in favour and the Liberals and Conservatives voting against. !e other Nordic countries followed. On July 3, 1962 during a ministerial meeting between Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the Nordic countries agreed to bring their anti-pirate laws into e#ect at midnight on July 31, 1962. !e law was known in Denmark as “Lex Mercur”, in Sweden and Finland it was called “Lex Radio Nord”.12 After just 16 months on air, one month be-fore the implementation of the Bill, at midnight on the last day of June 1962, Radio Nord played “Hit the road Jack” as its "nal number and 495 m on the medium waves fell silent. But it was not the end of the story but the beginning. “Do not think that Radio Nord is dead” Jack Kotschack starts his book. “Every day Melody Radio broadcasts, it is actually Bon Jour you hear. Every happy tune sent today by the Swedish Radio is an echo from sea, from a small weather bitten ship.”13 One week before Radio Nord was shut down, Midsummer night 1962, SR established night music radio. And one week after

11 In Sweden: Lag med förbud I vissa fall mot rundradiosäbdningar på öppna havet m.m.; given Stocholms slot den 6 juni 1962 (Nr. 278/1962), in Finland: Laki aavalla merellä tapahtuvan yleisradiotoiminnan rankaisemisesta, 1962/400.12 Kemppainen (2001), p. 81.13 Kotschack (1963), p. 7.

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the Radio Nord transmitters were turned o#, on July 7, Melodira-dion started broadcasting to parts of Sweden on FM frequencies, which was the start of the new SR Melody radio channel P3.

At the same time in Finland

Sinking the pirates did not help. Radio Nord and other pirates had already infected audiences with their light music virus. !e only remedy for this was for Public Service radios to radically re-vise their programming policy and increase their popular music output. And that is what they did. Radio Nord could be heard well in Southwest Finland and with a good aerial in Helsinki, too. It got a lot of sympathy in the newspapers and had a devoted crowd of supporters among the young. It also, of course, caused Yleisradio to think what should be done. Technical director Paavo Arni was the "rst inside Yleisra-dio to understand what was happening. He visited Stockholm in April 1961 to "nd out what actually was going on in Sweden. At the time Radio Nord was at its heyday. Arni wrote a memorandum14 to the management of Yleisra-dio concerning his visit. Prior to that he had been listening care-fully to the station at his home in Helsinki. In his memo Arni is quite revolutionary. He writes that after a hard days work, people do not want to concentrate on cultural programmes, lectures or concerts. !e want entertaining background music. And he said that this was just how Radio Nord was making its programmes. He waxed almost poetical in describing how entertaining music increases the will and the ability to work, improves a nation’s dili-gence and output. Light music provides a positive service to the whole of commercial and industrial life, Arni exclaimed. It also serves the authorities with its up-to-the-minute bulletins. According to Arni, Radio Nord has found radio personalities who do not talk as though they are addressing a full exhibition hall but to a single person or to a small family. Often they also read letters from listeners, giving the programme a very personal

14 Paavo Arni (1961) Radio Nord ja sen meille antamat opetukset. [Radio Nord and what it taught us]. Yleisradio, P.M. 10.5.1961, ELKA (!e Central Archives for Finnish Business Records).

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touch, making you feel at ease and entertained. Such an approach increases audience "gures. He suggests that at "rst, Yleisradio could "ll its daily mid-day pauses with light music. Swedish radio "lled the gaps too late and handed the initiative to the pirate, Arni writes. He also points out that when the principles of informative, educating end entertain-ing programming were created years earlier, times were di#erent. It would also be possible to advertise serious programmes within the light program format. In his memo Arni suggests not only "lling the daily empty gaps but also creating a second and even a third service as soon as possible. If there were extra expenses they could be met by in-creasing the licence fee or by allowing advertisements. A plan15 was made to increase broadcasting time. In Septem-ber 1961 the time was not ripe to approve commercial "nancing for Melody Radio but it was necessary to "nd the money from licence fee income. !ere would be an increase of six hours on weekdays and a few hours at weekends – altogether 36 hours a week. According to the plan, programming should be thoroughly entertaining: schlager, light opera, dance music, marches and, if possible, many short new news bulletins. !e project should start as soon as possible after the training of recruits. After one or two months a poll should be conducted and if the audience was satis-"ed, the licence fee could be made higher.

Commercial Melody Radio?

In Finland, talk about commercials was not as irrelevant as it was in Sweden. Advertising as early as 1956 "nanced the "rst television experiments in Finland. A commercial TV-company, Mainos-TV was established in the spring of 1957 to "nance the building of a TV-network and studios for Yleisradio. It was be-coming expensive to launch new television operations and they

15 Koskiluoma, Schildt, Arni, Zilliacus, Vallila: ”P.M. ääniradion lähetysajan lisäämisestä ULA-ohjelmaverkon 1 kautta” [Memorandum on increasing broadcast time in FM] 18.9.1961.

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could be partially "nanced via advertising. Commercial TV was operating in window slots on the only Yleisradio TV-channel. A committee set up in Yleisradio discussed in great depth the question of radio advertisement.16 !e committee realised that audiences had long been hoping to listen to a radio that sounded like the pirates. !e new light music service could be organised into an a%liated company, and should have no competition. Plans to allow competition in radio were under preparation, in-cluding the political level. Commercial TV, Mainos-TV had made plans for commercial radio as early as 1958, but they were postponed. In winter 1962, after negotiations with Yleisradio, Mainos-TV suggested that it could make "ve hour-long commercial program windows for light music and advertisements inside Yleisradio’s radio channel, to be organised as it was in television. When the threat from pirates was over and the political threat of loosing the monopoly was abating –temporarily at least – talks and plans about "nancing commer-cial radio were buried. But the idea of adding a light music programming was still abroad. Koskiluoma’s kommittee had suggested that increas-ing program time was not enough. Radio has to serve di#erent audience groups, which was why they should have the chance to choose between serious and light alternative. !is was a new idea at the time. It took one and a half year after the plan was "nished before Melody Radio was started. In May 1963 the Board of Governors suggested a considerable increase in the number of broadcasting hours and the Administrative Council decided to set up Melody Radio, “Sävelradio” on May 2, 1963. When the decision was made, things started happening at speed. !e Head of Melody Radio heard about his nomination two weeks earlier. !ere were no rooms to work in, there were no workers and there was no record archive for the needs of the new service. And above all, there was very little Finnish recorded light music. In actual fact the whole year’s domestic record production

16 Christo#er Schildt, Ville Zilliacus & Eero Vallila (1961) “Melodiradio” ja sen rahoittaminen mainonnalla. P.M. [On "nancing Melody radio by advertisement] Helsinki: Yleisradio 16.8.1961, ELKA.

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could be played through in two days. One of the "rst tasks was to go to the best record shops in the downtown and empty their shelves. !e entire "rst Melody Radio sta# was composed of mu-sic professionals; musicians who had played in the same bands. !ere was no training and actually those involved had little idea of what they should do. Just to "ll in the huge open spaces in the program schedule with light music. In the beginning there was only an increase of six hours a day. Broadcasts sounded quite strange, with long pauses between the announcer and the music. !e explanation for this was that the announcers were working in two languages. First they opened the Finnish channel, made the announcement, shut the Finnish channel, opened the Swedish channel, made the announcement in Swedish, shut the Swedish channel and put the music on. !ere was a lot of dead air, but so what, there was also a lot of new light music. Within half a year, in the autumn, the program had reached its designed volume. !e channel pro"les, too, started to be di-versi"ed so that it was possible to hear Sävelradio in parallel pro-grammes from six am to six pm and late in the evening. In a year Yleisradio’s radio output had doubled. It is not too much to say that setting up Melody Radio was one of the big turning points for Yleisradio. Rock’n’roll was born in the mid 50’s and it had a long way to come to reach the Nordic countries. But gradually it did come. Paul Anka visited Finland in 1959, Elvis never did. !e Roll-ing Stones visited the country for "rst time in 1965, !e Beatles never did. !e number of rock and pop programmes increased on Melody Radio and young DJs joined the ranks of presenters. Melody Radio gave strong impetus to the domestic record indus-try and Finnish rock stars and bands were becoming increasingly visible. In Denmark the story of pirate radios was not over. Radio Mercur was the "rst o#shore station to "ght the law and con-tinued broadcasting. !e Danish authorities decided to act and on 15th August 1962 a force of armed Danish police boarded the Lucky Star, Radio Mercur’s ship. !e ship was impounded and

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later all the equipment was taken o# the ship.17 Danmarks Radios !ird Program “Musikradioen” started in the beginning of 1963. Britt Wadner, director of Radio Syd, was "ned in December 1962, for a second time in the February of the next year and in 1965 she was imprisoned for a month, but she refused to shut down the station. She continued to direct the pirate radio com-pany from jail. !ere were furious demonstrations by Radio Syd supporters and a lot of publicity. Finally, April 1, 1966, the sta-tion was closed down.18 In the English Channel the "rst pirate was Radio Veronica. It started regular transmissions targeting Amsterdam in Decem-ber 1959. !e same ship broadcast the "rst ever pirate programme for English audience when CNBC (Commercial Neutral Broad-casting Co.) starting in February 1961. Radio Caroline, the "rst British pirate station, began broadcasting from a ship o# the coast of Essex in March 1964. Altogether, there were twenty pirate ra-dio stations broadcasting to the UK. !ey we built on old ships and World War II o#shore anti-aircraft and other defence forts in international waters and most of them were active between 1964 and 1967.19 On July 13, 1967 the BBC announced that their "rst local radio station would begin operations from Leicester on Novem-ber 8. It was followed by many other local radios. On August 15, 1968 !e Marine etc., Broadcasting (O#ences) Act becomes law. Radio London closed with the Beatles ‘A Day in the Life’ and thousands of fans gathered at Liverpool Street Station to wel-come its DJ’s after the station closed down. On September 30, the BBC’s new pop music service Radio One came on air with ex-pirate DJ’s such as Tony Blackburn, John Peel and Emperor Rosko.20

17 Henrik Noergaard (2003) Piraten i aeteren. Radio Mercur og Danmarks Commer-cielle Radio Dansk reklamradio fra Oeresund 1958–62. Odense: Danmarks Gra"ske Museum/Dansk Pressmuseum.18 Karén (1999).19 Skues (1994); John Hind & Stephen Mosco (1985) Rebell Radio. London: Pluto Press; Stuart Hebry & Mike von Joel (1984) Pirate Radio !en and Now. Dorset: Blandford Press.20 Simon Gar"eld (1998) !e Nation’s Favourite. !e True Adventures of Radio 1. London: faber and faber.

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Discussion

Pirates were the "rst step towards the deregulation of sound ra-dio. !e blow was not powerful enough, however, to knock out the radio monopolies – but it was de"nitely a decent punch and enough to make them totter. !ere was so much enthusiasm, so-cial revolution, artistic ambition and pure joy of making some-thing new that it could not be bypassed or totally ignored. !e whole atmosphere, however, was light-years away from what followed in the commercial radio business. Now we can see that commercial radio stations are in the business of making money, not in the business of playing music or having fun. In the begin-ning it was quite the opposite. !e pirates succeeded in opening a new gate to the develop-ment. !is time it still happened within the con"nes of the Public Service monopoly companies – but the price was high. !ey had to go through the kind of facelift they could not have imagined. It was a paradigm shift inside the Public Service Regime. !e change was so big that it was only a matter of time before the ra-dio "eld was opened up to the real competition between the two big players of today: commercial radio and Public Service radio. With the help of pirate radio the whole idea of radio, the bal-ance between information and entertainment started to change around 1960. A change in electronic media is holistic. When you move one part, all the other parts move. Pirate radio was the "rst attempt to increase pressure for the shift from the Old order to the New in the way McQuail et. al. (1990) put it.21 !e Old order meaning national monopolies, full service houses and paternal-istic programming and high quality public service, and the New order meaning the opposite: commercial competition, fragmenta-tion, pro"led radio stations and consumer oriented programming, light entertainment and a lot of music. !is was the "rst time that European radio responded to the call of the masses. !ey delivered what the listeners wanted. In

21 Denis McQuail and the Euromedia Research Group (1990) Caging the Beast: Constructing a Framework for the Analysis of Media Change in Western Europe. European Journal of Communication, Vol. 5 (1990), p. 313–331; see also Pentti Kemppainen (1998) “!e Channel Reform of Public Service Radio in the Nordic Countries.” Journal of Radio Studies/Vol.5, No.1, pp. 133–149.

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saying this we have to remember that the old school radio has always had, and still has its supporters, classical music its lovers, new addicts have always wanted more news than any channel can o#er. It all is still there. But what the pirates did was add a smile to the sullen face of old-time radio. And this would not have hap-pened without that limitless amount of vinyl records, the sweet taste of forbidden fruit, romantic young men talking from a lone-ly boat on a rough sea…

(!e article was previously published in Radio Journal vol 7 issue 2, 2009.)

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Pentti Kemppainen

Popular Music and Radio

Case Finland

Introduction

!is paper studies the changes in the music policy of YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, before and after the deregula-tion of radio operations in Finland. YLE’s transformation process started long before its monopoly ended and was mainly focused on keeping the young audience. In the West, there were originally two ideal types of radio: the European public service broadcasting (PSB) radio and the American commercial radio. Fees "rst charged from the radio receiver owners and, later on, only from the TV set owners "-nanced the public service broadcasting radio operation. Com-mercial radio was "nanced with advertising income. Until the 1980s, there was public service radio monopoly in the Nordic countries. !ere were no commercial radio stations and advertis-ing in the public service radio was not allowed. In the other Nor-dic countries, the deregulation process started "ve years earlier in Finland by the introduction of non-commercial community radios. When radio programming was reformed, popular music – or the lack thereof – has played a critical role in rather many occa-sions. !e two very di#erent worlds – that of the old and of the new radio – collided for the "rst time in the early 1960s, when YLE, scared by the popularity of pirate radio stations, made a hand brake turn towards popular music radio. !e change was far-reaching. It meant the beginning of the end of the old regime.

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Until that time, the mission of radio in Finland was to in-form, educate, and entertain. !e model came from the BBC. According to YLE´s past Concession the company was not only to inform and educate, but also to serve “elevating and innocent entertainment especially in regard to the needs of those living far from business centres.” So, the traditional public service program-ming approach of that time included a lot of highbrow talk, sym-phonies, and operas, but not so much popular music. !at kind of thinking was in drastic con$ict with how radio was seen in the US, where radio stations were in the business of making money, not even in the business of playing music,1 and not to even speak about any other, more expensive programme content. To make money with radio, you had to conduct a market research and "nd a pro"table target group. !e most e%cient tool to do this was to play music and the most money-spinning way of playing music was a music format radio. It was business as usual, a market mechanism to collect a group of consumers, or a seg-ment formed by a certain kind of listeners – and deliver it to the advertiser. !e impetus for a change came from outside the public service radio monopolies. Pirate radio stations forced the radio monopoly to modify its output towards more entertaining music programming. And, there also was the problem of listeners long-ing for more pop music. !is all took place at a time, when there was no real competition within the country boundaries. In Europe, the actual broadcasting deregulation process started in the late 1970s. Alternative radio forms, such as local and community radios, emerged. !e pressure for a change was so strong that, in many European countries, the alternative citizen and community radio stations were established and, only thereaf-ter, regulation for such radio operation was established.2 Four phases can be seen in the development of YLE towards a modern, more entertaining multichannel radio company with

1 Eric W. Rothenbuhler (1987) “Commercial Radio and Popular Music.” In Popular Music and Communication, ed. James Lull. Newsbury Park, Beverly Hills, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, p. 81. 2 Els De Bens & Vibeke G. Petersen (1992) “Models of Local Media Develop-ment”. In Dynamics of Media Politics, eds. Karen Siune & Wofgang Treuetzshler. London: Sage, p. 159.

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a variety of content, still not forgetting its public service obliga-tions. Popular music programming was the spearhead towards further developments. At the very beginning, there was a strong increase in popu-lar music and it started with by Sävelradio Melody radio in 1963. !is was made possible by building a Parallel Service, which covered all of Finland. !e second phase took place at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, as the "ght for the company’s political hegemony also gained strength in music programming. !ird, towards the end of the 1970s, the "ght for young audience in-creased. Rockradio and other programmes were established but could not stop the drain of young audience. Now they had their record and cassette players. Next, in 1985, the broadcasting in-dustry was deregulated and new commercial radio stations took the young audience by force. Finally, only "ve years after this, in 1990, YLE made its move by reorganising its radio channels and started a youth channel Radioma"a,3 with which it temporarily gained initiative and won its share of young listeners.

Culture

!e "rst change meant a radical increase in popular music in YLE’s radio programming. !e building of two separate distribu-tion networks and the pro"ling of the two channels made this possibly. !ese di#erentiated public service channels can be seen as the initial stage for today’s multichannel public service radio. !e social context of the new programming policy was ob-vious. !e baby boomers, the biggest age group in the Finnish history, born in the "rst "ve years after the World War II4 were now in their teens. Now youth was an independent phase of life –

3 For a more detailed discussion of this process, see Pentti Kemppainen (2001) Ra-dion murros. Julkisradioiden kanavauudistus Norjassa, Ruotsissa ja Suomessa. [Radio in time of change. Channel reforms among public broadcasters in Norway, Sweden and Finland]. Helsinki University, viestinnän laitos, Viestinnän julkaisuja 4; and Pentti Kemppainen (2008) “Kun vanha ja uusi radio törmäsivät”. [When Old and New Radio Collided] In Radio- ja televisiotutkimuksen metodologia. Näkökulmia sähköisen viestinnän tutkimiseen, eds. Heidi Keinonen, Marko Ala-Fossi, & Juha Herkman. Tampere: Tampere University Press, p. 97.4 See Antti Karisto (ed.) (2005) Suuret ikäluokat. Tampere, Vastapaino.

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instead of having earlier been just an introductory phase to adult-hood. As music and fashion guided its own independent subculture, this new youth generation was also the "rst consumer generation of the emerging popular culture. !e young had more money than ever before; their culture was international and got its idols from the West. !ey also easily adopted the new technology: tape recorders, portable radios, and cassette players, which all made it easier to listen to popular music. As a generation, from the mid-1960s on, the baby boomers went through a big societal and economical change in Finland. !ere was a strong process of urbanization in society. !e whole nation was in motion. !e majority of the generation was born in the countryside, but moved to cities or to Sweden to "nd work and a better standard of living. As popular culture emerged, the change was also cultural. According to Matti Virtanen,5 at the age of seventeen, you have your personal key experience. It gives your life the basic orienta-tion, which follows you the rest of your life. !is key experience includes values, symbols, and ways of behaviour. For this post-war generation, the new youth culture o#ered a whole new way of liv-ing, which was strongly connected to music. !e baby boomers remember the rest of their life Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, Paul Anka’s Adam and Eve, Bobby Rydell’s Sway, Elvis’ Surrender – or even Jay Epae’s Putti Putti. !e baby boomers also are the Beatles generation. !e youth had a new kind of relation to music. Music pro-duction was industrialised, which meant “a shift from active mu-sic production to passive pop consumption”, emphasising a con-trast between music as an expression and music as a commodity and de"ning the twentieth century pop experience.6

!e post-war introverted and isolated Finnish society opened in 1955–1965 and a national uniform culture turned into a more

5 Matti Virtanen (2001) Fennomanian perilliset. Poliittiset traditiot ja sukupolvien dynamiikka. [Heirs of Fennomans. Political Traditions and Generation Dynamics]. Helsinki: SKS, p. 357.6 Simon Frith (1987) “!e Industrialization of Popular Music”. In Popular Music and Communication, ed. James Lull. Newbury Park, Beverly Hills, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 53–54.

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multifaceted one. As one manifestation of this, the control of foreign trade was softened and foreign records and cinemas were imported into Finland in quantity.7 Record players were scarce in the 1960s. Record sales stayed around one million copies a year, half thereof being domestic. !e balance between domestic and foreign records remained the same throughout the period. !e role of jukeboxes increased remarkably,8 when the yearning for pop music intensi"ed among young people. In many ways, the year 1963 was a turning point in the his-tory of popular music in Finland.9 !e music taste of the Finn-ish audiences started to di#erentiate. It was not only the year of breakthrough for the Beatles. Domestic guitar pop and Finnish tango were also extremely popular. !e C-cassette player was "rst launched in 1963, introducing a less expensive way of listening to music. Now it was possible to buy inexpensive music cassettes almost at any service station.10 New transistor technology made it possible combine the ra-dio and cassette player into a portable radio/tape player and in-stall one in the automobile dashboard. !is meant new circum-stances for radio listening and, especially, for listening to music. !is was very important at the time, when the TV set took radio’s place on the family’s living room corner table. !e role of radio changed. Earlier, best listening time was in the evenings and on weekends. Evenings had now become television prime time. In-stead, morning and daytime radio and mobility created a new state of a#airs for the rise of a brand new popular radio. In the 1950s and 1960s, the radio scene was characterised by the lack of entertainment programming and this could be seen in the dissatisfaction, which was channelled through pirate radio sta-tions. !e European o#shore radio phenomena originated from Scandinavia. !e idea was to circumvent legislation by situating

7 Jari Muikku (2001) Musiikkia kaikkiruokaisille. Suomalaisen populaarimusiikin äänitetuotanto 1945–1990. [Music for omnivorous. Finnish popular music record-ing production in 1945–1990] Helsinki: Gaudeamus, p. 89.8 Muikku (2001), pp. 100–101. 9 Vesa Kurkela (2003) “Eriytyneiden yleisöjen aika: vuodet 1963–90”. [!e Time of Di#erentiated Audiences in 1963–90] In Pekka Jalkanen & Vesa Kurkela Popu-laarimusiikki.Helsinki: WSOY, p. 463.10 Pekka Gronow & Ilpo Saunio (1990) Äänilevyn historia. [Gramophone Record History] Porvoo – Helsinki – Juva: WSOY, p. 468.

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a broadcasting vessel in international waters. Actually, the original idea was not only to broadcast popular music from a pirate vessel, but also to create political pressure on the local governments to start a deregulation process in the Nordic countries.11

!e "rst pirate, Radio Mercur, started broadcasting to Co-penhagen in 1958, but the most signi"cant of the Nordic pirate radios was Radio Nord. It operated only 16 months from a vessel anchored outside the territorial waters of Stockholm. !e amaz-ingly endless $ow of pop music became very popular, in particu-lar amongst the young. On Saturday nights, three of four Swed-ish listeners tuned in the late dance music programme of Radio Nord.12 !e popularity of the station was unbearable to the au-thorities and also to the public service radio management. But the fact that there were also news and radio commercials, this simply was too much. In 1962, a Nordic act was passed to outlaw the o#shore pirate stations. !e Swedish monopoly station Sveriges Radio copied the most popular parts of Radio Nord, for example, the chart pro-grammes into its own programming. !e company had already increased pop music programming in chorus with Radio Nord. Sveriges Radio’s Melodiradion, a music radio, was its "rst pop music broadcast under various titles. It later developed into P3, a pop music radio channel starting one week after Radio Nord was silenced.13

In Finland, the pressure was not as acute as in Sweden, be-cause Radio Nord could only be heard in the southwestern parts of the country and in the capital, but only with a good antenna. But, to get back the initiative, YLE followed the Swedish exam-ple and, in early May of 1963, established Sävelradio (Melody Radio). Right away, to start with, this increased popular music to six hours a day, to certain degree compensating the void. In 1965, the building of a nation-wide parallel FM network was "nished and most of the new programming could be broadcast

11 Marko Ala-Fossi (2004) Saleable Compromises. Quality Cultures in Finnish and US Commercial Radio. Tampere University Press, p. 156.12 Jack S. Kotschack (1963) Radio Nord kommer tillbaka. Stockholm: Roos förlagss AB, p. 177.13 Alf Björnberg (1998): Skval och harmoni. Musik i radio och TC 1925–1995. Stiftelsen Etermedierna i Sverige, p. 177.

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there through. At the beginning, Sävelradio had three workers to put together its record concerts, and they all had a jazz musician background. At that time, the record industry in Finland was rather small in scale, so there was not enough domestic music to play. A typi-cal radio concert was formed so that "rst a record by a foreign artist was played, then an instrumental record, followed by a domestic artist. !ree records, one after another, and, then, the announcer announced the next three records. !e company had a record library of 20,000 copies, but only a part thereof was al-lowed to be played in the melody radio concerts. So, they had to acquire a record library of their own in a hurry. Because the music editors were jazz musicians, there was a lot of swing music: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, as well as big bands like Mantovani, Georg Melachrino, 101 Strings, and André Kostelanets and singers like Billie Holi-day, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Ella Fitzgerald. Light opera music and melodies from musicals and pop music were included as well. Some of the music was in-house production, but it was only on the tapes and, therefore, more elaborate to use on a daily basis.

Politics

!e year 1968 can be seen as a kind of a culmination for the radi-cal youth movement and cultural radicalism in Europe, Das Tolle Jahr, with powerful political movements: !e spring in Prague, May in Paris, violent demonstrations in West-Berlin, the occupa-tion of Czechoslovakia by East block military, and the murder of Martin Luther King; the hippies, the peace movement, and the rock generation. It was a turbulent time, and radio was an active part in it. Ta-pani Suominen has studied radical youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s. One of his main theses is that media does not only re-

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$ect societal change but is a critical part of it.14 !is certainly was true in Finland in the late 1960s and YLE was not a bystander in what happened in the society, on the contrary. Since its establish-ment in 1926, YLE had had a Reithian paternalistic ethos and a programme policy with a very highbrow pro"le, similar to other State-run public service radio companies in Europe. In music, this meant that classical music gave the main tone to radio music pro-gramming. !e Finnish society as a whole went through a vigorous proc-ess of modernisation and urbanisation. At the same time, there was a strong conservative right wing lobby in the country arguing for a bourgeois hegemony. !is could also be seen in the radio. After the World War II, there had been political arm wrestling, and, as a result, leftist General Director Hella Vuolijoki was "red. But it was nothing to match up to the appointment of Eino S. Repo as Director-General of YLE. Repo, a cultural liberalist, brought with him a bunch of new ideas which actually, as seen today, were not especially radically leftist, but rather represented bourgeois liberalism. His period in the YLE management from 1965 to 1975 was called Reporadio, a nickname that had pre-dominantly a negative connotation in the public discourse of the time. In 1967, the Long-Range Planning Committee, chaired by Repo, stated that YLE should be a vigorous and active actor in the community to which it belonged, consciously agitating discus-sion. “However, it must not endeavour to create and form opin-ions but o#er its audience rich and versatile material for personal views”.15 !e committee saw that a good cultural programme also is entertainment and that a well-made entertainment programme is culture. Repo applied Bertolt Brecht’s theory on theatre, in which the epic theatre is activating and entertaining, makes the spectator a observer and arouses his activity, compels him to take a stand

14 Tapani Suominen (1997) Ehkä teloitamme jonkun. Opiskelijaradikalismi ja vallankumous"ktio 1960- ja 1970 -lukujen Suomessa, Norjassa ja Länsi-Saksassa.[We perhaps execute someone. Student radicalism and revolutionary "ction in Finland, Norway and West-Germany of the 1960s and 1970s]. Helsinki: Tammi, p. 435.15 Eino S.Repo, Kari Ilmonen, Mauno Tamminen, Ville Zilliacus & & Nils-Börje Stormbom (1967) Policy of YLE !e Finnish Broadcasting Company. Tasks and Aims of Broadcasting. Helsinki: YLE, p. 8.

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and to draw his conclusions, gives him a picture of the world, al-though not mainly through suggestion but by appealing to facts. !is kind of entertainment “ought to be stressed in all programme types which YLE will produce and broadcast”.16

Yrjö Ahmavaara, the theoretical father of YLE’s informative programme policy wrote: “We must separate informative enter-tainment from light entertainment, the sole destination of which is to displace the feeling of disturbing idleness without bringing any intellectual activation: ´pure´ entertainment is a conjuring trick if not a fraud”.17

Brecht’s initiative about activating entertainment was also adapted to music programming. !e Music Policy Planning Com-mittee produced an idea of an integrated melody radio. Accord-ing to it, music from all over the world was included in every melody radio concert, e.g., starting with an American pop song followed by dance music from the 1500s, Finnish tango, African folk music, Polish polka from the 1920s, Chaplin’s cinema music for big band, domestic ditty, and so on, resulting in quite a mu-sical hotchpotch. !e idea was to make YLE’s music department an active, consciously discussion-awakening actor in society. With music from all over the world, the integrated Finnish Melody Radio guided its audience to be more broadminded about music. Whether the goal was reached is another question. From the second half of the 1960s on, the general atmos-phere in YLE was quite politicised. Increasingly, the employees had to show colour and choose their side, left or right. In 1970, Repo lost his position as General Director, to which he was origi-nally named with the support of the Agrarian party, but, with the left wing SKDL mandate, was now chosen Director of the Radio Unit. Actually, as a former literature journalist, Repo himself was not too fond of popular music, especially Anglo-American pop and rock, but he could tolerate it as well, because the young jour-nalists had a lot to say in between the music. !e new winds were too much for the value conservatives, and Repo’s progressive aspirations in the programme policy result-

16 Repo et al (1967), p. 33. 17 Yrjö Ahmavaara (1969) Informaatio: Tutkimus tiedotuksen logiikasta. Helsinki: Weilin+Göös, pp. 16–17.

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ed in a "ght over the company’s political hegemony programme policy, which also strongly focused on music programming. In its 1968 political handbook, the conservative National Coalition Party had already stated, that some cultural radicals had aimed at discrediting everything nationally valuable, and this should be corrected by stipulating a law to regulate the responsibility in programme output. !e same document18 $agged for giving up the broadcasting monopoly. At the time, there was no legislation stipulating this, or any commercial radio, either. !e 1970 par-liament election strongly focused on radio, and Coalition party had a great victory. !ereafter, it could dictate the terms of the radio policy. !e "rst thing to do was to put an end to parts of the Melody radio, or, its talk shows, which were made the scape-goat of Repo’s policy. In 1971 YLE was in "nancial di%culties. So the Conservative party promised to back it up in raising the TV licence fee, if the Melody radio talk shows were outlawed.19

Actually, the Melody radio talk shows as a whole were harm-less, containing mostly information on music as well as some pro-gramme series targeted, for exampled, at jazz- and pop music lov-ers, a very popular chart programme, and some experimental and underground programmes. A lot of political disagreement con-centrated around one series full of punch, Ristivetoa [Draught], which was ended by the decision of YLE’s new bourgeois-majority Administrative Council. After the Repo era, the political twist culminated, when the Radio Unit was divided into two: the bourgeois Radio 1 and the left wing Radio 2, both still inside YLE public service monopoly. Towards the end of the 1970s, the political con$ict calmed down. Today, it is easy to see the persecution of the Reporadio as a part of the larger discourse on the political direction in society and as a deep contradiction in the times when the whole society went through a rapid change. After the mid-70s there was the breakthrough of Suomirock [Finn rock]. !is meant that radio played increasingly more rock

18 Kansallisen kokoomuksen keskustoimisto (1968) Kokoomuksen poliittinen käsi-kirja vuodelle 1968. [Political Handbook of the Coalition Party 1968]. Helsinki, p. 67.19 Pertti Hemánus (1972) Reporadion nousu ja tuho [!e Rise and Fall of Repora-dio] Helsinki: Otava, p. 290.

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music of fully Finnish origin, with the lyrics in Finnish. Finland had extremely popular domestic singers and bands, Juice Lesk-inen, Tuomari Nurmio, Hector, and Eppu Normaali, just to men-tion a few. !is new genre made it easier for the new generation to adopt rock culture in their own language. During the 1970s, record sales in Finland increased tenfold. New record companies and studios were established. Being a pioneering label in the Finnish rock music, also releasing jazz, po-litical songs, and ethnic music, in many ways, one of them, Love Records, became a weighty actor. !e company was founded in 1966 and went bankrupt in 1979.

The Youth

While the political "ght over YLE was taken culminating, less at-tention was paid to other issues. It was obvious that there were too few programmes for the young; YLE was losing young listen-ers in the situation where YLE still had monopoly over radio. In 1979, there was a petition for more rock music on the radio, which was organised by a rock magazine. Actually, it ap-peared to be a major upheaval of young citizens complaining about the lack of rock music on the radio.

We, the signatories, are deeply concerned about the scant amount of rock programmes on the radio. !e other (e.g., sports) programme groups far too easily replace the time reserved for them, which as such already is minimal. At present, the range of pop music is so extensive that, to cover its di#erent genres satisfactorily and to satisfy the listening audience’s extremely di#erentiating music tastes, considerably more broadcast time than what is being o#ered today would be required. When determining the radio broadcast times, the needs of the young working or at school should also be taken into consideration.20

To satisfy its young audience, in 1980, YLE introduced a $ow of new domestic and foreign pop and rock music. Rockradio was a

20 Cited from a petition of 16,000 signatory powers in Soundi Magazine, Decem-ber 1979.

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live broadcast magazine aired weekly on three afternoons from 3 to 5 p.m., also including some other programme titles, at best, peaking at about 11 hours a week. It was not much, but, com-pared with the situation before Rockradio, it was a lot. And, for a while, many young listeners, who had already abandoned radio as a media, tuned in. Rockradio was not only about rock music; the spoken con-tent of Rockradio was revolutionary, too. In a way the Brechtian concept of informative entertainment was carried into a new di-mension. !e young deejays had their own interpretation of the principles of the Reporadio´s informative programme policy. !eir rock talk broke traditional radio talk code; it was informal and fast, including vocabulary used in subcultures and youth jar-gon. !e new rock journalism created new radio rhetoric: teasing chatter and parody. !e topics were current, in$ammable, and often taboos.21 Among the listeners, Rockradio was awaited and loved to such a degree that when one of the DJs went to a sum-mer rock festival, a young man prostrated himself before the DJ, shouting: “!ere you are, my Saviour!” And the young did listen to Rockradio. From the very begin-ning, there were about half a million listeners, which is a lot in a small country like Finland. In the autumn of 1985, Rockradio enjoyed the third highest ratings among YLE’s listeners. And they were new listeners; they did not take any listeners from a pro-gramme targeted on the adult audience simultaneously broadcast on the other channel. But, after all, Rockradio was not enough. A few hours a week was not as much as necessary to change the overall image of the company. Young people began to abandon YLE.

21 Vesa Kurkela & Heikki Uimonen (2007) “Usko, toivo ja petollinen rakkaus. Rock-kulttuuri ja suomalaisen radiopolitiikan muutos”. [Faith, Hope and False Love. Rock culture and change in Finnish radio policy]. In Etnomusikologian vuo-sikirja 2007, eds. Markus Mantere & Heikki Uimonen. Vaasa: Suomen etnomusi-kologinen seura, p. 16.

43


Business

It was time to turn the page in Finland’s radio broadcasting policy. !e changes in the political climate were certainly the key factor in broadcasting deregulation, as the free-market and free-competition ideologies were adopted into communications poli-cies. From around the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, the emphasis in the communications policy debate began to shift more towards deregulation: the aim now was to break down the public service monopoly and to create favourable conditions for commercial ra-dio. As local radio stations "rst started on an experimental ba-sis in 1985, the idea was that they would promote local culture, public debate, and freedom of speech. But soon, the high local and domestic cultural values collapsed as the radio stations mainly concentrated on economic issues, because the whole country was in deep recession. High editorial standards are expensive. It was easier and, above all, less expensive to make, e.g., music format programming with an emphasis on American pop music. Because of the copyright fee agreements, it was one third cheaper to play American music than Finnish music. !e politicians did not care. In the 1990s, instead of an instrument for promoting freedom of speech and local culture, they primarily considered commercial local radio as another "eld of industry.22 Competition pepped up listening audience "gures. In the late 1980s, radio reached more people than before. Especially local ra-dio – YLE and commercial as well – gained popularity, while the national YLE channels lost some during the same period. All in all, during the decade, daily listening time increased from two to three hours per day. Radio reached more than ever before young people.23 !is for two reasons: radio programme choice was rap-idly increasing, and, apparently, radio as a media, had a heyday. !e Finnish radio landscape was divided into public and pri-vate sectors, which each, up to these days, have had a 50/50 share

22 Marko Ala-Fossi (2005), p. 176.23 Erja Ruohomaa (1991) Radion yhtenäinen yleisö 80-luvulla [!e uniform radio audience in Finland in the 1980s]. Helsinki: Oy Yleisradio Ab, Tutkimus- ja kehi-tysosasto, Tutkimusraportti 8/1991, pp. 50–51.

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KEMPPAINEN

of the radio-listening audience. At the beginning of the 1990s, the nature of commercial radio operations started to change. !e "rst networks were Classic FM and Kiss FM. At present, there are ten national or semi-national radio networks, and, in many cases, they are in foreign ownership and under international format net-work policies. In addition to these national networks, there are also local radios, but they have only one tenth of the total listen-ing minutes. And there is yet another large music network broad-casting with local licensing. !e content of commercial radio is mostly music. !ese music format channels each have their own target groups, with an increasing number consisting of middle-aged listening audience.

Youth again

Commercial radio was a serious challenge to YLE’s radio service. When commercial radio "rst started in Finland, it was a lot about young audiences. Stations, such as Radio City in Helsinki, Radio 957 in Tampere, and Radio 100 in Turku, in the three biggest cit-ies in Finland, were absolute opinion leaders among young. Even though it had Rockradio, an important channel of rock music for young listeners outside the big cities, YLE was rapidly losing its share in young demography. In the spring of 1990, three fourths of the listening time attributed to 15–24 year-olds was being won by commercial radio. Commercial radio’s share in the entire lis-tening audience in Finland was 39 % at that time. In e#ect, this meant that young people had adopted commercial radio. !e emergence of commercial radio forced the public broad-caster to re-examine its relationship with its audience. YLE had not been hurt like this since the emergence pirate radios. !e dis-appearing young audience was the last straw. It had to do some-thing to regain the initiative and get hold of the young audience. It took YLE "ve years to react and respond to the competi-tion with a substantive radio pro"ling initiative in 1990, resulting in one channel for popular culture and youth audiences, a second channel for high culture and traditional audiences, and a third regional radio network primarily devoted to news and current af-fairs and music targeted at adults. !e channels were like chalk

45


and cheese, di#erentiated by distinct music pro"les as well as by dissimilar content and approach. YLE established Radioma"a, a popular culture channel for young audience. It was a national channel closely in tune with the times: aggressive, lively, intelligent, and opinionated. !e chan-nel had a strong channel culture and imago. It was a full-service channel for its target group, having a “multifaceted content with a touch of class.” Music played was mostly rock and pop, “modern styles of popular music”, and it covered two thirds of the channels’ broad-cast time. !ere was a music policy paper stating that music is an inherent element of the channel, that music has an equal value with talk, and that the whole channel gets its pro"le from the music it plays. According to the paper, Finnish music has a key role in the choice of music, and, instead of just re$ecting the mu-sic market, the channel is an active force in the music world. New tools for streamline programming, such as record list-ings, rotation clock, and weekly horizontal programme blocks were introduced. !e channel had a $at organisation, allowing it to react to new challenges much more lightly than the traditional YLE organisation could. !e company’s task for Radioma"a was to get back the young audience to listen to YLE, and that suc-ceeded – for a few years. However, the fact that Radioma"a became the favourite channel of the 15–24 listening audience was not entirely due to its own e#ort. Commercial radios had passed the phase of initial enthusiasm and the economical operating conditions also dimin-ished. !e recession in Finland forced the commercial local radio stations to face the harsh realities. In order to stay alive, they had to resort to adult listeners, because that was where the shrinking advertising money was to be found. But, there were better times to come and new "ghts for the audience share.

Did YLE have a music policy?

When we talk about radio music, there is a big di#erence between the old order and the new order, in other words, between the ra-dio monopoly era and the free-market radio era. In the old radio,

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music was part of its enlightenment message. Serious talk and classical music went well together, as they still do. In this context, light classical music was most entertaining. !at was under the radio monopoly programme o#ering and in today’s public serv-ice programming, this still continues in the same context on one channel, the full service cultural channel Yle Radio 1. During the Repo era, the very last overall and controversial interpretation of the old order policy was seen in the integrated melody radio. It was an endeavour to enlighten programme o#er-ing with the means of popular music. As the market now opened and radio was deregulated in 1985, popular music was the strongest pro"ler of the new radio era, now consisting of the public service radio and of commercial radios. !e "rst meaningful appearance of popular music in YLE was Sävelradio, which was a reaction to the pirate radios of the pre-commercial era. At the beginning, the basic market dynamics divided the ra-dio listeners into two basic demographic groups: the young and urban listened to the commercial radio; the old and rural listened to the public service radio. Just to resist this basic combination, Radioma"a and its followers were established. Music policy also dictated this basic division. But did YLE have any special music policy when going through all these changes? Yes, thrice it did have. First, the idea of an integrated popular-classical-ethnic music concert as an inter-pretation of an informative programme policy was novel. Second, Radioma"a had a music policy paper stating its idea of the role of music on the channel. It was an independent paper, not re$ecting the rivals. Together with the new broadcast technology, the new mar-ket dynamics lead to a much more detailed approach. !e basic rationale behind this was to keep the audience share large enough to maintain accountability and the right to collect licence fees for the operations. And third, in 2003, a popular music policy paper was pre-pared to position the channels into a competitive package. In an e#ort to create clear brands, a lot of audience research and SWOT analysing was done. !ereafter, some channel adjustments and positioning have taken place, but nothing bigger. !e eternal

47


question is, should a channel grow older with its audience, or should it, forever and a day, target the same age group. Today’s computer-operated radio is very di#erent from the radio of the 1960s, and even of the 1990s. Technological inno-vations, such as computerized studio equipment and automation, playlists, the web, and the new generations of hand-held mobile communication devices, are changing the radio broadcast play-ground. Music business has moved from vinyl to CDs and now to "les in a bit stream. !is is a big challenge for the copyright legislation that has always directed the "elds of industry dealing with music – and for the radio. As so many alternative ways of providing music and other content have emerged, the role of ra-dio as a media is under threat. What could a public service radio company’s music policy paper be like, let’s say twenty years from today? In this new, confusing radio environment, we do not even know whether radio will continue to be a device or just mere con-tent?

(Paper presented in the European Communication Conference ECREA 2008 in Barcelona, November 25.–28.)

49

Timo Syrjälä

Controlled Tunes

!e Regulation of Music in Public Radio in Finland, United Kingdom and Canada

Introduction

In this article I examine how the use of music is regulated in public service radio broadcasting in Finland, United Kingdom and Canada. Regulation covers the way authorities and radio management intervene with the musical selection of the chan-nels, which aims to implement the cultural political objectives, a part of public service. Intervening with the musical selection is often seen as negative, because it also limits the freedom of speech, which is one of the basic rights of communication. Music was an essential part of radio repertory already in the pioneering years of radio in the early 20th century. Its usage was in$uenced by the goals of radio broadcasting, such as enlighten-ing people via classical music. !rough the success of rock and pop music, popular music gradually gained its own programmes, but in the broadcast politics of public radio, the educational role remained in e#ect until the end of the millennium. !e spirit of the times is clearly seen in an extract from a report regarding the music policy of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio) from 1969: “!e goal is to get the listener to realise the existence of other musical styles than those of his or her own musical in-terests, and therefore enable the listener to better value his or her choices”. In the late 20th century, the broadcasting monopolies were abolished, and commercial radios brought about a competi-tion for listeners. Public broadcasting companies began to build

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their image by creating a picture of quality, versatility and reli-ability. Public service companies have speci"c and de"ned functions of public service remit they must carry out, but they have become more like commercial radio stations in their methods, producing prime time programmes for targeted groups of listeners. In today’s radio broadcasting, music is the key element in pro"ling chan-nels: the music has to be a part of the “sound” of the channel, and switching from one genre to another is not possible. Specialised music programmes are not included in the prime time schedule of a successful radio channel, not even on public radio channels. For example, the most popular radio channel in Finland, Radio Suomi, airs its specialised programmes in the evening and during the weekends. Radio broadcasting is guided by external regulation on sev-eral levels. International agreements and global legislation guide national laws. A more detailed regulation is provided through statutes and authority verdicts based on the laws. Additionally, broadcasting companies themselves prepare policies on their use of music. My immediate interest is on the type of regulation where music is directly targeted. !e central research questions of radio music regulation include the language used in the music,

Examples of regulations indirectly in$uencing radio music

1. FinancingIn Canada, commercial radio companies are obligated to "nance di#erent types of Canadian Con-tent Development (CCD) programmes that support the making and production of Canadian music. !e amount of CCD-aid per radio station is at least 500 Canadian dollars (CAD) annually and not more than 1,000 CAD + 0,5% of the pro"ts of the previous "scal year exceeding 1,250 000 CAD. If the ownership or share majority of the station is transferred to a third party, an additional fee of 6 % of the sale price is demanded (CRTC Public Notice 1998-41, Commercial Radio Policy, 116 and 126). !e aid continually strengthens the Canadian music industry, which gives more air time for well made music.

2. CopyrightMusic produced in the United States can be played in Finland without the so called “Gramex royal-ty” for the musicians and producers, because our national law grants this payment only for countries that have put into e#ect the so-called treaty of Rome. In England, a royalty similar to this has to be paid. !e price of broadcasting music has an e#ect on the music choices of the stations, and this situation adds to the already high air time of American music.

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the origin of the music and musical genres. Furthermore, what is played on the radio can indirectly be in$uenced by regulations re-garding copyright, taxes, production aid and workforce, but these aspects are excluded here. When a radio channel operates on licensing fees paid by citi-zens and on other public funds, its cultural political functions are emphasised. Each nation de"nes these functions according to its own political needs, but two cultural political goals are prevalent almost everywhere, still re$ecting the remnants of the old civilis-ing function. !e "rst of these has to do with securing cultural heritage and preserving national identity. Nation-states and their areas want to highlight their own history via art and other forms of cultural expression. Music can be a way of communication for the uniqueness of di#erent areas, and radio is a way to reach the masses. !rough regulation, the state can defend against an ex-ternal super culture, just like a small village defends itself against the Roman conquerors in the French comic book Asterix. !e ef-fect of the regulation can be described with the term “the Asterix phenomenon”.1

Another cultural political function concerns the pluralism of broadcasting, which is realised, for example, through diverse music programming. !e presentation of di#erent national mu-sical styles and the unique musical cultures of various countries enhances the citizens’ awareness of the surrounding society and brings about tolerance towards unfamiliar cultures. !e civilising goal, then, still exists, but it is not as obvious as it used to be. !ough seemingly contradictory, cherishing cultural heritage and national culture does not prevent broadcasting from being diverse and introducing the culture of other countries; both goals can be aspired to at the same time.

Freedom of speech and broadcasting

!ere exists a constant tension between freedom of speech and broadcast regulation. Programming can not be guided by regu-

1 !e Asterix Phenomenon is an apt term to describe the regulation of radio music also because the comic book is set in Northern France, and France is well known for its active regulation to defend its own culture.

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lation without carefully considering its e#ects on the freedom of speech. !e central, classic function of the freedom of speech has to do with truth, or, more accurately, the ways truth can be brought forward. !e world has changed, and the idea of an ab-solute truth is often considered an impossibility. A newer point of view emphasises the individual’s right to have access to plural-ist communications.2 In a free democracy, everyone has the right to express not only their thought concerning the society, but also their knowledge on matters that are not as crucial to the function-ing of democracy, and even aesthetically worthwhile matters.3 In music, it is not just about what is aesthetically valuable or consid-ered as such, but also about the musical contents and choices that are central for one’s own identity and world view.4 Political songs are an example of a situation where music is used to express and receive societal thoughts in a melodious form. !e experience is subjective: someone might enjoy the political lyrics, someone else focuses on the striking sound and the excellent guitar solo. !e surrounding context is also crucial. !e Finlandia Hymn by Jean Sibelius symbolised Finland’s strives towards independence when it was written, but now, almost a hundred years later, the piece has minor societal political meaning. Because of such problems in interpretation, the freedom of speech should be neutral towards all information. When it comes to music in radio broadcasting, freedom of speech is realised when di#erent musical styles, eth-nic groups, language families and music of various ages receive enough airtime. Freedom of speech concerns the pluralism of communica-tions. Its e#ect on the regulation of mass media divides opinions. !e question of plurality has to do with the discussion about the functions of public and commercial radio. One point of view is

2 According to researcher and Doctor of Laws Mikko Hoikka pluralism, as a term, is linked with programming contents. Diversity, on the other hand, concerns the ways and means of communication. Radio broadcasting, for example, is diverse, if several di#erent operators function in the same audibility area, some o#ering over the air and some internet services.3 Mikko Hoikka (2007) “Viestinnän moniarvioisuus eurooppalaisena oikeuspe-riaatteena” in Miten vapaa sana? Viestintäoikeuden vuosikirja 2006. Ed. Mikko Hoikka, Sakari Huovinen, Timo Nyyssönen, Eero Paukku, Riikka Rosendahl & Päivi Tiilikka. Helsinki: Forum Iuris 2007, pp. 145–155. 4 Interview with Dr. Vesa Kurkela 23.10.2009.

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that freedom of speech includes a “guarantee of pluralism”, a right to high quality programming, the opposite of which is commer-cial format radio, which in its steady uneventfulness reminds one of second rate sausage. According to this view, music regulation is a way to secure variation in the programming and – if acceptable criteria can be de"ned – also its quality. Critics say that this kind of argumentation only seeks to maintain the status quo, where public service companies have an advantage over others. !e op-posing point of view is that free competition and new means of distribution are the best way to guarantee pluralist programming and the freedom of speech. !is point of view is criticised as be-ing overly optimistic. Critics feel that the kind of specialisation that is reasonable in a free market is not enough to guarantee ver-satile programming.5

!e European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) con-tains an article on fundamental civil rights, which allows certain conditions to be set on broadcast licensing. If the special precon-ditions of section two of article are met, freedom of speech can also be limited via regulation in order to set more general goals.6 Even though the pluralism of communication is not speci"cally mentioned as a justi"ed exception, it is a signi"cant cultural po-litical goal and it may be included in “guaranteeing other rights”. Individual states have to consider on a case by case basis whether regulation contradicts freedom of speech.7 Some verdicts by the European Court of Human Rights during the 1990s suggest that limiting freedom of speech on cultural political grounds is not ac-ceptable without a very good reason. Of the countries in compari-son here, Canada is not a member of the ECHR, but through the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 19) it has committed to similar means of guaranteeing freedom of speech.

5 Mikko Hoikka (2007), pp. 135–140.6 !e European Convention on Human Rights, article 10.7 !orsten Ader (2006) “Cultural and Regional Remits in Broadcasting” in Legal Observations of the European Audivisual Observatory, Issue 2006/8, p.3.

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Background on the countries in comparison

Finnish public radio broadcasting began in 1926, and it is car-ried out by the state-owned Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio, YLE). !e current regulation of programming con-tents in public radio is based on the Parliament’s special statute (22.12.1993/1380), which describes the general public service functions of YLE. !e 2005 “Rules on programming” is, on the other hand, a guideline on the company’s procedures and does not include content regulation. !e ful"lment of YLE’s public service functions is supervised by the company’s highest decision-making body, the Adminis-trative Council. !e Parliament selects 19 of its members to the council for the duration of the term, and two members come from the company’s sta#. YLE produces annual reports of its pro-gramming for the Finnish Communications Regulatory Author-ity, which is an agency of the Ministry of Transport and Com-munications. Based on the report the Authority gives a statement to the Parliament on whether YLE’s programming ful"ls the ob-ligations set by law. YLE also provides the Parliament with direct bi-annual reports on its operation. Even if the governing organs found that YLE has not been carrying out its obligations on content, the special law on YLE’s rights and duties (YLE-law) does not contain any straight-forward sanctions. It is unclear whether the sanctions set in television and radio laws can be applied to the neglect of obligations set in YLE-law. !e YLE Board of Directors and the Parliament can use un-o%cial methods in dealing with such neglect, such as personnel changes and programming guidelines. !e lack of sanctions may still decrease the transparency of YLE’s public service functions, which is crucial for a state-owned company operating on public funds. !e British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the oldest and most famous public service broadcasting company in Europe. !e abbreviation BBC originally comes from the British Broad-casting Company, which began in 1922. For almost 50 years, the BBC had a monopoly in the UK, and still holds a strong position today in comparison with its commercial competition.

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Operator Market ShareBBC (combined) 55,2 %National Commercial Stations Combined (se-parate listing below)

21,0 %

Classic FM 11,3 %Virgin FM 4,9 %Talk Sport (talk radio) 4,8 %

Table 1. !e radio market shares of BBC and commercial radio in 2007–20088

!e BBC Charter is the basic document of regulation for the BBC’s organisation and its general programming guidelines. It is complemented by the Broadcasting Agreement between the BBC and the British Ministry of Culture. Both documents leave the task of setting up more speci"c guidelines concerning the ful"l-ment of public service remit and programming on six di#erent areas of interest to the hands of the highest management level of the BBC.9 One of the areas, “maintaining creativity and cultural excellence” also contains music. !e BBC Trust was founded in 2007 and it is now the high-est decision-making body of the company. It supervises that the company operates according to the interests of its most important "nanciers, the TV license payers. !e Trust also de"nes where the BBC should be heading in the future. For radio broadcasting, the Trust uses channel-speci"c Radio Service License promises to set up guidelines. !e highest operative management of the BBC, the Executive Board, began to produce similar channel-speci"c com-mitments in 2003. !ese are called Statements of Program policy (SoPP). According to the BBC these are voluntary when it comes to radio, but mandatory with television broadcasting.10

!e self-regulation of the BBC is, therefore, partly voluntary and partly based on law. !e guidelines contain concrete goals

8 BBC (2009) Annual Report and Accounts 2007/08, !e BBC Executive’s review and assessment, p.56.9 BBC Charter, Article 24.2.c & BBC Agreement, Article 21.10 Interview with Lucy Tristram, 24.2.2009.

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that are based on exact numbers, and their ful"lment is easy to oversee. !e BBC management produces annual reports on its goals to the BBC Trust, which also produces Service Reviews on each TV and radio channel every "ve years or more often. !e UK Minister of Culture Ben Bradshaw is responsible for media matters. In September 2009 he criticised the BBC Trust’s double role as both a supervising body and as the target of supervision. He thinks that this situation may change when the BBC Charter is revised by 2016. !e agency supervising UK media, O%ce of Communica-tions (Ofcom) does not strictly speaking govern the musical contents of the BBC, because they are based on voluntary obli-gations. Ofcom is, however, responsible for the legal oversee-ing of the BBC. In theory it can lay down a penalty fee of up to £250,000.11 Ofcom would also produce a statement if a BBC channel sought a change in the format speci"ed in its broadcast-ing license.12

!e Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is respon-sible for public service broadcasting in Canada. French language broadcasting is carried out by Radio Canada, which is a part of the company. !e CBC produces annual reports for the Parlia-ment and the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunica-tions Commission (CRTC). Founded in 1968, the CRTC regulates broadcasting, super-vises that the regulations are adhered to and carries out sanctions, if necessary. !e CRTC produces annual reports to the Parliament via the Minister of Canadian Heritage. Unlike the regulating bodies in the other countries in comparison, the CRTCS utilises a high level of authority. It can give out detailed decrees on the contents of public radio. !e theoretical maximum "ne for break-ing the law or the CRTC decrees is 250,000 CAD, 500,000 CAD for a repeated o#ence.

11 Communications Act 17.7.2003, c 21, 198.12 Interview with Jon Heasman, 18.1.2008.

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YLE – Music programming without special regulation

In Finland, there are no actual regulations on music broadcast-ing. !e YLE-law obligates YLE to treat the Finnish and Swed-ish speaking population equally and to produce services in other minority languages as well, especially in Sami, Romani and sign language. !e Swedish-speaking population have two national Swedish channels, the other of which is aimed at the young. !e YLE law also includes a general regulation for the support and de-velopment of national culture (7.2.2. and 7.2.4.) !e Finnish Broadcasting Company plays Finnish music suc-cessfully without a special obligation. In 2008, Finnish-language music conquered nine places in the list of 10 most popular songs on YLE channels. !e tenth song was Finland’s song for the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, sung in English. Ten years ago, music sung in English was more popular than music sung in Finnish.13 In 2001, YLE put together an internal set of guidelines on its music policy principles concerning classical, jazz, folk and spiritual music. According to these guidelines, music journalists must have journalistic independence when planning their pro-grammes to guarantee a diverse selection of music.14 Unfortunate-ly the practical signi"cance of the guidelines is small, as most of the programming in these genres is broadcast on the Yle Radio1 channel. !e most popular YLE channel is Radio Suomi (Radio Finland), which focuses on popular music and adult-oriented rock. Approximately 45 % of Radio Suomi’s broadcasting is mu-sic.15 Radio Suomi does not have public guidelines or play lists, but provincial o%ces are tied to the music decisions made in the capital city.16 Specialised programming is broadcast outside prime time. !e music the journalists can select for these programmes is strictly limited by their production agreements. For example,

13 !e Finnish National Group of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (2003), Äänitteiden myynti kääntyi laskuun. Musiikin kulu-tus kasvaa, äänitemyynti ei; Teosto-tilastot 2008.14 !e Finnish Broadcasting Company (2001), Yleisradion musiikkipolitiikan peri-aatteet. Klassinen musiikki, Jazz, kansanmusiikki ja hengellinen musiikki, section 3.15 !e Finnish Broadcasting Company (2008) YLE Annual Report, 28.16 Interview with Jorma Hietamäki, 9.2.2009.

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the journalist Heimo Holopainen had a programme called Hollen dollarihymy in 2003–2004. After careful consideration, it was de-cided that the musical pro"le of the show should cover the period of time between the settling of the initial wave of rock music and the beginning of the Beatles, in other words the turn of the 1950s and 60s.17 !e youth channel YleX is the only YLE channel that openly tells about the play lists it uses.

The BBC – A self-guiding flagship

!e BBC is commonly known as the $agship of public service. !is estimate is justi"ed in the light of both the historical and present day operation of the company. !e BBC o#ers a wide variety of radio and television programming for the British and foreign public. Even though the total amount of music broadcast-ing has slightly decreased, music is still a strong element of the BBC’s broadcasting. According to the company’s public relations its listeners rank the BBC’s channels as the best radio channels for new and live music in surveys carried out by the company itself.18

2006–2007 2007–2008Analogue channels 23,409.99 23,270.00Digital channels 17,634.00 17,454.00Total 41,043.00 40,724.00

Table 2. Amount of music broadcast on BBC channels per year in hours19

From the time between the World Wars until about 1967, the BBC was obligated to play no more than "ve hours of commercial music recordings per day. !is limitation, known as Needle Time, was the invention of the local musicians’ union and the special-interest group of the record companies. !ey wanted to secure the employment of the orchestras hired by the BBC and the sales of records. Indeed, in the United States the sales of records had de-creased during the beginning of commercial radio in the 1920s.

17 Interview with Heimo Holopainen, 17.2.2009.18 Interview with Lucy Tristram, 24.2.2009.19 BBC (2009) Annual Report and Accounts 2007/08, 67.

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Radio broadcasting, however, was not to blame. !e labels on British phonographic records had a warning not to broadcast the records exceeding the time limit. !is regulation was o%cially ter-minated in 1967, but it had an e#ect on the music programmes of the BBC Radio 1 and 2 channels for a couple of decades on-wards.20

Radio 1* Mon–Fri 6 AM – 7 PM 40 % British music21

* 45 % new music* 25 major live concerts/festivals* 250 new music performances

Radio 2* 40 % British during the day* 20 % new music* 260 hours of live music

Radio 3* 50 % live or live-in-studio recordings* 500 live or comparable performances* 30 new commissioned pieces* 40 % of budget spent outside of Greater London

1 Xtra* 35 % British performances* 60 % new music* 50 new live events

BBC 6 Music* 50 % of music over 40 years old* 400 hours of archival performances* 15 % of music from the BBC archives* 275 new performances

BBC Asian Network* 40 % British performances* 50 % of programming music

Table 3. !e origin regulation of BBC channels organised by channels (Radio Service License and the SoPPs)

!e English language dominates music programmes in the west-ern countries, and it need not be protected by regulations in UK. !e BBC Trust has, however, set out detailed goals on the origin of the music broadcast on the BBC channels, shown in table 3. Additionally, the BBC Trust’s guideline mandate that all radio channels must outsource at least 10 % of their programme pro-ductions. No such outsourcing quota exists in the other countries in the comparison, but the Finnish CEO of YLE, Mikael Jungner,

20 Interview with Dr. Pekka Gronow, 10.4.2009; Kif Bowden-Smith (2007) “Revolution at the BBC” in the Internet publication Radiomusications. !e best in audiohistory from Transdi#usion. http://www.transdi#usion.org/rmc21 British is de"ned as an artist who is a citizen or dual citizen of the country and a resident of UK. As for musical groups, 50 % of their members must ful"l these criteria (email from Lucy Tristram, 5.3.2008).

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supports this kind of thinking. He has suggested that at least 20 % of YLE radio productions were outsourced by 2012. Outsourc-ing is a way to save on productions, but it can also improve the pluralism of a channel. Broader programme production can be successful in radio, where production budgets are smaller than in television, and where there are fewer professional production companies. !e BBC also regulates musical genres. !e Radio 1 channel must broadcast specialised music programmes at least 60 hours a week and an annual 40 % of their supply. Specialised music pro-grammes mean individual or serial programmes that are limited to one or a few musical genres. Radio 2 has committed to o#er 1,100 hours of specialised music programmes per year and an additional 60 hours of musical theatre and programmes on "lm music. On the other channels, the genre is decided by the pro"led sound of the channel.

The CBC – Canadian content

!e Canadian Broadcasting Act (CBA) states that the goal of all Canadian broadcasting is the preservation and development of national identity and cultural independence. !e CBC, too, has to keep its programming mainly and visibly Canadian.22 !is strong wording of the law tells of the way the Canadian society is committed to its own culture, but it can also be a sign of fear towards the cultural hegemony of the neighbouring United States, or of the strong identity of the French-speaking areas of Canada. !e CRTC aims to reach this goal by detailed decrees, regulating the operation of both the CBC and commercial radio. French is the other o%cial language in Canada, alongside English. Approximately 1/5 of the population speak French as their mother tongue. !e law demands that both languages are equally present in broadcasting operations. In practice this means that there is regulation protecting French programming in the three provinces where French-language channels operate. Quebec has the largest area of the provinces, and it is the only one where

22 Broadcasting Act, C 11, 3.l.m.i.

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French is the language of the majority. New Brunswick and Brit-ish Columbia o#er French radio programming on a total of 10 channels.23 !e CBC operates on two English and two French na-tional radio networks. !e authorities protect French-language radio broadcasting via two types of regulation. A Radio Canada channel (that oper-ates in French) has to make sure that each week at least 65 % of the sung pop, rock and dance music it broadcasts is in French and to divide this programming in a reasonable way between each day of broadcasting.24 In international comparison, the French-language quota in Canada is uniquely high. !e situation in Canada can be compared to that of France, which has a common linguistic heritage and where similar cultural political argumenta-tion is used. In France, public service radio (Radio France) has to prioritise, in other words commit over 50 % of broadcast time for, French-language popular music.25 For comparison’s sake, the so-called Loi Carignon law dictates that commercial channels in France must use 40 % of their music programming for French-language music.26 In Canada, the 65 % quota also applies to com-mercial radio channels.

Language %English 75 %French 22 %Other languages 3 %

Table 4. Distribution of languages in Canadian audio and radio services in 200727

!e broadcasting of English-language hit music is limited in the French-speaking areas. A new regulation, which came into e#ect in February 2009, states that English-language AM and FM radio channels operating in the French-language market areas have to keep the amount of hit songs played during a week under 50 %

23 Interview with Bertrand Roux, 6.4.2009.24 CRTC (1986), Radio Regulations, 2.2.13.25 Cahier des missions et des charges de Radio France 1.6.2006, art. 30.26 LOI n° 86-1067 relative à la liberté de communication. 30.9.1986, art. 28.2bis.27 CRTC (2008), Communications Monitoring Report (www.crtc.ca).

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of their programming hours.28 A hit is de"ned as a song that is among the top-40 songs of 11 pre-selected music lists.29 Broad-casting hits used to be limited in the English-language areas as well, but instead of language issues, the motivation behind the regulation was the protection of so-called oldies music in radio. !e old regulation was deemed ine#ective and it was abolished. Regulation concerning the origin of music is based on Ca-nadian Content, the de"nition of Canadian music programming. It applies to any piece of music broadcast in the daytime (6 AM–Midnight) and lasting over one minute without interruptions. !e regulation is carried out through the MAPL criteria, the goal of which is to signi"cantly promote Canadian musicians, compos-ers and lyricists and to support the Canadian music industry.30 MAPL is an abbreviation of “music, artist, production and lyrics”. A musical performance is classi"ed as Canadian if it meets two of the following criteria:

* !e music is performed or sung by a mainly Canadian31 group of musicians;

* !e music has been composed in its entirety by a Canadi-an person. If there are several composers, they must all be Canadians;

* !e lyrics have been written in their entirety by a Cana-dian person. If there are several lyricists, they must all be Canadians;

* A live performance must be recorded in its entirety (not, for example, only some of backing music) in Canada or performed in its entirety in Canada and broadcast live in Canada;

28 Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-62, Policy regarding the broadcast of hits by English-language FM radio stations, section 9.29 Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-61, Conditions of licence for com-mercial AM and FM radio stations, sections 30–32.30 Public Notice CRTC 1998-41, Commercial Radio Policy, 16.31 !e law de"nes a Canadian person as someone who 1) is a citizen of the country, 2) who has a permanent residence in Canada or 3) whose place of residence has been in Canada for six months immediately prior to participating in compo-sing, performance or concert. A broadcasting company with a registered o%ce in Canada is also considered Canadian.

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* !e recording of performance has been carried out after 1.9.1991 and a Canadian person is responsible for at least 50 % of the copyright concerning the composition and lyrics;

* !e criteria of Canadian music can also be met if the work is an instrumental piece composed by a Canadian or the piece has been recorded before 1972 and one of the MAPL criterion is met.

Canada is the only country of the ones compared here where authorities have devised a system of genre classi"cation for radio music. Its purpose is to clarify musical terms and de"nitions of radio formats as well as to promote the use of music that receives little air time in broadcasting.32 !e classi"cation secures mini-mum quotas for Canadian and French-language music, popular music in particular.

Group 2 - Popular music

21: Pop, rock ja dance22: Country-music23: Acustic music24: Easy listening

Group 3 - Special Interest Music

31: Concert (classical)32: Folk and relevant music33: World Beat and International34: Jazz and blues35: Religious (non-classical) music

Table 5. CRTC Music Category Division – the most important musical categories and their subcategories

!ere is an important division, as described above, between popu-lar music and special interest music. All music that does not "t into any other categories is classi"ed as popular music. Lately the CRTC has changed the way it classi"es music, by the request of the radio stations. Because of this many pieces that used to la-belled as popular music are now special interest music. !e per-formances of jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, for example, used to be popular music. Now they are classi"ed as jazz. Similarly, the music of the world music group La Bottine Souriente, who draw

32 CRTC Public Notice 2000-14, Revised content categories and subcategories for radio, 1.

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inspiration from the French-Canadian tradition, used to be classi-"ed as popular music. Now it is folk music.33

At least 30 % of music classi"ed as popular music has to be of Canadian origin during the broadcasting week34. Additionally, the Canadian programming must be placed in a reasonable way, in other words spread across the broadcast day (6 AM–Midnight). For broadcasting aimed at minorities, the quota is seven per cent. In instrumental music, the quota can be 15 or 20 %, depending on whether instrumental music covers under or over 50 % of the channel’s weekly schedule. As concerns special interest music, at least 10 % of the music has to meet the Canadian Content crite-ria. !e CBC/Radio Canada states that its vision is to unify Ca-nadians through Canadian Content and has adhered to the regu-lation successfully.

Channel type Around the clock Prime time 6AM–7AM

English-language 99 % 100 %French-language 100 % 100 %

Table 6. !e ful"lment of Canadian Content 9/2005–9/200635

Conclusions

!e regulation of radio music di#ers in many ways in the com-pared countries. Canada has the strictest regulations concerning language, origin and genre. One explanation for the strict protec-tion of national music might be the country’s geographic location; the cultural superpower of music, the United States, is Canada’s neighbour. !e culture of regulation is also signi"cant: in the Eu-ropean Union, such protectionist action could be illegal due to the common market regulation in the Union. When compared to UK, the regulation in Canada is not as detailed, but the mini-mum quotas for French-language and Canadian content are high.

33 Interview with Bertrand Roux, 13.11.2008.34 Broadcasting week is a period of seven consecutive days, beginning on a Sunday.35 CBC/Radio Canada (2008), Annual Report 2006–2007, p. 29.

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Canadian authorities also have e#ective methods in dealing with problems: legally binding decrees and sanctions. In Finland, there is little regulation by authorities or self-regulation. !e situation is very similar in other Nordic coun-tries, with the exception of Norway, where the local public radio (Norsk rikskringkasting AS) must keep at least 35 % of its music Norwegian.36 Even though regulation is scarce, Finnish music has plenty of airtime in radio. !e music industry has suggested that this is because the Finnish music industry has become more professional and advanced on all areas. Another explanation is the popularity of music sung in Finnish. Today, over 50 % of all sold records are in Finnish, and many channels prefer to play sure-"re hits. !e country’s national taste in music, which prefers Russian-in$uenced songs in minor keys, might also explain the situation somewhat. !e leading Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sa-nomat even held a contest called “!e Grimmest Song in Finland” in 2005. !e musician Lauri Tähkä has an apt summary on the situation: “!e Finnish people are great, for they can "nd seeds of happiness in grimness.” One "nal explanation could be found in population structure and listening habits: the youth and young adults are the biggest consumers of English-language music. !is group of people is also abandoning traditional radio programming in favour of jukebox-esque new media subscription services. !e post-war baby boomers, the largest age group in Finland, listen to Finnish-language music in the traditional way. Heavy broadcasting of modern Finnish rock and pop does not, however, necessarily secure national heritage or lead to a pluralistic o#ering of music on YLE’s channels. Folk music, in-spired by traditions, older popular music and many other com-mercially less signi"cant genres receive relatively little airtime these days. !e general regulation regarding public service remit helps to achieve cultural political goals and copyright issues cre-ate obstacles for rebroadcasting old programs. Yet it is likely that more concrete content-related goals would improve the airtime of marginal music on YLE’s channels. Modern Internet services such as YLE’s “Elävä arkisto” (“!e Living Archive”) have brought old

36 Vedtekter for NRK AS, 3.5.k.

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music programmes available again, but such services do not reach the older population and those not part of the online society. !e UK model provides some of the power of regulation and supervision to the broadcasting company itself, which, from the point of view of legal competence, is somewhat dubious. How-ever, I feel that its the result that matters. Guidelines made by the company itself are e#ective, because the goals they contain are based on concrete quotas of broadcast hours and percentages. !e annual BBC raports show that, all in all, the goals are met with a high rate. !e channels adhere to self-regulation, since the goals originate internally. !e BBC’s self-regulation, partly based on law, is a good example of an e#ective and functional model of regulation. Unclear terminology makes it di%cult to oversee and approve regulation. Of the countries compared here, Canada has tried to solve the problems caused by vague musical classi"cation. Regula-tions like the Music Category Division help channels to plan how they can carry out the regulation demands for Canadian music. In addition to the Canadian model, it would be good to "nd com-mon national or international interpretation rules for these terms. !e term “adult oriented rock”, for example, should be uniformly de"ned. Radio airtime creates hits, which is why the music industry is strongly interested in in$uencing radio regulation. In Canada, the industry’s interest groups the Canadian Recording Industry As-sociation (CRIA) and the Canadian Independent Record Produc-tion Association (CIRPA) can have their say during the planning phases of regulation.37 In UK and Finland, the BBC and YLE de-"ne their own goals independently without outside in$uence. In my view the presence of the music industry during the planning phase of regulation would not be harmful, if one thinks about cultural political aims; it might lead to more airtime for national music.

37 For example Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-61.

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The near future of regulation

!e increase of new operators and distribution methods improves the variety of music programming. Radio channels for marginal groups already exist on the Internet, but the change has just be-gun – radio programming will mainly be distributed via tradition-al methods for years to come. It is too early to estimate whether channels that appeal to small groups of listeners remain alive, or whether the Internet and the new media mainly become second-ary means of distribution for commercial format radio. !e methods of operation of public and commercial radio have become more similar. Lately there has been discussion on, in particular, the status of publicly funded radio. In Finland, a committee lead by the Member of Parliament Mika Lintilä sug-gested in spring 2009 that the rationale behind television license fees were changed. !e committee suggested that the current sys-tem, where the license fee is mandatory for households that own at least one television, would be changed to a media fee, manda-tory for all households. If the funding of public services changes from conditional to mandatory, the citizens funding the operation should be allowed to monitor content planning better than today. In practice, transparency in Finland could be improved by setting more concrete goals. Mikael Pentikäinen, the CEO of Sanoma News, which pub-lishes the largest newspaper in the Nordic countries and the larg-est tabloid in Finland, recently suggested that YLE’s monopoly on publicly funded news production were abolished. He suggested that, in the future, services were put to tender publicly, so that a more cost-e#ective model could be found. Societal values are changing, and economical reasoning might become the most im-portant factor in how public services are organised. Pentikäinen’s vision might become reality. In this case, the public service mo-nopolies would be abolished in both entertainment and factual programming and the broadcasting rights would be allocated by competitive bidding. As far as content regulation goes, this would be an entirely new situation, where, in my opinion, regula-tion should apply equally to both public and commercial radio broadcasting. !is would mean, among other things, that all ra-dio companies delivering public service programming would have

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common rules. !e company-based evaluation of public service remit would also have to be questioned, maybe the focus should be on per channel or per function evaluation. Regulation concerning music will remain as a good starting point and pacemaker for when the functions and needs of change of radio are evaluated.

English translation by Jouni Luoma

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Vesa Kurkela

Screaming Sopranos in Radio

Irritating and Pleasant Voices in Early Radio Broadcasting in Finland

At the end of September 1929, the CEO of the Finnish Broad-casting Company, Hjalmar Waldén, received a letter from a radio listener. !e letter provides us a good way to try to approach the con$icting issues of early radio broadcasting. Mr. Martti Hau-tala, an American-Finn, had been staying in his native country for several weeks. However, bad Finnish radio programming had made him so angry that he decided to leave for the States earlier than originally planned:

In mid-August I arrived in Finland and brought a radio receiver with me. I thought I would have an opportunity to listen to some nice radio music, but I was very disappointed. You constantly hear nothing but operatic music that ordinary country folk can "nd no point in. It always sounds like drunken men slaughtering pigs. And, particularly, all sorts of female screamers have also been hired for singing on radio. [--] I am sick and tired of complaining and can not do it any more, so I shall pack my suitcase and start my voyage back to the Golden Land of the West.1

In the late 1920s, radio broadcasting was a true novelty in Fin-nish everyday life, and radio listeners were quite eager to com-ment on and even criticize the programmes. Several hundreds of letters were sent to the Finnish radio headquarters. !e radio company made its own surveys of listeners’ opinions about ra-

1 Martti Hautala’s letter to Hjalmar Waldén 25.9.1929. !e YLE collection, ELKA (!e Central Archives of Finnish Industry and Commerce), Mikkeli.

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dio content. Additionally, there was some debate in the Finnish newspapers; they published angry letters to the editor, where ra-dio listeners expressed their disappointment in radio music and programme content in general.2

In this article, I shall discuss the audience feedback on radio broadcasting in Finland in the late 1920s. Basing my study on the research material described above, I summarize the elements of early radio voices that made them either unpleasant or liked. A more general premise for the article is the new radioscape that brought public sounds to private life and foreign culture into the living rooms of ordinary citizens. !e new radioscape was very di#erent from the traditional soundscape of the home with its domestic sounds. Radio brought many new voices to private and everyday life. Many of these sounds were considered unpleasant and irritating. Furthermore, one could ask how radio changed people’s atti-tude towards di#erent sounds. Radio probably made the listeners more conscious of strange voices. Radio receivers were relatively expensive, and if such new equipment was purchased, the fam-ily listened to the radio very intensively and carefully. Early radio was de"nitely not used to create sonic wallpaper and background sounds, far from it. In addition, the early problems with radio sounds interestingly mirrors two cultural relationships: !e rela-tionship between mass media and traditional folk culture, and the change in the status of women and their role in modern life.

Music in early radio

!e Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE, was founded in 1926. !is occurred a couple of years later than regular radio broad-casting in Western European countries began, on average.3 From the very beginning, music played an important role in Finnish radio broadcasting. During the "rst years, music had a share of nearly 70 percent of all broadcast time. Later on the percentage

2 !e YLE collection, ELKA.3 For the history of early broadcasting in Western European countries, see e.g. http://www.hermanboel.eu/radiohistory/index.htm

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went down, but stayed at around 50. Almost all music was aired live, recordings were quite seldom used. Accordingly, YLE made considerable investments in its own music production. !e Finn-ish Radio Orchestra was founded in 1927 as a small salon music ensemble. !ree years later, the Orchestra consisted of 24 musi-cians – at the same time, the rest of the radio sta# from the chief manager to delivery boys amounted to 12 employees.4 Even a short review of early radio programmes gives the im-pression that YLE followed two main principles in programme planning:

1.) !e most important mission was to o#er serious and up lifting popular education and information to all Finns.

2.) In addition, YLE broadcast “suitable entertainment”, in order to ful"l the listeners’ need for amusement.

In the radio’s programme policy, this suitability referred more to high society than to a folksy style. Even popular music had to be sophisticated and in no way vulgar or crude. !e whole radio pol-icy was based on a strictly paternalistic attitude. !e broadcasting authorities seem to have thought they knew what was good for the Finnish people and what was not. Actually, the music the Finnish Radio Orchestra played dur-ing the early years, was quite light and popular, consisting of typi-cal salon orchestra repertoire of the 19th Century: “grand waltzes”, divertimentos, “concert polkas”, mood music (Charakterstücke), folk music rhapsodies, medleys of operetta melodies, operatic overtures, and so forth. After the new chief conductor Toivo Haa-panen was appointed in 1929, the Radio Orchestra quickly began to emphasize symphonic music in its repertoire, although “light classics” were still an important part of radio music repertoire. Additionally, since the late 1920s, the Helsinki Philharmonic Or-chestra had fairly regular radio broadcasts for its weekly symphon-ic concerts. !e shift towards more serious music led to some de-

4 Eino Lyytinen (1996) Perustamisesta talvisotaan. Yleisradion historia 1926–1949 Vol 1. Helsinki: WSOY painolaitokset. Yleisradio, pp. 54–55; Pekka Jalkanen and Vesa Kurkela (2003) Suomen musiikin historia. Populaarimusiikki. Helsinki: WSOY, p. 306.

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bate and critical feedback from listeners to the radio headquarters. Ordinary citizens did not understand symphonic music, although the radio listeners liked orchestral music in general.5 However, there were some other issues that made listeners even more irri-tated, among other things, bad sound quality, unpleasant female speakers, and above all, screaming sopranos.

Listeners’ opinions

During the "rst years, the Finnish radio authorities were very in-terested in the listeners’ opinions on radio programmes. In 1928 and 1929, special surveys were carried out, in which radio license payers were asked about their preferences concerning radio music and other programming. !e following review of pleasant and ir-ritating radio voices is mainly based on the 1929 survey based on 42,122 responses.6

!e feedback uncovers an obvious contradiction between popular taste and highbrow culture, between listeners’ wishes and the paternalistic attitude of the radio authorities. It might be tell-ing that YLE did not repeat the surveys after 1929. It is likely that the data on the listeners’ uncivilized taste was not useful regard-ing the radio programme policy, which followed an educative and morally uplifting line. !e following tables highlight the likes and dislikes of ordi-nary radio listeners: Table 1 shows the most popular radio sounds and programmes, with table 2 revealing the most irritating ones.

5 Kai Maasalo (1980) Radion sinfoniaorkesterin viisi vuosikymmentä 1927–1977. Jyväskylä: K. J. Gummerus, pp. 18, 38–49.6 Interestingly, the sample methods of the survey seem to be unknown. !e ques-tionnaires were sent to all the licence payers and 61 per cent replied. !e results of the 1929 survey were published in the periodical Yleisradio 16/1929. p. 241; see also Ala-Fossi (2005), pp. 144–145.

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* accordion music* comic songs * folk song arrangements* old dance music (polkas, waltzes)* brass bands and choral singing (especially male choirs)* kantele music* radio plays* male speakers, Markus Rautio and Alexis af Enehjelm7

Table 1. Pleasant sounds on Finnish radio in 19298

!e "ve-row accordion was a real innovation in the popular music scene of the 1920s. It was a very central instrument for dance mu-sic. Some new folksy dance bands had up to four accordions. !e most famous of these, the Dallapé orchestra, became popular by recording fast foxtrot tunes sung in Finnish. “Kuplettilaulu” was a genre of comic and topical songs, and they were very popular. A substantial part of the recordings targeted for the Finnish market before the 1930s were comic and other kind of folksy songs, often accompanied by accordion, piano, or a small “Salon ensemble”. Many of them were originally recorded and released for the Amer-ican-Finnish immigrant market.9

Initially the Finnish Broadcasting Company hired two male announcers, who also became the main "gures in organizing and planning radio programming: Alexis af Enehjelm and Markus Rautio. Mr. af Enehjelm was an opera singer with a wide network of connections among professional musicians, especially the art-ists of the Finnish Opera, among others. Later in the 1930s, he became a popular radio voice due to his feature programmes. Mr. Rautio was known as “Uncle Markus”, due to his children’s hours. !e idea for the programme was derived from the BBC pro-gramme “Children’s corner”. Mr. Rautio’s children’s hours were

7 !e popularity of radio announcers was not a part of the survey, but in several letters to the radio authorities the listeners told they liked the voice of male spea-kers very much. (!e domestic correspondence 1928–1930, !e YLE collection, ELKA).8 More than 40 percent of the informants wished to hear more of these sounds.9 Rainer Strömmer & Urpo Haapanen (1981) Catalogue of Finnish Recordings 1920–1945. Helsinki: Suomen Äänitearkisto, p. 6–29; 108–145; pp. 158–167.

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immensely popular and made Uncle Markus’ voice really well-known among all radio listeners, especially the younger ones.10 However, what is most striking in the list is its close connec-tion to folk culture. In the 1920s, Finnish folk culture consisted not only of peasant tradition, but also of the so-called organiza-tion culture of various associations and clubs that were founded in the late 19th century as a part of the Finnish national move-ment. Music festivals were regularly held in assembly houses and youth clubs, which is why Finns were already used to listening to brass bands and choral music. !eatre plays and various tab-leau performances were highly popular as well. At festivals and meetings, the national spirit was often upheld with the aid of folk songs and playing the kantele, the Finnish national instrument. In early programme planning, YLE successfully followed this old popular trend. Orchestral arrangements of folk songs were a permanent part of the Radio orchestra’s repertoire, and, during the decades to come, radio became a very important channel for the distribution of Finnish choral music, old and contemporary. In the 1920s, radio plays were real novelties: Radio listeners were fond of new, non-visual theatrical performances aired to their liv-ing rooms.

Irritating radio voices

!e list of unpleasant radio voices (table 2) consists of di#erent topics and sound sources. However, the reasons for their unpopu-larity are relatively easy to explain. In the early years of radio, the quality of radio sound was very poor due to serious technical problems in transmission. !e lo-" standard of radio sound made even smooth orchestral music quite noisy and restless, thus preventing an enjoyable listening experience. At the end of the 1920s, the technical quality was a common topic in the listeners’ letters to radio.11

!ere were many voices on the radio waves that were felt to be irritating by the majority of radio listeners: Modern concert

10 Lyytinen (1996), p. 55–56.11 !e domestic correspondence 1928–1930, !e YLE collection, ELKA.

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music, American dance music and lectures on art and philosophy sounded strange and disturbing. Ordinary people could not un-derstand the most exclusive forms of high culture, and new Amer-ican dance music, so-called jazz, sounded too noisy, especially among country people. !e majority of radio listeners were Finnish-speaking, and Swedish programmes were the subject of continuous complaints. !e Republic of Finland was founded in 1917, and the new 1919 constitution declared the country o%cially bilingual. !e Swedish-speaking minority had the right to be served in Swed-ish by the clerks in governmental and municipal administration as well as in educational institutions. Accordingly, the Finnish Broadcasting Company was bilingual from the very beginning, and the number of Swedish programmes was, relatively speaking, considerably bigger than the share of Swedish speakers of the to-tal population. However, the language question was a hot issue in the young republic, and many nationalist Finns – the so-called genuine Finns (aitosuomalaiset) – tried to weaken the public status of the Swedish language. !ey felt the abundant number of Swed-ish programmes in Finnish radio disturbing, and even an insult towards Finnishness and the national spirit. A 1928 letter to the radio headquarters states: “Us Finns were truly humiliated once again last Sunday evening, when our radio enjoyment was dis-turbed by untolerable Swedish babble. [--] It would be preferred

12 More than 38 percent of the informants wished to hear less of this kind of music; the highest number (51,4 percent) was for the dislike towards female solo singing.

* poor quality of radio transmissions* antipathetic female announcers * swedish-speaking broadcasting* lectures on philosophy, "ne art and music* irritating music12

* female opera singers* opera, operetta, cabaret * female choirs* symphonic music* modern American dance music

Table 2. Irritating sounds on Finnish radio 1929

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that Swedish-language programming would only be broadcast once every seven years.”13

!e most striking feature on the list, however, are the dis-turbing female voices. !e irritation was expressed very clearly in many angry letters written by the radio listeners to the radio headquarters. Both female announcers and operatic singers were accused of having shrill voices that made it painful to listen to the radio. In order to understand this phenomenon, one has to go back to the original premise, the idea of a totally new soundscape that was born in the wake of radio broadcasting. !e listeners felt that the new “radioscape” was public and national rather than private and local. In the "rst half of the 20th century, a typical and accept-able public voice was, evidently and only, a male voice. Radio was a part of the public sphere, and accordingly, at the beginning of the radio era, female voices were willingly omitted from the radio-scape. !e other reason for the irritation was more accidental. !e "rst female speaker in YLE, Ms. Ebba Jacobsson-Lilius, just hap-pened to have quite a cold and sti# quality to her voice. It is somewhat ironic that Ms. Jacobsson-Lilius was a true voice pro-fessional, who later on had a long career as a teacher of elocution and vocal training at the Sibelius Academy.14 Due to her profes-sional background, her voice sounded upper-class, o%cial, highly trained, carefully recited and somewhat Swedish, and ordinary listeners could not stand it. It is interesting to compare her voice to that of her colleague, Mr. Alexis af Enehjelm, an aristocrat and opera singer. His voice, too, had an upper-class and formal sound. He was, however, a man, and thus his voice was accepted – it was allowed to sound o%cial. Gradually, at least during the years of World War II, the Finnish listeners became accustomed to female radio voices. However, by the mid-century onwards, the optimal radio voice had developed to a quite soft and relatively low one, and the fe-

13 A letter from “License 99991/2” to YLE 9.2.1928; YLE collection, ELKA.14 Fabian Dahlström (1982) Sibelius-Akademin 1882–1982. Helsingfors: Sibelius–Akademi, p. 321.

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male speakers usually tried to adapt their voices to this ideal.15 !is development is connected to the way women of the public sphere use their voices even today. If you listen to women in high positions – business managers or politicians – their public voice is usually quite low. A piping soprano is not considered credible, and during the recent decades, there has also been a common tendency among Finnish female students to lower their pitch.16 Something similar has happened to o%cial male voices – both in political life and in more commercial contexts like radio and television ads: deep baritones are kings. !eir voices have many positive connotations that are needed for assertion and persua-sion: "rmness, power, credibility, and sexual appeal.17 According-ly, there is a considerable di#erence between public male voices in the highest political positions of the 1930s and today: screaming tenors – Chamberlain, Hitler, Atatürk, and Goebbels – have been replaced by deep baritones like Obama, Putin, and Helmut Kohl. However, a high pitch could be caused by purely technical issues: In mass gatherings with no powerful sound ampli"ers available, the early political speakers actually had to shout in order to get their message through. Even Adolf Hitler’s radio voice was softer and lower than his voice in political rallies.18

However, it was not only due to the question of credibility why coloratura sopranos were considered particularly aggravat-ing during the early radio years. !e main problem was the way the opera singers sang. A letter from a female listener in 1944

15 !is account of audible changes is preliminary and the issue needs to be studied more closely later on. !e argument here is based on the overview of radio and television programmes in 1950–1980 at the YLE archives, see http://yle."/elavaar-kisto/ 16 Timo Leino, A-M Laukkanen, R. Kättö, E. Mäki, I. Ilomäki (1999) “Average fundamental frequency of Finnish female students in the1970’s and in the 1990’s”. In Proceedings of the 24th congress of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP), eds. Ph. Dejonckere & H.F.M. Peters, Amsterdam 23–27 August, 1998. Volume I. Nijmegen: IALP, pp. 60–62. 17 Cf. Heikki Uimonen (2007) ”Bensankärystä pullantuoksuun. Miesäänen käyttö suomalaisissa televisiomainoksissa”. Lähikuva 4/2007, pp. 6–23. 18 It is noteworthy that not all the top politicians had a high voice in the 1930s: !ere were also deep baritones among them, like Winston Churchill and Beni-to Mussolini. !e observations are based on documentary "lms available in the Internet, e.g. “Adolf Hitler 1937 in original German”; “Hitler’s Last Broadcast”; “Winston Churchill speech 1940”; “Goebbels Rare Speech Galore”; “Kendi Sesiyle Atatürk”; “Mussolini discorso della dichiarazione di guerra”, www.youtube.com/watch?v=; “Prime Minister Chamberlain speaks”, www.itnsource.com/shotlist

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is revealing: “Dear radio people. I beg of you. Save us from the howling of women. [--] I am a woman myself and I like music, I even like female singers as long as their voices are not tainted by artistic endeavours.”19

!e singing style of operatic sopranos was very di#erent from folk music and other popular ways of singing, and this is why the listening experience was often too peculiar for ordinary listeners. One reason was undoubtedly the poor technical quality of radio transmission, which made soprano voices appear tiny, weak, dis-tant, and, at least occasionally, full of distortion. !e lyrics were another reason. Most of the operatic reper-toire was performed in foreign languages. However, singing in Finnish did not make the reception much easier. !e habit of op-era singers to pronounce the lyrics “musically” often resulted in such a performance that one could not understand a single word even if the song was sung in one’s mother tongue. Interestingly, the "rst real hit singer in Finland, Georg Malmstén, also had an operatic background with classical voice training. However, he managed to rid his voice of operatic man-ners and adapt to the popular style of singing.20 !e same seems to have been impossible for Finnish female opera and operetta singers, and the disgust towards operatic sopranos brought about low popularity for female popular singers, too. It was not until the mid-1950s that the "rst generation of female hit soloists ap-peared. !e most successful of them were contraltos and altos, the so-called crooning altos like Annikki Tähti, and even sopranos and mezzo-sopranos lowered their pitch when striving for popu-larity.21

19 A letter from a female listener to YLE headquarters 26.4.1944, YLE Music De-partment, domestic correspondence, ELKA.20 Sakari Warsell (2003) Georg Malmsten. Suomen iskelmäkuningas. Helsinki: WSOY, pp. 136–192.21 Pekka Gronow (1996) !e Recording Industry. An Ethnomusicological Approach. Tampere: Acta Universitatis Tamperensis, ser. A vol. 504, pp. 64–67.

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Why so serious?

One can still ask why the Finnish audience took the early ra-dio sound so seriously. Why did they get so angry at disturbing voices? First, we have to remember that radio broadcasting in the 1920s was a real novelty, a sign of modernity and national prosperity. Only the automobile was a more powerful symbol of modern life, but in poor Finland very few people could a#ord a car. Radio receivers were available to almost everybody. Hardly anyone could be indi#erent, since radio was much more than mere entertainment. It was highly political, a totally new mass medium. Secondly, for several decades, Finnish radio was based on one-channel broadcasting. If one happened to dislike the radio sound, the only alternative was to switch o# the receiver. Furthermore, irritating sounds were more disturbing at home than in public places like in the street, where you could quite eas-ily escape irritating foreign language or unpleasant music. Finally, a strange and disturbing radioscape – upper-class speech, noisy modern music or foreign language – was often felt as a threat to harmonious family life. !e radio set was no longer a cosy "re-place, “a radio hearth” – as a typical radio advertisement of the time called it – but a dangerous device that caused irritation.22

Radio and cultural conflicts

In conclusion, the early broadcasting in Finland brought up sev-eral cultural con$icts or contradictions that were very typical in European cultural history of the previous century (table 3).

* popular culture vs. upper-class culture* uncivilized masses vs. high art and academia* rural & local vs. urban & national* traditional life vs. modernity* liberal attitude vs. paternalistic attitude* private life (female) vs. public sphere (masculine)

Table 3. Cultural con$icts in radio broadcasting

22 Simon Frith (1988) Music for Pleasure. Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 31–32.

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!e "rst two cultural con$icts are parts of the same contradic-tion between highbrow and lowbrow cultures. !e centuries old dichotomy between “the nobles” and “the peasants” did not dis-appear in the wake of national and democratic movements and modern political life based on parliamentarism. On the contrary, in the Western cultural discourse the distinction between low and high culture – the civilized and the masses – became more strictly divided than ever before. As Lawrence Levine23 puts it, at the turn of the 20th century, the masses were de"ned “as those whose sole delight rested in ‘eating, drinking, smoking, society of the other sex, with dancing, music of a noisy and lively character, spectacu-lar shows, and athletic exhibitions.” Anyone demonstrating “per-manent taste for higher pleasures [--] ceases, ipso facto, to belong to the masses”. Although radio was seen as a mass medium from the very beginning, the cultural attitude of public broadcasting in Finland – and elsewhere in Europe – was relatively highbrow. Ra-dio was for the masses, but it was not mass culture. !e mission of early public broadcasting was to distribute uplifting “higher pleasures” and popular education as the journal of YLE stated in 1929:

Radio cannot survive only on entertaining programmes, it does not exist purely for amusement. On the contrary, its most central mission is, without question, the distribution of spiritual and material civilization and furthering all kinds of useful knowledge.24

!e next two contradictions (rural – urban and traditionalist – modern) were connected to the demographic fact that, before the mid-20th century, the vast majority of Finns lived in the country-side. Accordingly, ordinary people were not used to accepting the cultural habits and issues typical of urban life. Radio was an im-portant symbol of modernity and thus Finns not living in urban areas easily found new radio sounds and programmes strange and disturbing. On the other hand, radio was an e#ective medium in building an “imagined community” of the Finnish nation-state

23 Lawrence Levine (1988) Highbrow / Lowbrow. !e Emergence of Cultural Hierar-chy in America. Cambridge – London: Harvard University Press, p. 225.24 “Suomen Yleisradio alkavana radiokautena”. Yleisradio 35/1929.

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among all Finnish citizens. With the aid of radio, strong local identities were partly replaced by a national identity. !e radio network quickly spread in the 1930s. In 1939, about half of the Finnish population had access to radio broadcasting.25

!e last two contradictions highlight the change in Finnish cultural and political life where the paternalistic hegemony gradu-ally lost its superiority. !ere were many female voices in the early YLE radio programmes, especially musical voices. However, the audience feedback was often negative, and one could even argue that there was an implicit tendency to abandon o%cial fe-male voices with biblical overtones: Women shall keep quiet in the communion. On the other hand, during the decades to come – until the 1980s – the general image and overall radio sound stayed extremely formal and o%cial. !e formal YLE code in ra-dio speech was a rule that nobody could and wanted to o#end. In the early years, and several decades thereafter, YLE "rmly stuck with the topics mentioned on the right side of the table above, promoting highbrow culture, nationalist values, semi-urban modernity, masculine publicity and a paternalistic attitude in private and public life. Radio also brought the public sphere to the living rooms of ordinary people, which must have been quite confusing for traditional family life. Later on, the issues on the left side of the table gradually received more space in radio broad-casting. However, the breakthrough of popular culture did not occur until the 1960s, when so-called pop music revolution sub-stantially increased the supply of international popular in radio. Finally, a liberal attitude, private life and female and other non-masculine voices – especially those of young people – became a part of radio language, when the o%cial style of radio speech and “reading from paper” gave way to a more informal style. In Finland, this did not happen until the 1980s, in the wake of me-dia deregulation and commercial radio.

(!e article is based on the paper held at IASPM World Conference, June 27th 2005, Rome (Italy).)

25 Lyytinen (1996), p. 128.

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Vesa Kurkela Heikki Uimonen

De-Monopolizing Finland

!e Changing Contents of Finnish Commercial and Public Radios 1980–2005

In 1985 a fundamental structural change occurred in Finn-ish radio history when the "rst commercial radios stations were granted experimental two-year licences. At the same time the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE lost its monopoly of radio broadcasting. As a result a competition between two types of cor-porate cultures and radio practices were introduced: on the one side there was the European public service radio and on other the American commercial radio. American style radio is founded on advertising and music. However, in most European countries radio was originally seen as a medium for information and propaganda. Music had a signi"-cant but secondary role in radio programming. Classical music was considered the most suitable music for radios, which is un-derlined by the fact that most European broadcasting companies had their own symphony orchestras. Since the 1960s, the amount of recorded popular music increased. It seems that it re$ected not just the taste changes of the audiences but also the changes in the quality cultures of the broadcasting companies. !e Finnish government granted twenty-two experimental licences to local broadcasters with the emphasis on locality. !e commercially operating radios’ economy was based on selling ad-vertising time. However, the absolute prerequisite for the licence was the locality both in transmission range and programming content. Locality was clearly an ideological term loaded with great expectations to increase the citizens’ self-expression and political participation. Accordingly, the change in the Finnish ra-

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dioscape was "rst tinged by the ideals of the freedom of speech. In this atmosphere hardly anyone could believe that tiny commercial radios could threaten the monopoly of the mighty Finnish Broad-casting Company.

Gradually the hegemonic European radio system ended in Finland and the American one became more in$uential. !e topic of this article is to analyse how these changes in the radioscape af-fected radio music, and, more speci"cally, how the use of music was changed in radio programmes and in radio journalism. Furthermore, we scrutinize the idea of local radio in a country with relatively a small population: what does locality really mean in modern radio culture? !e transition to commercial radio is often seen as part of the deregulation of the electronic media. According to Malm and Wal-lis in deregulation the monopolistic radio corporation is replaced by a new group of commercial owners which will lead to a creation of new monopoly or oligopoly2. However, the term deregulation is slightly misleading in Finnish context. !e regulation of Finnish radio broadcasting did not end in 1985 since the radio business is also regulated and reformulated today and there are no signs that this would cease to exist in the future. As a consequence it would be more appropriate to speak about the demonopolization and reregulation of broadcasting3. In 1990s the deregulation led to a concentration of owner-ship, formats, streamlining and networking . During this transi-tion, recorded music has become the main content of commercial radio stations, and radio has e#ectively become a part of the mu-sic industries. In reaction to the competition, public broadcasters have changed their music policies, and thus increased the signi"-cance of recorded music in their channels. With good reason it

1 Antero Jyränki (1969) Yleisradio ja sananvapaus. Tutkimus valtionvalvonnasta ja sananvapaudesta yleisradiotoiminnassa. Helsinki: Tammi, p. 34; Taisto Hujanen (1993) “Viestinnän demokratisointi, yleisradiotoiminnan deregulaatio ja paikal-lisradiot”. In Radiotutkimusta kohti, ed. Taisto Hujanen. Tampere: Tampereen yliopistopaino, pp. 189–203.2 Krister Malm & Roger Wallis (1992) Media policy and music activity, London: Routledge.3 See also Taisto Hujanen (2001) “Ääniradio”. In Suomen mediamaisema, ed. Kaarle Nordenstreng & Osmo A. Wiio. Porvoo: WSOY, p. 94.4 See Malm & Wallis (1992).

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can be said that broadcasting lives in symbiosis with the record industry. It must be said, however, that there are profound di#erences in the record industry and the radio business. Record companies sell their products to consumers, and receive direct feedback from the sales. !e revenue of radio broadcasters is based either on ad-vertising sales on commercial radios or licence fees in public ra-dio. Management can perceive the response of the listeners only indirectly. !e way in which broadcasters interpret the needs and wishes of their audiences and determine what types of music are suitable for broadcasting is the “quality culture“ of the company. It can be de"ned as an aspect of the company’s corporate culture. Historically, the quality culture of public broadcasters stressed diversity, artistic quality and good taste. It de"ned clas-sical music as a preferred genre, but allowed the broadcasting of a certain amount of popular music. Even in public broadcasting, it has at least partly been replaced by the new quality culture of commercial broadcasters. !e new meaning of quality is based on management theory and can be de"ned by several concepts more or less related to the economic goals of radio business: competi-tion, production, expenses, consumption, and changing cultural values.

In the following we discuss how the transition from the pub-lic service radio monopoly to a more liberal and many-sided radio culture occurred in Finland. Alongside with describing the Zeitgeist of local radio culture we will present a theoretical framework for the separate stages of radio between 1980 and 2005. In each of these one can "nd considerable changes in the radio content that had a clear impact on the use of music in radio programmes. !ese phases can be summed up in three somewhat romantic headings: Faith, Hope, and Treacherous Love. !e change will be studied especially from the perspective of rock music in radio and its reception among young audiences and the related public discussion. Along with the Finnish Broadcasting Company our focus is on two in$uential music radios, Radio City in Helsinki and Radio 957 in Tampere. In addition, the

5 See Marko Ala-Fossi (2005) Saleable Compromises. Quality Cultures in Finnish and US Commercial Radio. Tampere: Tampere University Press, pp. 251–260.

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development of Classic Radio and Iskelmä Radio (“Schlager Radio”) will be brie$y discussed.

Faith 1980–1985

Towards the end of the seventies one could not imagine that YLE would some day lose its monopoly as a radio and television op-erator. !e faith in the eternal monopoly was seemingly as "rm as the omnipresence of Finland’s Eastern neighbour, the Soviet Union. Despite the media hegemony YLE was not passive or un-concerned about the future. On the contrary, the company con-tinuously discussed the guidelines of programme practices and accessibility of radio listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, when television became more popular and central in the people’s lives there were many who supposed that the story of radio would end quite soon. However, the setting up of a series of new light music programmes called Sävelradio (lit. Melody Radio) in spring 1963 created a foundation for a new programme policy that favoured popular music. !e importance of radio broadcasting was meas-ured with the aid of regular quantitative research of radio listen-ing and audiences. By 1980 the authorities of the Finnish Broadcasting Com-pany suddenly realised that they had lost their young listeners. According to a survey, the young generation, aged 9 to 14 years, hardly listened to radio at all. Instead of radio, they used music cassette players. !e number of listeners was also relatively low in the next age group, those aged 15 to 24. Compared to the young Finns, radio was rather popular mass-media among middle-aged and older citizens: 75–86 per cent of them listened to radio regu-larly.7 !e fear of audience loss was apparently exaggerated, since the listening habits of young people under 15 years were never

6 Erja Erholm (1987) Radio-ohjelmien seuraaminen 1976–1986. Yhteenveto radion seuraamistutkimuksista. Helsinki: Yleisradio, p. 3; Pentti Kemppainen (2001) Julkisradioiden kanavauudistus Norjassa, Ruotsissa ja Suomessa. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto, viestinnän laitos.7 Erholm (1987), pp. 28–29.

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measured before. However, the radio leaders started to "nd the reason for the alleged loss of young audiences. !e reason was evident: YLE’s broadcasting of rock music was very meagre and selective. A couple of years earlier a new musical style, so called suomirock was born. It was a combination of Anglo-American pop, Afro-American rock and Finnish lyrics. Towards the end of the 70s suomirock became very popular: for the "rst time in Finnish music history rock sold better than other popular mu-sic styles such as schlager, pop schlager and disco. However, the “rock” of the Finnish radio was usually light and harmless Top Ten pop songs as well as fusion jazz and progressive rock styles. Punk and new wave were seldom aired, despite their popularity at that time. Harsh and aggressive rock was totally unsuitable to the radio’s enlightening and uplifting music policy. In addition, new rhythmic music was played only occasionally between regular daily programmes, so the young rock fans did not have a "xed time for the radio listening. As a result, they turned their backs on radio. Between 1976 and 1982 listening activity among school children and students collapsed by one-third.8 Furthermore, a prominent youth cultural movement con-nected to rock music emerged. In spring 1980 the activists of the so-called ELMU movement – which stands for Live Music Asso-ciations – contacted YLE’s headquarters. !ey brought a petition signed by 16, 000 rock a"cionados and demanded more rock mu-sic on radio programmes. !e collecting of names for the petition was organized by the leading Finnish rock magazine called Soun-di. Young audiences’ dissatis"ed feedback was not positive for the public image of YLE and the company had to react to it in some way. Because of this the radio authorities promised to rethink the company’s music contents. A new programme called Rockradio was launched in June 1980. It was organized simply by relocating and renaming youth programmes to a single two-hour block that was to be aired regu-larly every second day under the new title. !e programme was planned and hosted by three radio professionals with backgrounds

8 Erja Erholm & Ismo Silvo (1983) Radio- ja televisio-ohjelmien seuraaminen 1976–1982. Oy Yleisradio Ab, Suunnittelu- ja tutkimusosasto, Sarja B 8/1983, p. 7.9 Seppo Bruun & al. (1998) Jee, jee, jee: suomalaisen rockin historia. Helsinki: WSOY, p. 310.

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as rock musicians and DJs Heikki Harma, Heimo Holopainen and Jake Nyman. Alongside these main hosts the many leading radio voices of the younger generation started their career as col-laborators of Rockradio. At "rst the new programme was aired and developed in relative peace, but after a year a public debate on rock and morals started. !e "erce debate was named the Finnish ‘rock war’.

The rock war

!e Finnish rock war can be described with the help of the source material seldom used in research: the "les of the YLEs programme service. In October 1970 a special phone line was opened for the radio listeners. !e listeners could call the radio company and give their opinions about radio programmes and their contents. !e new service proved useful since feedback was given on almost a daily basis. !e reports of the radio service gave a many-sided picture of radio listeners’ likes and dislikes regarding current ra-dio programmes. !e feedback was also discussed in the weekly meetings of the editorial sta#. According to radio personnel the attitude towards the feedback was twofold: On the one hand the continuous feedback was seen as useful and important. On the other, the radio professionals soon realized that there were many unbalanced people among the feedback senders; overeager listen-ers who complained constantly about everything. However, some radio hosts even counted their editorial work as successful as long as they received critical feedback. Listeners’ criticism showed that the programme was not meaningless. Already in the seventies noisy and unpleasant music and ob-scene language were the typical topic in the listeners’ feedback. Quite understandably the same issues appeared in 1981, when Rockradio caused a daily sensation among the adult listeners. Typical feedback on Rockradio journalism was "led by the pro-

10 Taina Kanerva (1990) Rock, radio ja rockradio: rockmusiikin vastakulttuuriluon-teen ja syksyn 1981 rockradiosodan tarkastelua. Rock suomalaisessa musiikkikulttuu-rissa. MA thesis, Tampereen yliopisto, tiedotusopin laitos, p. 108.11 Oral information 9th March 2007: Minna Hannula, Hannu Suolanen, Pentti Kemppainen.

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gramme service in October 1981. An angry female radio listener complained about grotesque rock recordings and suspected the Rockradio hosts of being secret Communists:

Despite all critique, this awful trio (Harma, Nyman, and Holopainen) is allowed to go on playing those terrible noisy records with such dreadful lyrics that nobody’s ears can listen to. !e majority of Finnish people cannot accept these obscenities that new suomirock bands are rendering. And these DJs: have they been at least in elementary school and what kind of families do they come from? Are they probably Com-munists in"ltrated into radio?12

!e reference to the Communist plot can be interpreted in con-nection with political features of the YLE organization. In 1975 the radio programming of the company had been divided into two separate units, Radio 1 and Radio 2, with two directors with an obvious party political background. Radio 2 was headed by Keijo Savolainen who came from the left-wing party. Accordingly, it was easy to conclude that Radio 2 was the Communist radio channel. Since Rockradio was located to the Entertainment De-partment of Radio 2, it was not di%cult to believe that Rockradio was Communist, too. !e Communist stigma was no doubt increased by the habit of young rock journalists of blending political issues and rock music together. Some listeners disliked the DJs making jokes about Ronald Reagan or Margaret !atcher in a music pro-gramme for the young. In a country with a cautious foreign poli-cy o%cially stressing neutrality in its international relations it was easily thought that all the YLE programmes should also remain non-partisan and neutral:

In my opinion the rock DJ mocks the new President of the US a bit too much. If this kind of political mockery is part of the new practice of Rockradio, the Presidents of some other countries should also be selected for such mockery.13

12 OPR 10th March 1981. Reports of the programme on-call service, YLE archives.13 OPR 24th January 1981. Reports of the programme on-call service, YLE ar-chives.

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In the following there are some typical examples of critical audi-ence feedback of Rockradio. It is easy to see that the main reason for the irritation was the speaking style of the rock DJs and their guests. Swearwords were also searched and reported in the lyrics of rock songs. Some radio listeners even counted and put down the frequency of naughty words in a programme:

Saturday 24.1.1981

A woman from Lahti town: “A man reads poems on the radio and uses very bad words. He said “damn” and spoke twice about fucking; he even mentioned the word “cunt”. !is kind of speech is by no means suitable for radio.”

Saturday 13.6.1981

A male listener: “In this radio programme there was no single word of real Finnish, just swearwords. ‘Fuck and damn’ are not Finnish. !is "lth was broadcast on Saturday afternoon. How is this possible?”

Monday 12.10.1981

Eight teachers from Sipoo municipality: “In this programme a song by the Sleepy Sleepers was played that contained only swearwords. If DJ Holopainen does not stop this kind of action which is contrary to the Education Act, we will have to contact to the programme council of the radio. Such hosts must be dismissed from radio.”

!ursday 12.10.1981

A female listener: “Our family with "ve members is currently dining and Rockradio broadcasts such a terrible manner of speech. A man called Santtu reads poems with only swear-words and abuse. How can this be allowed!”

Quite soon the rock war became a part of Finnish media publi-city. During the autumn many newspapers and magazines re-ceived a huge number of letters to the editor where Rockradio was blamed for obscenities and rough expressions. In addition, the

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loud and distorted sounds of rock music were heavily criticized. !e typical press headlines of autumn 1981 were: “Rock: unlim-ited joy or spoiler of manners?” (Jokiranta 1981); “Dogs bark but the Rockradio plays on” (Pesonen 1981); “Is rock corrupting Finnish youth?” (Timonen 1981). However, the harshest criticism against Rockradio came somewhat unexpectedly from inside the radio company. Two conservative female journalists, Maija Dahl-gren and Anneli Tempakka, launched a campaign against Rockra-dio. In their opinion the new music radio idolized decadence and led young listeners astray.

Anneli Tempakka was famous for her youth programmes, where she – according to rock DJ Heimo Holopainen – introduced such idealistic young people who hardly exist. Holopainen was invited by Tempakka to her programme for a conversation. In this ‘special court’ Holopainen was heavily accused by two aggressive young op-ponents of rock culture for corrupting innocent young listeners. In addition, Maija Dahlgren focused on new rock lyrics. In her talk-show Dahlgren rather unambiguously interpreted enigmatic and of-ten ambivalent lyrics of Finnish rock bands: such songs gave simply bad ideals of the Finnish youth and it was unbelievable that these could be aired in Finnish radio.15 After this campaign the listeners’ feedback partly turned positive for Rockradio. !e conservative radio journalists were accused for having double standards and unfair and disloyal behaviour. In some listeners’ opinions the female broadcasters had no idea of rock mu-sic. Suomirock was seen as a new kind of literature, even avant-garde literature. Rude and vulgar expressions were considered as an essen-tial part of literature as much as it was important that di%cult social problems were discussed in rock lyrics:

14 K. Timonen (1981) Tästä radiolaiset nyt riitelevät: Pilaako rokki Suomen nuorison? Ilta-Sanomat, tabloid, 17th October; R. Jokiranta (1981) Onko rokki rajaton riemu vai tapojen turmelija? Jaana, Ladies’ Magazine, nr. 44, 29th October; P. Pesonen (1981) Rock-radio soi, koirat haukkuvat. Kansan Uutiset, newspaper, 15th October.15 Kanerva (1990), 108; Bruun & al. (1998), p. 312; Yle (2007a) Anneli Tempakka – Olen erilainen nuori. http://www.yle."/elavaarkisto/?s=s&g=5&ag=35&t=297.

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Friday 9.10.1981, feedback on Maija Dahlgren’s radio talk.

Academic librarian: “!is criticism recently focused on rock music is amazing. A totally rock illiterate columnist spoke about a topic fully unfamiliar to her. Is it too di%cult for older people to realize that all modern music has to have a message and dirty words are part of modern literature?”Male radio listener: “In my opinion in the song in question the overuse of beer is expressed in an ironizing manner whereas the other song tells about sinking in "lth. But isn’t it true that we will all sink in muck and pollutants very soon?”

!e end of the rock war emphasises the importance of media public-ity. With the aid of public debate Rockradio became well-known and popular among the young and the Finnish Broadcasting Company was able to keep young listeners on the channel – at least for a while. From the perspective of a changing radioscape the in$uence of Rock-radio was crucial, since the new channel launched a group of young DJs and journalists that soon became the leading radio voices of their generation. Later on, most of them made a career outside the YLE and some of them were the founders of the "rst commercial music radio specialized in rock music, Radio City in Helsinki.

Smiling broadcasters

!e rock war was apparently the last episode in Finland when the cultural establishment tried to prevent the development of youth popular culture or control and redirect its modes of expression. Actually, it was a "ght between two opposing hegemonies, the high-cultural project of popular education and Anglo-American rock culture. !e former was "nally losing its absolute cultural hegemony, whereas the latter was about to prevail. Unfortunately, one might say, since in the long run, cultural hegemony of any kind never brings any good to local cultures; it kills diversity and easily sti$es and marginalizes the local and minority voices. In the beginning rock culture was quite innovative in the national radioscape. Young rock radio journalists were rather in-formative and thus following the path of public education policy of YLE. However, their mode of expression was new. !e rock

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talk was breaking the traditional code of radio speech. It was more informal and faster than traditional radio talk, using a lot of expressions of subcultures and urban slang. As a result, new rock radio journalism developed a totally new rhetoric for radio talk. !e appearance of a strong rock culture raised new issues in the Finnish public discussion, and young journalists were key messengers in this process. However, the change did not only mean that public speech became more sub-cultural or slangy. At the more general level the public image of the Finnish medias-cape became lighter and more entertaining. Education became edutainment and very often nothing but fun without any educa-tive or informative goals. !e Finnish cultural sociologist Markku Koski describes how journalists’ public images have changed in the Finnish me-diascape. According to him – and applying Raymond Williams’ vocabulary – in the 1980s there was a notable change in the “structures of feeling” in radio and television work. !e pater-nalistic and formal attitude typical of previous YLE broadcasting was replaced by new modes of speech that were more informal and often naive; serious education and information was put aside in favour of fun-seeking nonsense. Koski speaks about “a smiling broadcaster”, who “no longer represented the state or society and does not speak to citizens but to audiences. S/he is a performer, but s/he di#ers from other artists in one way: S/he actually does not know who her audience is”. Koski’s evaluation rings true. However, today – more than twenty years later – new quality culture in commercial radio oper-ates with carefully de"ned channel pro"les cause new challenges for smiling broadcasters: !ey have to know their audiences ex-actly. Furthermore, Koski’s comment could be complemented with an example of classical music. !e sanctifying and uplifting speech typical of all classical music programmes in previous dec-ades disappeared at least partly in the 1990s. !is high-$own way of speaking was felt to be old-fashioned even among conservative classical music audiences. Lofty speech about music can be heard even today, but it is no longer part of channel sound but a special e#ect reserved for certain types of classical music programmes.

16 Markku Koski (2001) Julkisia eläimiä. Helsinki: WSOY, pp. 147–151.

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However, the traditional matter-of-fact style, the so-called YLE speech code, was fairly powerful. Conventional programmes with strict timetables and well-structured contents were a core part of YLE’s everyday programming. Nevertheless change was imminent. !e messengers of change were commercial and local music radios, which at the very beginning seemed to be very ide-alistic, tame and innocent.

Hope 1985–1990

In the mid-1980s Finnish radioscape entered a new phase where radio speech gradually started to re$ect the style of broadcast mu-sic and its sub-cultural features. A similar change in rock journal-ism dates back to the end of the 1960s, when young ‘popwriters’ evolved their own personal style. A key innovator was the rock journalist Nik Cohn, who by the late 1960s had became the "rst writer to put his perspective of “presence and rock’n’roll attitude” more deliberately into the writing style itself. In his opinion short sentences and direct, powerful language was a guarantee that writing should “drive” just like the music. With him, for the "rst time, musical reception became the most important aspect of rock criticism. !e similar change towards informal writing was typi-cal of the young writers in American fanzine journals that found their models in jazz and avant-garde art writing, but even more in "lm criticism and so-called “New Journalism’s fondness for the extraordinary in ordinary life”. By the 1980s rock journalism even in Finland was stylisti-cally many-sided consisting of various sub-cultural speech modes, the most in$uential trailblazers being the rock magazines Soundi and Rumba. Music radio slowly followed. !e traditional model of public radio radio speech was so strong that the founders of Rockradio could not usually risk breaking the YLE code. As al-ready noted, the feedback of adult radio listeners discouraged

17 Pekka Oesch (1989) Levyarvostelun tuolla puolen. Neljä näkökulmaa rockkritiik-kiin. Helsinki: Työväenmusiikki-instituutti, pp. 38–40; Gestur Gudmunsson & al. (2002) “Brit Crit. Turning Points in British Rock Criticism, 1960–1990”. In Pop Music and the Press, ed. Steve Jones. Philadephia: Temple University Press, pp. 41–44.

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vulgar expressions. However, a more informal mode of speaking and a new editorial policy found their supporters in commercial local radios. Colloquial language, informal modes of speaking and parody styles were introduced, likewise programmes dealing with sensitive and taboo subjects, such as neo-Nazis, drug use, and sexual minorities. !e heralds of the new radio speech were Radio 957 from Tampere and especially Radio City, broadcasting in the Helsinki area. Before broadcasting was started the freedom of speech, econ-omy, locality, participating of the listeners and the economic pre-conditions were brought into the discussion19. Quite interestingly, music was almost completely excluded from the public discussion. However, six months after broadcasting started issues dealing with the music selection creeped into the corporate cultures of the ra-dio. Radio City especially identi"ed itself strongly with rock mu-sic right from the beginning.

Radio City rocks the capital

Radio City was granted a broadcasting licence on 24th January, 1985. !e licence-holder was the local Elävän musiikin yhdistys (ELMU, Live Music Association) which was also responsible of the content of the channel. Helsingin Paikallinen Radio Oy (Hel-sinki Local Radio Corporation) was responsible for selling the radio advertising time, investments and local programme produc-tion. !e shareholders of the corporation were ELMU, WSOY (one of the major publishing houses in Finland) and the student union of Helsinki School of Economics. Broadcasting started on 31st of April, 1985.20

18 Alan G. Stavitsky (1995) “Ear on America”. In Radio. !e Forgotten Medium, eds. E.C. Pease & E.S. Dennis. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 19 Prtcity (1985) Operating and information dissemination philosophy for local radio stations. !ematic interviews at Lepakko Helsinki 25th April, those responding were Reijo Rutanen, Teppo Turkki and Petri Niemi; 23rd May. Christian Moust-gaard responding. Transcriptions stored in archives at the department of Journal-ism and Mass Communication, University of Tampere.20 Prtcity (1985); Jukka Lindfors & Markku Salo (1988) Nupit kaakkoon: Elmu kymmenen vuotta. Helsinki: Elävän musiikin yhdistys, p. 238.

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ELMU’s radio channel was a natural continuation for its musi-cal and other cultural activities. !e new radio station was located in Lepakkoluola Building (“Batcave”) which was already a centre of spontaneous alternative youth culture in Helsinki and thus the per-fect place to enhance the informal nature of the programmes. Radio City’s reputation in developing radio speech was partly based on per-sonnel recruited by YLE such as Outi Popp, Teppo Turkki and Jorma Elovaara, to name just a few. In addition to the professional journal-ists and DJs new radio personnel was recruited and trained. Accord-ing to project secretary and visionary Teppo Turkki “pretty subjective journalism” was applied in describing and representing the reality.21

At "rst the programme policy of Radio City was rather diverse and stretching in various directions without any strict journalistic policy. !e founding of radio was based on public or social demand not to mention the mission to o#er alternative journalism and new radio culture and to challenge YLE and the biggest newspapers in the country. It can be said that it was not a matter of simply launching a radio station but of more or less creating a community. !e found-ers of the station considered that YLE lacked decently pro"led music programmes. Being obligated by the ELMU tradition the activists hoped to establish a “pop and rock station targeted at listeners under 44 years old”. Music in Finnish radios was not targeted at the certain audience segments before the launching of the commercial radio stations. !e lack of experience had its pros and cons, which was re$ected in the programme planning and music policy. For instance, in Radio City alternative rock music was followed by Finnish schlagers or classical music.22 Radio City personnel had their struggles about idealism, com-mercialism and locality. !e latter was de"ned not just by the range of the radio signal but also by the “locality of the mind” meaning “how a Finn identi"es himself or herself in the global locality and in the middle of the sign semiosis”, as Teppo Turkki elaborated it before broadcasting started.

21 Prtcity (1985); Lindfors & Salo (1988), p. 238. 22 See Lindfors & Salo (1988); Isokangas & al. (2000); Olli Ylönen (2002) Paikallisradioita Suomeen! Tampere, Tampereen yliopisto. http://tampub.uta."/ tiedotusoppi/951-44-5572-X.pdf, p. 27. Accessed 14th February 2010.

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Local culture was subsidized by o#ering broadcasting time to lo-cal bands and citizens’ organisations. Programme time was given free of charge to SETA (Sexual equality organisation), feminist groups and paci"st organisations. Much thought was also given to what kinds of businesses were allowed to advertise on the radio. !ese dis-cussions were in stark contrast to the basic principles of a commercial radio and were subdued as soon as the broadcasting began. Accord-ing to marketing manager Petri Niemi there was a di#erence between substantial and instrumental commercialism. Radio City represented the latter.23 Six months later economic realities changed the programme pol-icy. Very cost-e#ective May turned to summer, when the income rad-ically diminished. !e companies had not budgeted money for radio advertising and Radio City was unprepared for seasonal $uctuation. According to their marketing department the amateurish journalism and especially the fact that the radio was labelled as the advocate of sexual minorities had the e#ect of repelling the advertisers.24 !e citizens’ organizations’ programmes were temporarily axed. It was feared that the listeners could not distinguish between the opinions of the citizens’ organizations and those of the station, and with good reason. !e newspaper Lauttasaari reported that the parliamentary group of the political party Suomen Kristillinen Liitto (currently Christian Democrats) would make a plea to the Finnish government to ban the programme directed at homosexual people. In addition to that, the newspapers reacted to swearwords heard in broadcasting not to mention the discussion this journalistic policy caused among the personnel of the radio.25 After the crisis meetings in the autumn of 1985 Radio City de-cided to lay their foundations on rock music. Only six moths after the beginning the radio was ready and willing to abandon their ide-alistic programme policy and go for bigger audiences. !e shares of the ownership also changed: Taloudellinen tiedotustoimisto (Economic Information O%ce) replaced WSOY as a major owner. Amateurish journalism was abandoned, which left one third of the personnel without jobs. !e share of music was also increased. According to

23 Prtcity (1985); Lindfors & Salo (1988).24 Lindfors & Salo (1988).25 Lindfors & Salo (1988).

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the Chair of the Board, Juhani Merimaa, the role of radio became a more integral part of ELMU’s rock policy. In the early days of commercial radio the listeners’ reactions were parallel to those connected publicly funded YLE’s programmes. !e press was quite polemic when commenting programmes. !e lis-teners moreover applied to the politicians instead of just putting the radio o#. !e radio was certainly still considered to be rather social and even a political medium. !e fundamental reason for revising the programme policy was the contradiction between the alternative culture radio and the radio targeted at larger audiences. !e broadcasting was also constructed oversized, which demanded extensive organizational and economic resources. With sub-cultural and economically unpro"table pro-gramme policy the radio could not operate.

Radio 957 – From the student union to the people of Tampere

Radio 957 started to broadcast in Tampere region on 15th Au-gust, 1985. An experimental licence was granted to the Student Union of the University of Tampere i.e. TAMY, which formed a production company Tampereen ääni together with the student organization Juvenes Ltd. TAMY was the majority shareholder. !e enterprise was funded by self-"nancing and loans, the income "nancing consisting mostly of advertising. It was planned that a full service local radio would be targeted especially at the towns-people of Tampere unlike YLE’s regional radio, which was also broadcasting to nearby municipalities. All citizen groups were to be taken into consideration regardless of age, gender or any other quali"cation. Di#erent interest groups and organizations were welcomed and guaranteed air time because TAMY was supposedly granted a licence because of its close relations to the alternative lifestyle movements. Radio City had taught a lesson

26 Prt957 (1985) Operating and information dissemination philosophy for local radio stations. !ematic interview in Tampere 30th May, with Ismo Nykänen, head of programming, Kalle Koponen reporter, and Markku Veima reporter. Transcrip-tions archived at the Department of Journalism and Mass communication, Univer-sity of Tampere.

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to the new radio entrepreneurs of Tampere: such words as “new” and “di#erent” favoured by their colleagues in Helsinki were rejected. !e share of music content was estimated to be around 60–70 percent of programme time, somewhere between Radio City’s and YLE’s share.27 !e programme manager Ismo Nykänen de"ned the locality somewhat the same way as Radio City’s personnel. It was considered more a mental than a geographical concept. Locality was construct-ed in accordance with the information received on the people and events from Finland and the rest of the world. Programme exchange with Radio City was executed by the interchange of tapes. !e mar-keting contract was also negotiated in collaboration with a radio station called Auran Aallot, located in the city of Turku. Radio 957 composed their programmes themselves in order to control the out-come of the programmes. Prior to the "rst broadcastings the relation-ship to trade unions, residents’ associations, feminists and organiza-tions promoting sexual equality were already established.28 After six months the programmes were pro"led somewhere be-tween a speech radio and commercial/entertaining radio broadcasting “nice tuneful pop”. !e journalistic guidelines stated that the opin-ions of the journalists would not be allowed to dominate the pro-grammes.29 !e arguments concerning the programme policy were parallel to those in Radio City: it was walking a tightrope between speech and music. !e provoking attitude and journalism familiar from YLE’s Rockradio was avoided for fear for losing the advertisers. !e listeners’ association of Radio 957 aimed to promote local culture and gather information on local events. !e association not only encouraged the citizens’ organizations to make programmes but also provided schooling for it. !e feedback caused by citizens’ or-ganization programmes of Radio City was a reason for this. Radio 957 wanted to give air time to organizations but in a more profes-sional way – and perhaps in a more controlled way, too.30

27 Prt957 (1985).28 Prt957 (1985). 29 Prt957 (1986) Operating and information dissemination philosophies for local radio stations. !ematic interview in Tampere 6th January, with managing director Tomi Carlson; 7th January Ismo Nykänen. Transcriptions archived at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Tampere. 30 Prt957 (1986).

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!e challenges of the new radio were more journalistic than mu-sic-related. Ismo Nykänen considered that music should not become a “self-satisfying thing”. After "ve months of listening to music in the background he could not think of any way to improve it. !e man-aging editor Reijo Rutanen agreed with him and considered the talk programmes to be the most challenging ones improving the broad-casting.31 Radio 957 indeed wanted to hold on to their experimental li-cence. !ey were o#ered an English satellite music programme, which would have suited well to "ll in the gaps in the broadcasting. !e Ministry of Transport and Communications suspected that it would show the station in a bad light, when it’s experimental period was evaluated. !e stance of the ministry caused the station to reject the o#er.32 !e future plans of Radio 957 di#ered from those of Radio City. City’s policy was based on rock music, which was considered to be the driving force of the station. Music replaced spoken programmes and some of the individual programmes were replaced by DJs and radio personalities. Prime time broadcasting consisted of mainstream Finnish and American rock music, domestic alternative groups (es-pecially from Helsinki), British “art rock”, soul, rap, heavy metal and established popular music entertainers. However, the individual mu-sic programmes were quite diverse. For instance in February 1988 a prime time special programme celebrated the tenth year of the Folk ja Kantriseura (Folk and Country Society), a rock and jazz musician selecting and discussing his favourite music and two composers dis-cussing "lm music.33 !e reason that rock music was taking over was partly econom-ics. According to CEO Tynkkynen, the production of speech radio was considerably more expensive than music programmes. It was also easier to build a commercially successful radio on music. !e turn of the policy was fruitful, since the turnover of Radio City increased to 20 million FIM (3,3 euros) in 1989. !e economic boom of the

31 Prt957 (1986).32 Prt957 (1986).33 Isokangas & al. (2000); Helsingin Sanomat (1988) Micro"lms 8493, 45/15.2.1988–25.2.1988/55.

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late 1980s contributed to this because the successful brands became interested in Radio City as an advertising media.34 At "rst Radio 957’s broadcast music was as diverse as in Radio City. Heavy metal, rock and roll oldies, Finnish schlager, jazz, local rock music – and music was targeted at di#erent audiences. Music was selected by programme hosts, DJs and specialists in di#erent music genres. Exact information about the music broadcast is lacking but over 65 percent of it was rock.35 In 1989 two new radios were granted a licence in Tampere. !e personnel of the rather short-lived Radio Musa consisted of people involved with music business in one way or another. Radio Musa amalgamated with another newcomer, Radio Tampere in spring 1991. !e new competitors in the market and later the economic recession of the 1990s caused Radio 957 to pitch their music at the wider lis-tener group. However, it could not yet be called a format radio.36

Treacherous love 1990–2005

In 1989 the Ministry of Transport and Communications granted 65 licences for a "ve-year period thereby increasing the competi-tion. !e commercial sector seemed to have quite a bright future in Finnish radioscape. !e state-owned Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE had to react somehow to the alleged success. In 1990 it did so with a radio reform by increasing the amount of music and targeting its three national channels at di#erent audi-ence segments. !e three channels were called Ylen Ykkönen (for highbrow culture), Radio Suomi (for the Average Joe), and self-ironic name of Radioma"a (for youth). Radioma"a followed the new, more informal radio speech launched by Rockradio and com-mercial stations. !is is rather obvious, since half of the editorial sta# were hired from the commercial stations such as Radio City

34 Isokangas & al. (2000).35 Jari Niemelä (2004) Programme manager Radio 957. Interview 15th February. Heikki Uimonen In the author’s possession; Liikenneministeriö (1989) Paikallisra-diotutkimus II, Helsinki: Liikenneministeriö, p. 28.36 Ylönen (2002); Heikki Uimonen (2004) “Kuuloaistin valtakunta. Urbaani ääniympäristön ja radion musiikkitarjonta”. In Eletty tapakulttuuri. Arkea, juhlaa ja pyhää etsimässä, eds. V.A. Heikkinen, Sam Inkinen & Matti Itkonen. Jyväskylän yliopisto: Jyväskylä, pp. 598–625.

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and Radio 957, which raised a new generation of radio profes-sionals. !e reform was boosted by the fear of losing the young listeners and the success of Radio City. However, even YLE admit-ted that competition turned radio into an interesting media once again.37 Special attention was paid to the listener: !e focus of the broadcasting changed from sender to receiver. Radio programmes were converted into products and listeners into customers. Radi-oma"a was already based equally on music and on speech during the planning stage of the channel. Actually, music became a major element when channels were pro"led: it became a strategic tool which was used to distinguish one channel from one another.38 Right from the start Radio Ma"a adopted the ideas of streamlined production policy. !e broadcasts included entertain-ing programmes with a fair share of music. Rotation clocks, play lists and deejay-operated studios became a crucial part of the new production culture. !e working methods were already familiar to those recruited from the commercial sector.39 However, YLE was short of those economic indicators famil-iar to commercial radios. !eir sender-centered programme poli-cies practically did not care how the audience reacted to broad-casting. Negative feedback was not a matter of life and death unlike on commercial radios.40 YLE’s policy was still reactive in-stead of being active. By contrast, Radioma"a aimed to advance domestic music and wanted to be proactive in their music policy. Commercial ra-dios were dependent on record companies, which was considered not solely a positive phenomenon. !e economic recession was also on Radioma"a’s side. !e operating conditions were declin-ing, which caused radios to target their broadcasting at solvent grown-ups. Radioma"a stood out from its competitors and pro-moted itself in public with its provocative name. !eir attempt to

37 Kemppainen (2001), pp. 153–154; 177; 194.38 Kemppainen (2001), pp. 168–170; 225–226.39 Kemppainen (2001), pp. 171–172.40 Kemppainen (2001), p. 172.

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lead the market in the age group under 35 years old was success-ful.41

Tuneful music and formatted stations

!e general ideas concerning radio business and music in the turn-of-the-decade commercial radios were somewhat parallel. !is was ascertained in a study carried out in towns with two competing stations, including Helsinki and Tampere. Broadly speaking, the appropriate music of the stations was characterised as easy to listen to, entertaining and tuneful. !e music selection was facilitated by the computer controlled and automated CD changers, that enabled the programming of music in accordance with the format of the radio. !e radio stations were already pro"led with the help of music in the 1980s, which was gradually increased towards the turn of the decade. One of the interviewees considered this as a countermove to the informative programme policy of YLE followed by the “intel-lectual” rock of Rockradio: More entertaining music was excluded in both cases. !e early 1990s playlists were followed either rather slav-ishly or in quite a liberal way, more experienced personnel especially accepted them somewhat reluctantly. If they were not in use it was assumed that the hosts had internalized the music policies of the sta-tions. Some stations applied so-called power play listings. A couple of dozen new releases were listed and thus easily picked up and broad-cast if necessary.43

In Radio City the economic situation deteriorated in 1991, when the sales of advertising were halved. Spoken and special mu-sic programmes were removed from prime time and some of the journalists moved to work for YLE. !e playlists were introduced in 1992. Two years later the ownership was shared with the inter-

41 Kemppainen (2001), p. 198; 203.42 Harri Tuominen (1992) “Korvaluomia ei ole! Katsaus paikallisradioiden mu-siikkipolitiikkaan”. In Toosa soi. Musiikki radion kilpailuvälineenä, eds. Ari Alm ja Kimmo Salminen. Helsinki: Yleisradio.43 Tuominen (1992).

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national Scandinavian Broadcasting Systems (SBS), which became a major owner in 1996. In 1992, 75 per cent of the shares of Radio 957 were sold to another domestic radio company. As a result, the station was converted to format radio. Interviews and spoken programmes were replaced with music; the number of show hosts was reduced and they were turned into announcers. !e diversity of music was also cut down: classical, folk, jazz and independent musics were no longer broadcast. !e new target group consisted of urban people, aged 35 to 45 years. Likewise in other stations music was considered the strategic competitive element. !is led to playlists and computerised CD players to create a distinctive sound for the station. It must be noted, however, that the playlists at that time were not very tight. In 1993 the Scandinavian Broadcasting Sys-tems acquired shares in Radio 957. !is changed the production culture towards strictly formatted commercial radio with playlists and rotation clocks.45 !e decline of the economy and the diminished revenue from advertising weakened operating conditions of the radios until 1995. After that the advertising investments started to grow again.46 A national commercial channel Radio Nova was intro-duced in 1997 and increased competition. Alongside SBS the other multinational media companies became active in Finnish radio market. Media conglomerates acquired ownerships of local radios, chained them and formatted them to play music to the desired groups of listeners. MetroMedia Incorporation and Clas-sic FM/Great Western Radio became new enterprises on regional markets.47 Furthermore, the Ministry of Transport and Commu-nications favoured networking since a French station chain NRJ targeted at youth was granted permission to broadcast in various localities with local licences. Commercial radios format their stations and the broadcast music according to certain listener segments. Metroradio Fin-

44 Isokangas & al. (2000).45 Niemelä (2004); Ala-Fossi (2005), p. 187.46 Marko Ala-Fossi (1999) Tähden kylmä loiste: Radio Novan markkinoilletulon vaikutus Suomen kaupallisten paikallisradioiden toimintaan. Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto.47 Hujanen (2001), p. 102.

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land Oy owns channels targeted at di#erent listener groups such as Suomipop (schlager), Metro FM (rock) and Groove FM (Afro-American). SBS radios were also targeted to di#erent consumer segments in order to curb the programme costs. A chain called Cityradiot (Cityradios) is currently formatted to play classic rock with iden-tical playlists in four di#erent towns (Radio 957 in Tampere, Ra-dio Sata in Turku, Radio Jyväskylä in Jyväskylä and Radio Mega in Oulu). Semi-national Iskelmä and Voice radio chains are formatted respectively to play schlager and contemporary rock/pop.48 Radio City was discontinued in 2006. YLE was once again worried about losing listeners under 45 years of age to commercial radios. !is led to another channel reform in January 2002. Radioma"a was converted to YLEX, targetted at age group 17 to 27 years; Yle Ykkönen was renamed YLE Radio 1 and Radio Suomi became YLE Radio Suomi. Women’s channel Radio Aino broadcasting in Helsinki and Tampere, was converted to YLEQ tar-geted at those from 24 to 40 years of age.49

IFPI Finland releases National Airplay Chart listings. Accord-ing to them in early 2004 the radio was dominated by Finnish hit songs and Anglo-American music with the same songs broadcast several times a day50. Publicly funded YLE Radio 1 and commercial Classic Radio are the only exceptions. However, Classic Radio also bas-es its playlists on the hit music repertoire of western classical music although it must be noted that the same works are not broadcast that much as on popular music hit channels. Despite that, the most pop-ular opera overtures, arias and compositions of Mozart, Beethoven and Sibelius are heard on a daily basis. Classic Radio was discontinued and can be listened only in the Internet since 1 September 2009. All in all, today’s commercial and public radios face severe chal-lenges in the future. As previously stated, young listeners abandoned radio in the 1970s in Finland. Again, we are in the same situation: the young are listening to less and less radio in Europe. In France, for instance, young radio audiences from 15–24 dropped by 16 per cent

48 SBS (2007) http://www.sbsradio.com/"/. Accessed 28th May. 49 Yle (2007b) Radion kanavat uudistuvat. http://www.yle."/elavaarkisto/?s=s&g=4&ag=28&t=14&a=422. Accessed 28th May 2007.50 National Airplay Chart (Finland) - Week 10. 2004. Ranking - TOP 100.

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over the past ten years51. !e youngsters are adopting new technol-ogies very quickly and easily, which suggests that radio broadcast-ers should also adapt and introduce the new technologies faster than they are currently doing.

Conclusions

!e Finnish Broadcasting Company’s rock programmes intro-duced a new speech mode in the 1980s which was heavily op-posed by the friends of traditional radio speech and conservative radio journalists. !e practice bonded rock music and informal speech together and established a new style which is also heard in contemporary radio. Radio deregulation brought previously irritating and counter-cultural rock music to the mainstream. National, semi-national and regional channels have changed the media content and the public sonic environment so that one may speak of the ubiqui-ty of rock and roll. It seems to be everywhere nowadays. At the same time the rebellious, aggravating and perhaps subversive pro-grammes that were interrupting the business were faded from the broadcasts. Currently music is announced with speech connected to the broadcast music genre. Rock music is accompanied by youth talk or peppy sports announcement style; jazz and soul are an-nounced with a jargon spiced up by American-English phrases and laid back parlance. YLE Radio 1 still favours the traditional, formal and lofty speech easily associated with classical music pro-grammes. Commercial Classic Radio adheres to the same mode al-though the credibility of the ritual language is diminished by the advertisements. On the other hand the ads have also been selected or styled to suit to channels’ ritual style. Twenty-"ve years ago the new commercial radios were ex-pected to give a voice to local self-expression and democracy. A couple of years later they ended up playing hit songs, familiar rock music and schlagers, and were "nally purchased and chained to obey the collective playlist with their co-radios in the same

51 Public Radio in Europe (2007) SIS/Radio Department Geneva EBU.

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conglomerate. !e radio chains formatted to di#erent popular music styles cover the whole of Finland excluding Lapland. It should be noted here that one should not interpret the change in music broadcasting simply as the adaptation of the American style format radio and business logic to the Finnish ra-dioscape. !ere is no need to compare the commercial and pub-licly funded cultures to each other either, because of their funda-mentally di#erent policies. A more fruitful way to account for the change in the radio culture would be to compare di#erent com-mercial radios and their musics with the changes of ownership, automated music playing and the music selection included. American format radios have been very successful in Finland. However, they cannot operate in a country with a relatively small number of native speakers, and at the same time broadcast diverse music. !ey cannot a#ord to specialise in marginal music styles, since the advertisers have no interest in investing in small audi-ences or non-commercial music. As a result, the channels are satu-rated with mainstream and hit music. Currently the idea of locality should not be understood geographically but rather as an image or a commercial brand. One might even want to talk about fake locality. Local music is broadcast locally but at the same time the same songs are heard on many other channels belonging to the same chain of radio sta-tions. !e announcements and the news of the radio chain are broadcast from a single station, not in the towns where the sta-tions are actually broadcasting. In other words: the local identity has been replaced by the shared interest in music or music prefer-ences. Or perhaps not altogether, since in the 1980s Radio City and Radio 957 no longer considered themselves to be purely lo-cal. !eir locality was more a mental than a geographical concept, which included not only local but also global musics. !e Finnish Broadcasting Company would have resources to change the prime time broadcast music in a more diverse direc-tion. However, it seems that so far YLE has been more interested in increasing the number of their listeners just like the commer-cial sector. Because of demonopolisation, the Finnish Broadcast-ing Company was forced to use the same methods as its commer-cial competitors. During the whole deregulation process starting from the mid 1980s YLE appears to have been passive and more

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responsive to in$uences from outside than proactively creating a music policy of its own.

(!e article was previously published in Radio Journal vol 7 issue 2, 2009.)

113

Maija Kontukoski

Local Music and Music Broadcasting

In this article I will examine how the process of choosing music in licence-dependent local radios changed in Finland during the years 1985–2006, and what kind of e#ects the changes had on the music played on the radio. How has local music been under-stood during these changes? !e theoretical viewpoint for this ex-amination comes from the theoretic model of music generations, which is based on the Mannheimian theory of political genera-tions1. !e study is a part of my forthcoming doctoral disserta-tion on music broadcasting in licence-dependent local radios in Finland. First, I will brie$y introduce the history of Finnish commer-cial radio and the ideas on which commercial radio was built. Next I present my recent analysis of the process of choosing music and give some examples from my research data, followed by my conclusions about the question of local music in music broadcasting.

1 Karl Mannheim (1972) !e Problem of Generations. Essays on the Sociolgy of Knowledge. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London, pp. 276–320; J. P. Roos (1987) Suomalainen elämä. Tutkimus tavallisten suomalaisten elämänkerroista. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Hämeenlinna, pp. 51–59; Matti Virtanen (2001) Fennoma-nian perilliset. Poliittiset traditiot ja sukupolvien dynamiikka. Suomalaisen Kirjalli-suuden Seura, Hämeenlinna, pp. 22–26.

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Finnish radio history

During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in Western Europe, there was a widespread debate on the democratization of communica-tion in the "eld of mass communication. First of all, the storm of criticism hit the traditional broadcasting corporations in those European countries where they had generally enjoyed a monopo-listic position.2 Professor Taisto Hujanen mentions the utopia of the com-munications policy. Hujanen introduces Mannheim’s notions on utopia: “Utopias are utopias only when they are tied up with certain context of time and place. If and when these ties break, they immortalize themselves and become an ideology.” According to Hujanen, this was exactly what happened to the ideas of the democratization of communication – the change from utopia to ideology. 3

In Finland and other Nordic Countries, the viewpoint on the utopia of democratization was di#erent, because the state’s role had traditionally been that of promoting the common good and democracy. In the Finnish discourse, the role of the state was seen as too patronizing and restrictive, and in communications policy the tendency was to reduce public regulation. Expectations of democratic communication were placed on the spontaneously organized civil society and on the democratic potential, o#ered by this new communication technology. !ere was a great tendency towards technological determinism. In Finland the result of all this was the deregulation of broad-casting, which was a major change in the state communications policy. !e Association of Finnish Local Radio Broadcasters was founded in 1983 and was extremely important in the process of deregulation. !e Association’s object was to establish private ra-dio operations in Finland. !e model came from the commercial radios of the United States. In 1985 the Ministry of Transport and Communications, which regulates the Finnish broadcast-ing sphere, "nally carried out a two-year experiment with local

2 Taisto Hujanen (1991) “Viestinnän demokratisointi, yleisradiotoiminnan deregu-laatio ja paikallisradiot”. Tiedotustutkimus 4/1991, pp. 34–48.3 Hujanen (1991), p. 34.

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commercial radio by granting twenty-two regional and mostly single-frequency licences for the "rst operators in the "eld of commercial radio broadcasting. In 1987 the Ministry extended the experiment by two years, after which licence-dependent com-mercial broadcasting became an established practice. Every "ve years there is a new application period, and alongside the new ap-plicants, all the old broadcasters must reapply for licences.

1983 Association of Finnish Local Radio Broadcasters founded1985 Two-year local radio experiment started: 22 licences1987 Two-year licences for 26 local radio broadcasters1989 Five-year licences for 50 local radio broadcasters1997 First national licence for commercial radio: Radio Nova2000 Multinational SBS Broadcasting enters the Finnish broadcas-

ting "eld

Table 1: Milestones of the commercial radio history in Finland

Taisto Hujanen remarks in his article: “During the mid-1980s the political opinion about introducing the commercial radio broadcasting was already so strong, that during the "nal decision making, the questions about the programme contents of the local radio stations actually did not have real meaning anymore”.4 In the experimental licences granted for the period 1985–1987, the essential reference to programme content was that it must contain information about local issues and promote local culture and free discussion among citizens. Still, for example, the chairperson of the Association of Finn-ish Local Radio Broadcasters, Jaakko Numminen5, said in his speech in 1985, that “these local radios will not become distribu-tion channels for recorded popular music (as some people think), instead, in the programme content there will be a lot of local folk music and music by local devotees of music”. Here the term local music meant traditional folk music by local musicians and other

4 Hujanen (1991), p. 42.5 Jaakko Numminen (1985) “Katsaus paikallisradiotoiminnan tulevaisuuteen”. Paikallisradio 1/1985, p. 7.

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KONTUKOSKI

local non-professional musicians playing di#erent music styles (choirs, dance bands and brass bands). However, when it comes to music, the quantity of recorded popular music burgeoned quite soon after the new radio stations started: In 1988 almost 59 per cent of all the local radio pro-gramme of all the 18 local radio stations was music. In 2005, 70 per cent of the prime time programme was music. But there were already big changes in the radio music content before the deregu-lation, as radio-researchers Pentti Kemppainen (2001) and Marko Ala-Fossi (1999; 2005) have shown in their studies.6

Radio Paitapiiska and Radio Simpsiö

My research area is Southern Ostrobothnia in Western Finland. Recently I have been studying especially two now defunct radio stations: Radio Paitapiiska and Radio Simpsiö were among the very "rst commercial radio pioneers who started in 1985. Here, I focus on Radio Paitapiiska. In 2006 Radio Paitapiiska could not renew its licence and went out of business at the end of the year. !e main reason for this was that in the latest licence application period in 2006 the Ministry of Transport and Communications made a decision to suppress all the so-called one-tower-radios and regrouped them into new frequency groups. !is shift meant the reform of whole radio market. A local broadcasting company Kevyt Kanava (Light Channel) produced all the programmes on both of these radio stations in the 2000s and since 2007 Kevyt Kanava has been in close cooperation with the multinational broadcasting company SBS. !is means that SBS Finland’s head of music designs the music streams for two of Kevyt Kanava’s ra-dio stations.

6 Pentti Kemppainen (2001) Radion murros. Julkisradioiden kanavauudistus Nor-jassa, Ruotsissa ja Suomessa. Ph.D. thesis. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopiston viestinnän laitoksen julkaisuja 4; Marko Ala-Fossi (1999) Tähden kylmä loiste. Radio Novan markkinoilletulon vaikutus Suomen kaupallisten paikallisradioiden toimintaan. Tampere: Tiedotusopin laitoksen julkaisuja A 92/1999; Ala-Fossi, Marko (2005) Saleable Compromises. Quality Cultures in Finnish and US Commercial Radio. Ph.D. thesis. Tampere: Tampere University Press.

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Radio Paitapiiska

- Started broadcasts in 1985;

- 57,000 potential listeners;

- Owners: 1985–2002 Kurikka-lehti Oy, a local newspaper company, 2002–2006 Kevyt Kanava Oy, only locally owned radio chain in Finland;

- Radio of the Year award in 1991;

- Music format radio 2002–2006.

Table 2: Radio Paitapiiska information box

The process of choosing music

During the "rst years of commercial radio stations in Finland the owners were typically local entrepreneurs and newspaper publish-ers. Radio Paitapiiska was also originally owned by a local news-paper entrepreneur. When Radio Paitapiiska started it had only three employees, but right from the beginning it had wide circle of contributors: By 1990 there were 18 collaborators and freelanc-ers with 4 journalists. !ese journalists and collaborators with the editor-in-chief and head of programming were the key persons in the process of choosing music; they were the most important people shaping the corporate culture of the new media with their opinions and practice. !e biggest change in music broadcasting has been the change from “block radio” with the content of di#erent special programmes to “stream radio” with a strict music format. Dur-ing the late 1980s and early 1990s Radio Paitapiiska was a block radio with a several di#erent kinds of music programmes. How-ever, towards the end of the 1990s these special programmes were replaced by a programme stream, with less strict and produced content. I have analysed the process of choosing music from four dif-ferent perspectives: Individual, ideological, economic and techno-logical. In this short paper, I describe only my main foundings so far. !e research data consists mainly of interviews with heads of

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KONTUKOSKI

programme, heads of music and journalists, and the music reports that radio operators must submit to the two Finnish Copyright Societies called Teosto and Gramex.

Song Artist Genre Year

Sweet Dreams Chet Atkins & Mark Knop$er country 1990Only You Louis Armstrong jazz 1955You Got It Roy Orbison ac/pop 1988Mustang Sally Sam & Dave soul 1960sBlue Moon Francis Goya & Damian Luca entert. 1980sTeardrops Womack & Womack soul 1988Norjalainen villapaita

Juice Leskinen Grand Slam rock 1991

Villihevosia Hanna Ekola iskelmä 1990Rafaelin enkeli Pekka Ruuska ac/pop 1990Sankarit J. Karjalainen ac/pop 198220 vuotta sikana Eppu Normaali rock 1987Living on Video Sequen-sync dance 1980s?Sedät jaksaa heilua Lapinlahden linnut humour 1990Sä lohdutat mua Matti Esko iskelmä 1990

Table 3: Example of music selections in Radio Paitapiiska in January 1992. !ese songs were aired consecutively7

Analysing the interviews and music reports from the individual viewpoint I found that in the early days of Radio Paitapiiska some journalists played a lot of American and British pop and rock mu-sic from the sixties, while other journalists played a lot of Finn-ish Iskelmä, i.e. popular songs. Among the music selected, there were also numerous bands and artists which, according to the interviews, were also the ones that had been the “musical key ex-periences” or the most important musical experiences during the early youth of the journalists. In addition to these genres Radio Paitapiiska played more recent pop and rock from Finland and abroad, local folk and even local punk music and children’s music.

7 Annual report (1992) of !e Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society Teosto.

119


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1930

s19

40s

1950

s19

60s

1970

s19

80s

1990

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112

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134

334

1436

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271

22

139

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211

11

115

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181

113

12

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161

78

Chi

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142

75

Soul

1310

12

Dan

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31

7C

ount

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22

44

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62

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22

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Tota

l64

01

326

9664

195

229

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20,

54,

115

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,030

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120

KONTUKOSKI

From the ideological viewpoint this meant that Radio Pa-itapiiska’s music selections were widely varied and the new radio station wanted to serve di#erent kinds of audiences by playing them their presumed favourite music. In a way, it came fairly close to public service radio and their ideology. !is was a natural tendency, because public service radio had been the only model of music broadcasting. Another reason for such a “something for everybody” music policy was that Radio Paitapiiska was a small radio station, with some 57,000 potential listeners, so it did not seek to serve only one kind of audience. One interesting observation was that Radio Paitapiiska’s mu-sic programmes were placed carefully in the timetable so that, for example, the children’s day care centres could use the special mu-sic show for children in their day programme. Another example is that as the agriculture was prominent around town of Kurikka and the surrounding towns, during the early hours in the morn-ing Radio Paitapiiska played only soft and peaceful music. !is decision was based on feedback from local farmers: the farmers had mentioned that the cows would then produce more milk. Can a radio station be more local, one might ask? Considering the process of choosing music from the eco-nomical viewpoint, in the 1980s it was about building a so-called basic record collection. Radio Paitapiiska bought records from local record stores and ordered them from Finnish music stores and also from abroad. Signi"cant shares of the music selected also came from the journalists’ and freelancers’ own collections, and this kind of practice made the special music programmes possible, like artist and genre introductions, for example. Regarding the technological viewpoint, music was recorded on vinyl records and audiocassettes, until they were replaced by CD’s, after which music was in digital format on computers. In the 1980s music records and cassettes were played one by one by the journalist or host using two players. In the early 1990s in Radio Paitapiiska music was gradually transferred to computers. Automation came later in the 1990s and 2000s. Radio Paitapiiska also had a mobile unit which enabled live programme and most of all live music from the reception area.

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Conclusions

I have discussed the term democratization of communication, which went from utopia to ideology. We can also contemplate this ideology from the point of view of local music and music policy. One conclusion is that at the beginning of Radio Paitapiiska (from the 1980s to the early 1990s) the democratization of music communication was quite well under way. In Radio Paitapiiska there seem to have been two perspectives on local music. Firstly, local music meant music locally produced by local people. For example, there were radio airings of the demonstra-tion tapes made by the local rock, punk, Finnish Iskelmä bands and choirs etc. and they sent their tapes to the radio station. Sec-ondly, local music meant music from the local music cultures. !is did not necessarily mean that the music was locally produced or that the musicians were locals. For example, the Ostroboth-nian Tango generation of the 1960s – which is still a strong and well-known phenomenon in Finland – got their own show called Vanhaintanssit (social dances for seniors). A local freelancer DJ and record collector Erkki Ollikainen, who loved Finnish Iskelmä and old dance music, especially that from the 1940s to 1960s, played a show that lasted minimum for two hours every Saturday evening. It represented the way people danced in the 1960s: that is two waltzes, two foxtrots, two tangos, two humppas and so on. !ere was no voiceover. !is show was extremely popular for over 15 years. Paitapiiska also organized social dance events in the sur-rounding dance places and dance-restaurants with local artists and orchestras and also with big Iskelmä stars from elsewhere, and Pa-itapiiska broadcast these happenings live using their mobile unit. !ese are just few examples, but we can say that during the 1980s and 1990s that the variety of music to be found in Radio Paitapiiska’s record collection and in the journalists’ and freelanc-ers’ home collections really re$ected those key musical experiences of Radio Paitapiiska’s listeners’. And the radio listeners felt it re-ally was their radio.

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KONTUKOSKI

Song Artist Genre YearAina toinen Petri Munck ac/pop 2005Unwritten Natasha Beding"eld ac/pop 2005A Little Less Conversation Elvis VS JXL ac/pop 2002With a Little Love Modern Talking dance 1985Save a Prayer Duran Duran dance 1992She Bop Cyndi Lauper dance 1983Strong Enough Cher dance 1999Return to Sender Elvis rock 1962You Drive Me Grazy Britney Spears ac/pop 1999A Girl Like You Edwyn Collins ac/pop 1994Welcome to My Truth Anastacia ac/pop 2005Siivet Jani Wickholm ac/pop 2004Where are you Bosson ac/pop 2001My Heart Goes Boom Frencha#air dance 2000

Table 5: Radio Paitapiiska’s music stream in January 20068

But Radio Paitapiiska’s corporate culture changed after the glo-bal economic recession that Finland su#ered in the early 1990s. Sales revenues fell for "ve years and Radio Paitapiiska’s owner out-sourced the programme production. For the next few years there were di#erent entrepreneurs, until the whole radio station was sold to the only locally owned radio chain called Kevyt Kanava. !e new owner turned Radio Paitapiiska into a music format radio and it was no longer about di#erent kinds of musics and genres, but about a new channel sound. !e music selections were mainly American and European pop and dance music from the 2000s. !ere was no longer any locally produced music. Accord-ing to the new head of programme, they “could play it, if it suits the channel sound”. However, it seems to be that none of those locally produced records suited it. Many older listeners were op-posed to these changes and this was criticised in letters to the lo-cal newspaper. !e movement was from a romantic and nostalgic ideology of local music and programme to the more economically based ideol-

8 Teosto annual report 2006.

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ogy of the channel sound with pronounced programme and music formats. !e ideology of channel sound also breaks down the tra-ditional genre thinking and genre boundaries – in other words: the genre is hit music. Today’s Ostrobothnian radio stations are ef-fectively used for target group advertising purposes, and the music has become the most important competition tool. Nevertheless, in the case of Radio Paitapiiska, it seems that the music format did not work so well because the music they played had a too small target group. In the other radio, Iskelmä 969 the music was only Finnish Iskelmä and this was a huge success. One particularly interesting change in the process of choos-ing music was that the number of di#erent kinds of request programmes increased during the history of Radio Paitapiiska, and the majority of the requests were for Iskelmä music until it became a music format. Today the absence of locally produced music by local musicians is almost total in the Ostrobothnian case. Or should we just understand the meaning of local music di#erently here – as music from the local music cultures – regard-less of where the music is produced. Today it seems to be more meaningful to speak about commercial radio broadcasting instead of local radio broadcasting. !is all means that corporate culture has changed dramatically among Finnish broadcasters.

(!e article is based on the paper held at IASPM UK & Ireland conference, 12–14 September 2008, University of Glasgow (UK).)

125

Heikki Uimonen

Music Selection and Corporate Cultures in Finnish Commercial Radios

Introduction

!e deregulation of radio in 1985 introduced a competition between two profoundly di#erent systems of broadcasting in Finland: the European public service tradition and American commercial radio. Because of the rivalry the music contents were changed both in commercial stations and in state owned YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Company). !e process of music selection has also undergone major changes in twenty-three years. !e individual disc jockeys and their professionalism was replaced by technological innovations such as music schedulers which enable a single person to manage music not just for one station but also for chains of stations with identical format. To a certain extent the music genres are currently subordi-nate to channel sound and radio format – or perhaps more likely to the business idea of the radio channel. As a result of format-ting we have both rock, Finnish iskelmä and classical music formatted stations that are seemingly following similar business logic. Some critics say that the variety of musics heard over the airwaves has narrowed signi"cantly because of this, but so far there is no factual evidence to support this claim. Although music plays the most signi"cant role in current broadcasting, there has hardly been any systematic study of this at all. !is article concentrates on two main questions concern-ing music policies: what were the main watersheds historically in

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UIMONEN

the production and music cultures of Finnish radios on the way to the current format radio and what were the major changes in music selection process? !e article seeks answers through inter-views with radio station and record company past and present policymakers. !e work will be supported by quantitative data consisting of music reports of Finnish radio stations. !e relation-ship between radio stations and record companies during the last twenty-three years of commercial radio will also be monitored.

Background

According to Simon Frith, radio is the main gatekeeper of music. !e Deejays are supposed to please the audience, not the record companies. !ey are independent in relation to the law, and it is illegal to try to in$uence what kind of music is broadcast. In this respect their position has changed remarkably during the last twenty years. Currently the music played is selected by the music directors. Deejays have to leave their own music preferences aside while on the job and play music from the play lists in accordance with the music policy of the radio station. !e playlist is the tool for the music director. Originally it was launched to control the payolas or bribery of the Deejays by the record companies. !e direct pay-o#s were soon replaced by the more re"ned policies and pluggers or salesmen promoting the records to the radio sta-tions.1 !e policy was already started in the late 19th century by the sheet music publishers, who realized that the best way to sell music is to have it played continuously by performing artists.2 !e Top 40 formatted radios launched in the United States were based on this principle. !ey wanted to keep their listeners loyal by repetitious hit playing instead of losing them by airing unwanted songs. According to Frith, the experience of rock music soon became more familiar than surprising or challenging, as it used to be. !e commercial ac-tors were not interested in music as such: the success was measured

1 Simon Frith (1988) Rockin potku. Tampere: Vastapaino, pp. 123–126.2 Russel Sanjek (1983) From Print to Plastic. Publishing and Promoting America’s Popular Music (1900–1980). Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, p. 8.

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MUSIC SELECTION AND CORPORATE CULTURES IN FINNISH COMMERCIAL RADIOS

by the number of listeners, not by the diversity of music.3 Because of the public service broadcast tradition in Finland, the commercial radio evolved in Finland in a somewhat di#erent way.

The watershed of 1985

Being economically successful does not automatically exclude running an artistically or musically ambitious radio station. !is was notable in the early days of Finnish commercial radios such as Radio City in Helsinki and Radio 957 in Tampere. Both stations were located in the most densely populated areas in Finland. !e loosely de"ned “rock and roll attitude” was characteristic especially of Radio City. !e young male Deejays were eager to show listeners what they thought was “the right kind of music”.4 !us the stations music policy became to almost enlightening, which is usually connected to publicly funded radio stations such as YLE. Perhaps one might want to call it neo-enlightening, because of the public funded enlightening attitude but commercial rhetoric style. !e listeners’ preferences were taken into consideration but they were not yet the focal point of the business – at least in the music selec-tion. Basically the music selection was in the hands of the hosts and Deejays. !ey selected music from their own collection but also from the record collections of the station. !e back catalogue was donated or acquired at a relatively cheap price from the record importers. Ac-cording to Juha Tynkkynen, Radio City’s CEO the new songs were aired as soon as they were released in Finland and other countries. !e latest hit songs were played repeatedly within one week up to saturation point5. !is was unheard of in YLE programmes, since their music policy concentrated on less aired songs, and thus left a slot for repetitive song playing for the commercial stations. Radio City and Radio 957 acquired the latest hit singles and records from domestic and foreign record companies. It was a not just the question

3 Frith (1988), pp.130–133. 4 Axa Sorjanen (2007) Radio City radio host. Interview conducted by author at Helsinki, Finland 24 th September; Juha Tynkkynen (2007) Radio City CEO. Interview conducted by author at Helsinki, Finland 18th October.5 Tynkkynen (2007).

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of honour but also a competitive advantage to air the latest songs be-fore other stations. !e song selection was decided according to the time of the day so that during prime time the music was targeted at more heterogeneous listeners than was the music in the evenings6. Likewise, Radio 957 struggled to get the latest songs aired as soon as possible. Rock music from the sixties and the seventies that was considered historically important was also aired. Regardless of the time of release they were considered new, because at that time they were seldom heard on any other stations.7 !e liberal music policy of Radio 957 added to the diversity of music in the programmes and challenged the Deejays to air more eclectic musics. !e morning news followed by e.g. the music of Frank Zappa and the prime time saturated with rock from the six-ties pushed the limits of music selection. !e special programmes were soon airing reggae, Latin American or African music. !e non-Western popular or folk music were introduced not just on special evening programmes but also during prime time.8 In the early days of commercial radios the lobbying of record companies was rather innocent – or at least somewhat unprofession-al. !e circles of the music business were relatively small and almost everyone knew each other. For instance, Radio 957 programmes were hosted by the CEOs of the local small record companies and music importers Poko Rekords and Rockadillo Records. Despite the closely knit collaboration possible accusations of favouritism were taken seri-ously. !e reports to the copyright organization were stored just in case they were needed as a proof of aired music.9

!e partnership of record companies and radio stations was con-"rmed by the former Deejay of Radio City. !e new releases were delivered promptly to the station’s premises and sometimes they were broadcast immediately without preliminary listening. Due to Radio City’s image as a rock channel, they sometimes had an agreement with the record companies to receive the latest releases earlier than competing stations. !e fast delivery was advantageous for the com-

6 Juha Lassila (1987) Kultalevyn alkemia. Rockteollisuus musiikin suodattajana. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto, pp. 149–155.7 Tapio Korjus (2008) Rockadillo Records CEO. Phone interview conducted by author 7th February.8 Korjus (2008).9 Korjus (2008).

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pany, the station and the listeners. Although YLE was broadcasting nationally to bigger audience they were broadcasting rock music only on special programmes in the evening and on certain days. By bring-ing the record to commercial station the song was aired immediately because the music selection was virtually unrestricted. !e procedure was similar in Helsinki and Tampere.10 !e radio station and journalist received records for free. Also, the promoters of the record companies were constant guests on the station premises. One of the hosts characterized the music business of the eighties as collaborative and somewhat naïve: Deejays, promoters and musicians were on the same side of the fence. !e record compa-nies were visited quite often and the parties were open to all. Some-times a record company o#ered to pay the travel costs from Helsinki to Stockholm to meet the recording artist, which was an o#er that a relatively low-budged radio station could hardly refuse.11

!e cronyism of the insiders and the unorthodox ways of dis-seminating the records was part of the radio station policy in Hel-sinki and Tampere. !e provincial radios were more unfortunate in this respect. For instance in Ostrobothnia, in Western Finland, the records were acquired from the local record shops or by mail order from the domestic or foreign record companies. !e promotional packages were welcomed since they introduced new music to the lis-teners and reduced the acquisition costs12. In 1987 Poko Rekords CEO Epe Helenius stated that the best way to promote sales for bands selling 100–3000 records was radio airplay combined with music magazines. !e promotional activities included publication parties of the records and providing enough of the company’s products to radio stations. !e most important dis-semination channels of a rock-oriented record company were the local stations in the biggest towns such as Helsinki, Tampere and Turku. However, the most important one was YLE because of its na-

10 Outi Ahola (2008) Radio host, Radio City. Interview conducted by author at Helsinki, Finland 15th August; Harri Tuominen (2008). Radio 957 music director. Phone interview conducted by author. 14 th October.11 Ahola (2008).12 Maija Lahti (2007) “Radion portinvartijat ja musiikkisukupolvet. Tapaus-tutkimus Radio Paitapiiskan musiikinvalintaprosesseista.” In Etnomusikologian vuosikirja 19, eds. Markus Mantere & Heikki Uimonen. Helsinki: Suomen Etno-musikologinen seura, p. 48.

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tional coverage area13. !e "rst semi national, commercial radio net-works were founded in 199414. !e Deejays autonomy was con"rmed by the record companies. !ey were unable to have an e#ect on radio stations’ music poli-cies because no such thing existed in the 1980s. !e journalists and Deejays played whatever they liked. !e policy of YLE was criticized that they played anything else but the hit songs from the latest LPs15. !is can be interpreted as a continuation of the era of the enlight-ening music policy of the sixties and the seventies. In this sense the commercial radios were a quicker dissemination channel for the record company for the latest hit songs. However, their music policy was somewhat unpredictable, or at least it was dependent on the preferences of the Deejays. A former programme host of Radio City pointed out that when selecting music she had to keep in mind that the radio was listened to in cars, shops and homes and thus the programme needed to be suitable for di#erent listening situations and environments. !e more personal communication was easier in a local than in a national network of YLE. However, it was possible to play the song from the “rougher side” and interrupt the policy of the station, if she felt like it.16 An individual listener was not yet the target of the programme as the 1990s.

Towards the streamlining

New broadcasting licences were granted by the Ministry of Trans-port in 1989. !e following year there were 66 active radio sta-tions in Finland.17 In 1991 seven music directors were interviewed about the competition and how it a#ected the music policies of the

13 See Lassila (1987).14 Marko Ala-Fossi (2005) Saleable compromises. Quality Cultures in Finnish and US Commercial radio. Tampere: Tampere University Press. 15 Lassila (1987), pp. 142–144.16 Ahola (2008). 17 Olli Ylönen (2002) Paikallisradioita Suomeen! Tampere, Tampereen yliopisto. http://tampub.uta."/ tiedotusoppi/951-44-5572-X.pdf, p. 27.

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stations18. By now, at the latest, it was clear that the primary content of the commercial radios would be music. Radio City had already made a decision on this in 1986 because of its close connections to the Live Music Association of Helsinki (Elmu)19. Music was targeted according to the listener segment which should be big enough to be sold to the advertisers. Most of the chan-nels de"ned their target group from 25 to 50 years old, which was also the listener segment with the highest purchasing power 20. !is is somewhat contradictory to the notion that it was the demographic group of youth which was usually prioritized by the marketingdepartments of the radio21. Because of competition, the number of di#erent genres and art-ists was reduced and the airing of hit songs was increased. !e pre-dictability and the uniformity of the station were considered a virtue. Four channels out of seven were using playlists consisting of a few thousand songs. Some channels were introducing tentative playlists: songs were compiled on NAB tapes and Deejays encouraged to air them. !e music director, CEOs and in some cases even the board of directors were responsible for music. Principally, the programmes remained intact although the hosts had to “internalize” the policy of the station. !is was maintained by feedback, training and by re-cruiting suitable personnel for radio.22 Particular attention was paid to prime time music (i.e. 6:30 to 17:30). Special programme and allegedly irritating musics were aban-doned including heavy metal, rap, progressive rock, hip-hop, schlag-er, and loosely de"ned “minority musics”. Some stations excluded them from the evening programmes, too. Radio Sata in Turku was especially selective: the aforementioned heavy metal, rap and schlag-ers were banned, but also disco music, classical music, Finnish folk music, modern jazz and sacred music. Broadly speaking, the appro-

18 Harri Tuominen (1991) Seven interviews of commercial radio CEOs, music directors and program hosts. 19 Tynkkynen (2007). 20 Tuominen (1991).21 Pentti Kemppainen (2008) Researcher/YLE. Interview conducted at Helsinki Finland by author 13 th October.22 Tuominen (1991); Tuominen (2008).

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UIMONEN

priate music was characterized as melodious, ear catching and “nice sounding”.23 For instance, in 1994 prime time “nice sounding” music on Radio 957 was represented by the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Elvis, !e Eagles, !e Rolling Stones, Paul Si-mon and Tina Turner. According to Juha Tynkkynen of Radio City it was essential to pro"le the radio station in relation to the competi-tion: their overall sound had changed to more nostalgic and the share of the established favourites had increased.24

!e airing of Finnish music was in$uenced by disagreement concerning the royalties. !e Rome Convention was rati"ed in Fin-land and according to it the remunerations are higher compared to releases of un-rati"ed countries. For instance, the costs of music re-leased in United States were two-thirds cheaper. !e CEOs and mu-sic executives of 1991 admitted that the airing of domestic music was cut down for economic reasons. !e broadcasting of new songs was also avoided because of this.25 Radio 957 estimated in the early 1990s that they would play 50 per cent domestic and 50 per cent foreign. !ree years later they actually aired only 33 percent domestic music.26 !e change of the production culture was obvious because the management of the radio gave orders concerning the airing of domestic music. Radio City considered remunerations the biggest individual reason in$uencing music selection. !e amount of prime time mu-sic under remuneration was de"ned very clearly. !e reduction di-minished the playing of domestic music but also the interviews with the artist because these two go usually hand in hand. Some of the channels took a stand as a members of the “union” [i.e. !e Associa-tion of Finnish Local Radio Station] but followed their own logic in their music policy.27 !e harsh comments concerning the matter were probably caused by the on-going dispute between radios and collect-ing societies.

23 Tuominen (1991); Harri Tuominen (1992) Korvaluomia ei ole! Katsaus paikal-lisradioiden musiikkipolitiikkaan. In Toosa soi. Musiikki radion kilpailuvälineenä?, eds Ari Alm & Kimmo Salminen. Helsinki: Yle, pp. 108–121. 24 Tuominen (1991); Gramex (1994) Copyright society’s music reports.25 Tuominen (1992), pp. 109–110. 26 Tuominen (1991); Gramex (1995) Copyright society’s music reports.27 Tuominen (1991).

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YLE also reacted to remunerations by airing free-of-charge clas-sical music during night time on their rock music channel. Because the remunerations were based on the total airing time Radio 957 aired birdsong and thus managed to reduce the percentage of the costs.28

!e change of the production culture was legitimated by “better service for the listeners”. !e stations concentrated on the rhythm or the tempo of the channel instead of just playing “one-sided music”. !e arguments concerning hit repetition were based more on specu-lation than on actual listener research. One of the CEOs reasoned that pro"ling music means "nding the alternatives amongst the same kind of music. Radio 957 founded hit playing on quite an undisput-ed notion: hits are probably better than the rest of the artist’s music since people like them better.29 Both comments refer to streamlining of broadcasting and priori-tizing alleged listeners’ preferences and the channel sound to diversity of individual songs. !e change of the music policies can be seen as a part of the wider pro"ling which was characterized as “horizontal” by Juha Tynkkynen. !e recurring weekly rhythm of a listener was essential in this kind of thinking: when a radio listener wakes up or returns home after the day’s work there is a certain host or certain kind of music waiting for him or her.30 An individual listener was paid more attention than in the 1980s. !e technological preconditions of the early 1990s were well suited for developing the new corporate and music culture in the radio business. !e introduction of CD in the late 80s helped pro-gramme-making although they did not become a standard overnight. !e record companies restricted the promotional records due to their more expensive price to analogue recordings. !e attitude changed quickly because it turned out that CDs were broadcast more often than analogous records.31 Automated CD players became common in the early 1990s. Ra-dio City was using three players that held 60 CDs each. !e songs

28 Tuominen (1991); Kemppainen (2008). 29 Tuominen (1991). 30 Tuominen (1991). 31 Sorjanen (2007).

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were selected with the help of software such as Selector, which was introduced at Finnish Broadcasting Company in the late 80s.32

The music policies of the 21st century

Radio is largely responsible for creating di#erent music genres. Currently radio stations are diluting the strict genre categories or at least moulding them to suit the stations’ music policy as a part of their business strategy. !e music policy is de"ned by the lis-teners’ preferences and the channel sound of the radio33. !e increased competition and more accurate targeting are af-"rmed by the fact that previously banned musics are constantly re-considered. A radio station was formatted on hard rock and heavy metal, let alone the whole chain of stations that were was formatted to play Finnish iskelmä (schalgers). Both musics were played down, ignored or at least removed from the prime time in the 1990s. !e separate programmes have been replaced by streamlined broadcasting and music selected by music directors. !e broadcast is composed with the help of software and digital music. !e music di-rectors’ personal knowledge of music is combined with the informa-tion gathered from constant monitoring of listener feedback such as Internet questionnaires. !e auditory tests carried out once or twice a year help to “test the "ne line between rock and pop music”.34 !e information is then combined with market and con-sumer surveys in order to characterize the target group or to the virtual listener who is constructed with the help of the surveys. !e most important channels for the new releases are still the record companies. !ey are sending promotional records but have learned to target products more according to radio than in earlier days of commercial radio. !e number of new releases has increased dramatically from the 1980s. Radio 957 receives ap-proximately 500 records per month. Fifty percent of them are left

32 Tuominen (1991); Arto Vilkko (1992) “Tietokone – musiikkitoimittajan pelastaja?” In Toosa soi. Musiikki radion kilpailuvälineenä?, eds. Ari Alm & Kimmo Salminen. Helsinki: Yle, pp. 208–211.33 Ari Ojala (2007) Music director. Lecture, University of Helsinki. 14th June.34 Juha Koivunen (2008) Radio 957 Programme Manager. Interview conducted by author at Tampere, Finland. 11th February.

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un-listened to as being unsuitable to the format of the radio. Ten or so airings are added per month. !ese include unfamiliar songs from already well-known artists that are suitable for the station format and familiar songs that have been abandoned because lis-teners are bored with them. According to one music director it is hard to predict a hit song because of the high volume of new releases. However, the radio station is more likely to air the new Rolling Stones release than a song from a relatively unknown art-ist because it is always a risk to play and an unknown song. It is somewhat di%cult for the small record companies to get their songs aired because the strategy of the radio station is to play a certain kind of music. Strategy also gives guidelines for the rota-tion of songs. !e slots from the playlists are available depending on how successful the old songs are. !is is indicated by the re-sults of music researches.35 !e promoting personnel of the record companies avoid ma-nipulating the gatekeeper of a radio station. Although the main task for the record company is to get the song aired, the relationship be-tween the radio personnel and the record company promoter can be characterised as one of mutual respect: “!e songs are not pushed too hard”. !e biggest changes in the future will be the on-line dissemi-nation of the promotional material. Actually the radios are already receiving the passwords to visit the computer system of the record companies in order to become acquainted with the latest releases. !e centralized music selection has completely changed the profes-sion of the Deejays. !ey obey the playlist song order and leave the song list untouched unless there is good reason for this such as the visit of the artists on the programme, playing the record request or announcing important news.36 According to Poko Rekords CEO Epe Helenius promotion is equivalent to selling. !ere is no other way to in$uence to radio play than to have someone visit the radio station to promote the song. Also, the trends regarding radio play are prone to change. Currently it seems that what you get is the guaranteed hit song

35 Koivunen (2008).36 Koivunen (2008).

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or no radio play at all.37 !is holds true, since the music selection described above is constructed to minimize the risks. Helenius argues that the gate-keeping process is carried out in Finland by seven or eight individuals. However, there is a change for the crossover phenomenon: if there are two or three stations that get enthusiastic about the song, their competitors will be paying at-tention to it as well. !is includes the stations which have initially rejected the song. After the national coverage of YLE smaller locals stations will follow.38

With the minor record companies the situation is worse. !e record companies releasing domestic music outside the mainstream have been marginalized if the yardstick is the airplay of their artists. According to record company Rockadillo Records CEO Tapio Korjus the programme policies are closely related to the pro"tability of the business since in some cases the royalties used to cover 40 percent of the turnover. !e sending of the promotional records to radio sta-tions was already rather frustrating already in the 1990s and currently it is almost impossible to get airplay outside the mainstream in Fin-land, excluding a couple of commercial stations.39

!e change of music policy holds true not only for commercial but also for publicly funded radio. Fifteen to twenty years ago it paid to publish, for instance, alternative or contemporary folk music. !e record sales were moderate and YLE aired marginal music at least in special programmes and night shows. !e costs of the company were covered partly by the remuneration fees, which were higher than in the commercial sector. !ey also covered part of the income of the artists. !is changed when the YLE decided to cut down their special programmes.

Conclusion

Instead of remaining the same for the last twenty-three years the Finnish radio business has been in constant $ux because of tech-nological, economic, and cultural factors. Although Frith’s ideas

37 Kari “Epe” Helenius (2008) Poko Rekords CEO. Phone interview conducted by Vesa Kurkela.38 Helenius (2008).39 Korjus (2008).

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are not comparable in some respects it is easy to agree with him concerning the familiarity and predictability of radio music. !e risks are being avoided not only in selecting the music, but also in how the actual broadcasting is managed. Carefully selected music is supported by the digitally edited phone-ins in order to "t them both to the pulse of the broadcast. In the 1980s independent music hosts, their preferences and professionalism de"ned the music policy of the station. !e mu-sic was targeted at a local group or groups of listeners. Recruiting policy was used as a means to manage the music aired. Especially in the early years the collegiality between hosts and record com-panies improved the airing of the new releases. Analogous equip-ment was used in broadcasting the handpicked music mainly from LP’s and compact cassettes. Di#erent genres were aired on the same channel. Because of increased competition in the late 1980s the early playlists emerged, although hosts remained relatively independent and their music selection intact. Music was selected increasingly in accordance with the listener’s daily activities and the special music programmes were removed from prime time. New semi-digital software and equipment helped to manage music and to remove the undesired genres from the broadcast. According to the 80s host it was important to envisage the same programme in simultaneous but dissimilar listening en-vironments. !e horizontal thinking of the 1990s is based on a daily rhythm of an individual listener. Towards the next decade the targeting was re"ned even more: the broadcasting was directed at a virtual listener whose pro"le was constructed with the help of the information from the marketing and consumer surveys. In the late 1990s music selection became a more integral part of business management. Instead of Deejays the music directors alone are responsible for selecting and compiling of streamlined broadcasting of music. !e alleged preferences of the listener have overridden the host preferences and individual songs not to mention channel sound, which have replaced the programmes and genres. In the near future all-digital music management and on-line promotion in music selection will replace the handling of music artefacts such as CDs and LPs.

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(Previously published in European Communication Research and Education As-sociation. Programme, abstracts, posters and papers. 2nd European Communica-tion Conference, Barcelona. CD-ROM, 26th November 2008.)

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Heikki Uimonen

The Changing Music Cultures of 1990s Commercial Radios in Finland

!e democratic participation and locality were highlighted when the Ministry of Transport granted 22 experimental licences to Finnish local radio stations in 1985. Seven of them were con-nected to national or regional independent and political news-papers that considered the economical aspects to be one of the main reasons for starting the radio business. Idealism and some-what subversive radio policies were connected to two major city radios, Radio City in Helsinki and Radio 957 in Tampere1. !e music contents were not brought into the discussion in the early days of commercial radio. However, it was self-evident that the new music dissemination medium was greeted with joy by the Finnish music industry. !e music business was $ourish-ing and new records were successfully released. Rock sold most of the domestic music genres and the record companies had found new audiences among the young and the adult oriented rock lis-teners.2 !e listening culture had also been in the state of change for some time. Since the 1960s people had listened to radio in

1 Liikenneministeriö (1987) Paikallisradiotutkimus. Paikallisradiokokeilun seuran-tatutkimus. Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus, pp. 5–9; Vesa Kurkela & Heikki Ui-monen (2007) “Usko, toivo ja petollinen rakkaus. Rock-kulttuuri ja suomalaisen radiopolitiikan muutos”. In Etnomusikologian vuosikirja 19, eds. Markus Mantere & Heikki Uimonen. Helsinki: Suomen Etnomusikologinen Seura, pp. 9–28.2 Juha Lassila (1990) Mitä Suomi soittaa? Hittilistat 1954–1987. Jyväskylä: Jyväsky-län yliopisto, pp. 53–56.

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the background while engaging in other activities at work and in leisure time3. First the broadcast music was refreshed by the new radio hosts and deejays in special music programmes. !e channels started to compete for who would broadcast the latest music re-leases. !is was easy because unlike the publicly funded Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio i.e. YLE) commercial sta-tions were not tied to the time of the day or to the amount of the broadcast music. In principle the stations could air as much music as they desired and thus challenge YLE’s rock programmes con-"ned to a certain day and time of the week. Freedom of speech, musical diversity and the many-sided policies were an integral part of broadcasting until the end of the 1980s. In the early 1990s more licences were granted, which in-creased the competition. !e streamlined channels reduced the diversity of music genres. Until then music and individual songs had been fairly independent elements in broadcasting, but now they were integrated more closely into the business strategy of the station. !e arguments invoking the freedom of speech and di-versity were replaced by a channel sound and topics suitable for format radio targeted at a particular audience segment. !e new foundations for radio were laid on listener groups, centralized music selection and music research. !e public discussion on the matter is relatively often con-nected to aforementioned issues. It seems that only somewhat uncoordinated arguments are presented. On the one hand there is the idealism and musical diversity of the mid-1980s radio, on the other there is international ownership, chaining of stations, lim-ited playlists and the fading hopes for the media democracy. No matter how true or false these arguments may be, they are seldom backed up by facts relating to changes in the history of Finnish commercial radio. Historically, the transformation of the business culture came about gradually and for di#erent reasons. !is article searches for an explanation for the changes in production culture and the mu-

3 Heikki Uimonen (2009) “Haitaribussi. Kaupallisten radioiden musiikkivalinnat kaupunkitilan muokkaajina”. In Julkisen tilan poetiikkaa ja politiikkaa – Tieteiden-välisiä otteita vallasta kaupunki-, media- ja virtuaalitiloissa, eds. Seija Ridell & al. Tampere: Tampere University Press.

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THE CHANGING MUSIC CULTURES OF 1990S COMMERCIAL RADIOS IN FINLAND

sic programming tied to it. !e text emphasizes the early 1990s because at that time American-style format radio was not yet fully established but seeking its mode of operation in Finland. Produc-tion cultures have changed since then because of digital innova-tions but basically similar music auditorium research and music selection practices are currently in use. !ey therefore deserve to be documented. !e article sheds light on the factors a#ecting on the music policies of commercial radio stations manifest sonically in the broadcast music of local and semi-national radios. !e empirical data consists of interviews with radio station personnel, music copyright reports and written archive material. Radio Sata, found-ed in the south-western Finnish city of Turku will be examined in more detail. !e station was active and innovative in construct-ing its music content and form in accordance with American-style format radio. Furthermore, Radio Sata created local and semi-national mu-sic policies in consulting various radios which clearly transformed the radio policies towards more formatted radio not just in south-western Finland but in other parts of country as well. Radio 957, formerly owned by the Student Union of University of Tampere, was one of those consulted and therefore also presented here in more detail. Both radios ended up in the possession of the multi-national Scandinavian Broadcasting Systems (SBS) with identical playlists and represent the transformation of the Finnish radio-scape in general level.

Business culture, music management and technology

At the turn of the 1990s the Finnish radio business was $ourish-ing. !e turnover of the entire Finnish radio business rose from FIM 10 million to FIM 235 million (1.6/39 million euros) from 1985 to1990. !e competition situation had changed as well as the number of radios had increased from 18 to 66.4

4 Joukkoviestimet (1998) Helsinki: Tilastokeskus, pp. 157–158.

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!e increased competition altered the contents broadcast by the stations, especially in towns with two commercial radios. !e number of broadcast artists and genres had decreased and the predictability and uniformity of the station had become a virtue. !is was a#ected by listeners’ preferences and the programme policies of competing stations: music was now targeted at a cer-tain group so as to attract a su%cient number of radio advertis-ers. Especially the prime time music, from approximately 6.00 to 18.00, had to be suitable for the largest possible listener group5. A format radio station is bound to streamline its content so that it meets the expectations of the target group. !is cannot be done without replacing diversity with uniformity.6

Radio Sata was founded in 1989 in Turku to challenge an-other local commercial channel, Auran Aallot. !e new station was targeted at young adults and middle-aged listeners from 25 to 50 years of age. !e rapid change towards American style, stream-lined commercial radio was intentional and well-thought-out.7 A radio station was little by little transformed into a product that needed to be controlled as thoroughly as possible, including mu-sic management. !e format ideology of Radio Sata was founded on experi-ence of the domestic and international music and radio business. In the 1980s the interior design in Finnish restaurants was en-hanced by background music targeted at the clientele. According to the music director of Radio Sata this can be attributed to an early form of formatting in Finland: music from 1960 to 1980 including contemporary hit songs was selected and targeted at a certain group. !e music director’s comment sets target group thinking and music selection in a broader context, namely the change in music consumption and listening culture starting from the late 1920s in

5 Harri Tuominen (1992) “Korvaluomia ei ole! Katsaus paikallisradioiden musiik-kipolitiikkaan”. In Toosa soi. Musiikki radion kilpailuvälineenä, eds. Ari Alm & Kimmo Salminen. Helsinki: Yleisradio, pp. 108–121.6 Ferrel G. Lowe (1992) “Virtaviivaistetun formatoinnin työkalupakki”. In Toosa soi. Musiikki radion kilpailuvälineenä, eds. Ari Alm & Kimmo Salminen. Helsinki: Yleisradio, pp. 200–207.7 Markku Heikkilä (1991) Manager, Radio Sata. Interview 5th July, Harri Tuomi-nen; Kari Purssila (2008) Journalist. Interview 15th November, Heikki Uimonen. In the author’s possession.

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Finland. Portable gramophones liberated music listening from a certain place and time. !e phenomenon was enhanced by tran-sistors and car radios and the cassette culture of the 1970s. Music became the listener’s constant companion; it was no longer con-nected only to festivities, dances or concerts.8

Radio Sata was active in searching for up-to-date informa-tion on the innovations and the latest trends in radio business. !e radio stations in the USA and the international media events such as NAB Shows (National Association of Broadcasters) were visited regularly. !e participation was quite objective-oriented: the lectures, memos, literature and the taped radio programmes were analysed and then combined in the handouts that were used in educational events of the station.9

!e teaching handouts of Radio Sata consisted of photocop-ies of Finnish and English scienti"c articles, newspaper articles and studies on commercial radio. Concrete methods of broadcast editing were also included. An article dealing with the new form of public broadcasting of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was heavily underlined. It stated that single programmes were not relevant to audiences; the prime time was daytime, not evenings; radio was a local medium, and hosts should be personalities who attract and hold audiences.10 !ese were the major changes that also took place in Finnish commercial radios. Radio Sata was aware that adults listened to the radio for longer periods than the young: music “did not play a fundamen-tal role in their lives”. Because of this the music selection was guided by nostalgia. 25-year-old listeners would like to listen to the music that they listened to when they were 13 to 15 years of age. !e playlist was compiled of that era’s music. !e selection process was quite challenging considering that 50-year-old listen-ers had experienced their memorable musical moments twenty-

8 Vesa Kurkela (2005) “Kirkuvat sopraanot ja ihana Markus-setä. Varhaisten radio-äänten kulttuuriset ristiriidat.” In Kuultava menneisyys. Suomalaista äänimaiseman historia, eds. Outi Ampuja & Kaarina Kilpiö. Turku: Turun historiallinen yhdistys, pp. 98–121; Uimonen (2009).9 Purssila (1993) “Radiojuontajan pieni kehitys- ja rytmitysopas”, handout. Kim-mo Sahramäki’s archive; Purssila (1993) “Radiotoiminnan perusteet”, handout; Kari Purssila (2008) Journalist, Radio Sata. Interview 15th November 2008. Heikki Uimonen. In the author’s possession.10 Purssila (1993).

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"ve years earlier. !e possibly irritating genres were abandoned and in order to attract female listeners the station abandoned sports programmes.11

Radio Sata received the broadcast music from the record companies or purchased it from the local record shops. Hit mu-sic was not of paramount importance because the station was not targeted at young listeners. Actually it was more suitable for the station’s policy if the competing channel or television made the hit instead of them. Radio Sata did play new songs but their “test slots” were precisely de"ned in the streamlined programme $ow. !e feedback was received immediately from active listeners.12

In the early days of commercial radio the channels gained a competitive advantage by broadcasting the recent releases be-fore their competitors. In the 1990s the radio music culture was changed by target group thinking: in a certain format the compet-itor’s hit-making was considered not just worthy of support but also economically lucrative. It became a risk for a channel playing nostalgic music to broadcast an unknown song because it might drive a listener away to another frequency. Radio Sata’s corporate culture di#ered from those of com-petitors in this respect. Centrifugal elements in broadcasting were considered more important that centripetal element. !is obviously catered for background listening: entertaining, non-dis-ruptive and nostalgic music is appropriate to accompany daytime activities. Not only the music but the studio equipment was updated. Radio Sata and Data City Communications had designed, planned and constructed a device called the CD Music Editor which could control eight Sony CDK-006 CD players, each of them holding 60 CDs13. With the new music scheduler the nature of music selection was profoundly changed because handling it became intangible. In addition, the CD Music Editor enabled the

11 Purssila (2008); Gösta Sjöman (2008) Music director, Radio Sata. Interview 12th November. Heikki Uimonen. In the author’s possession.12

13 Markku Ahto (2008) Radio entrepreneur, Radio Sata. Interview in 13th Novem-ber, 18th November and 4 th December. Heikki Uimonen. In the author’s posses-sion.

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unoccupied use of the studio and made evening and night broad-casting more cost-e#ective. By launching the CD Music Editor the radio programming needed a transition to format thinking because night time broad-casting necessitated the categorization of music. !e device was controlled by the 30-key keyboard unit which was later converted into computer controlled music management software and incor-porated into Radioman music management products.14 !e early format radio music selection was not completely automated. Radioman o#ered choices from the music bank with rated songs (e.g. domestic new release/foreign classic) which were then selected by the show host. For instance, a song with a rating from 8 to 9 was broadcast relatively often, whereas a song with a rating of 5 was heard hardly once a month. !e playlist was com-posed hand in hand with the rotation clock that noticed the daily rhythm of the listeners and their possible feeling of drowsiness in the afternoon.15 !e principle closely resembles that of the well-known back-ground music enterprise Muzak Corporation. !e Stimulus Pro-gression method from the 1940s aimed to relieve the drowsiness of workers by the music selection.16 Similar to the current radio formatting the songs were labelled according their suitability, e.g. “Gloomy - minus three/Esctatic - plus eight”. Public discussion about the music content in radio generally revolves around the individual songs or their repetitive broadcast-ing. !e radio business culture of the early 1990s changed the focus to a more holistic view. Instead of individual songs it was considered more important to concentrate on the station’s chan-nel sound. It consisted of the compatibility of jingles, music and openers, which are the high-rated songs broadcast immediately after the advertisements.17

14 Ahto (2008).15 Purssila (2008); Sjöman (2008).16 Joseph Lanza, (1995) Elevator Music. A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and other Moodsong. London: Quartet Books, pp. 48–49. 17 Purssila (2008).

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Music research as an integrated part of production culture

In 1990s music testing was established as an essential part of the radio channels’ production culture, music scheduling and advertising. !e station brochures presented the professional ra-dio stations as basing their business on research and researched knowledge about the listeners who could thus become a potential segment for potential advertisers.18 !e launching of music testing was connected to the tougher competition of the commercial sector in the radio business. In Finland the tradition was virtually non-existent, although some special studies were carried out soon after the YLE started broad-casting in 1926. Listeners’ opinions on the classical music, folk and popular music were registered. !ere was no need for research due to the monopoly position of the public service channel. How-ever, some of them were accomplished e.g. in 1977, when the music content was evaluated statistically and the opinions of the listeners concerning the “light music” were surveyed.19 Furthermore, the modes and places of listening were now dif-ferent. In the commercial radio of the 1990s scheduling of music, news and weather forecasts was based on the idea of fragmented listening. !e policy was to create optimal content for the "fteen minute or half-hour period of time when the radio was listened to while commuting. !e idea was based on KRT (National Ra-dio Research) which was a collaborative study carried out by YLE and commercial radios. Informants estimated their radio listen-ing in "fteen minute periods by "lling in so-called radio diaries.20 Interestingly, the aforementioned Muzak’s Stimulus-Progression method was based also on "fteen minute sequences.21

According to Radio Sata personnel, the importance of KRT lay in the public availability of information concerning the radio markets and that this information was taken into consideration

18 Tutkittu radio (1993) Brochure of Radio 957. Jari Niemelä’s archive.19 Kurkela (2005), pp. 109–112; Kurkela & Uimonen (2007); Pentti Kemppainen (2008) Researcher & programme manager YLE. Interview December.20 Ahto (2008); KRT (2009) Kansallinen radiotutkimus. http://www."nnpanel."/radio.php. (Accessed 29 April.)21 Lanza (1995), p. 49.

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in the decision-making of the media companies and advertisers. However, it was insu%cient for the radio station’s strategic plan-ning which required more profound information on radio listen-ing. In addition, Radio Sata analysed their competitor’s broad-casting. !e places of advertisements, broadcast music, rotation of the songs and jingles were monitored and notated with the aim of gathering the empirical evidence on the competitor’s activities. !is was described aptly in an urban story of the 1990s in Turku: if Radio Sata painted its walls blue on Monday, the walls in the competing station were also blue by Friday.22 Furthermore, qualitative research methods were utilized in marketing. Radio Sata invited approximately one hundred listen-ers to a lunch, during which opinions of the station were elicited by interview research. Music preferences were considered essen-tial, because if there was any loss of listeners the "rst one to blame was the music.

Radio Sata: a mission in Tampere

Radio 957 started to broadcast on 15 August 1985. !e licence was granted to the Student Union of the University of Tampere. Contrary to the common trend, the application articulated the alternative communication policies which would “emphasize the new cultural trends quickly absorbed by students”. Furthermore, the active role of the Student Union in the local music scene was noted.23 !e channel was targeted at all Tampere region residents, not just students or music enthusiasts. However, diverse music genres and artists were broadcast not only in special programmes but also during the prime time. Radio 957 faced serious "nancial problems at the turn of the decade, when two more licences were granted in Tampere. !e biggest single change in production culture took place in 1992, when 75 percent of the Radio 957 shares were acquired by Radio Sata. !e new music content was planned in accordance with mu-

22 Ahto (2008); Purssila (2008).23 Tamy (1984) Tampereen yliopiston ylioppilaskunnan paikallisradiotoiminnan periaate. Attachment to the radio licence application. Jari Niemelä’s archive; Kur-kela & Uimonen (2007).

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sic research aiming to "nd the assorted and exclusive artists and songs that would suit the vast majority of local music listeners, no longer speci"c music audiences. !e new Radio 957 was targeted at young adults according to so-called “Artist research”. Five hundred interviews were used to ascertain local music preferences, which led to the conclusion that Tampere was more “rock-oriented” than to other towns and that the townspeople’s “rock age” lasted longer. !e company that carried out the work claimed that after the research Radio 957 listeners increased by thirty percent and thus the station became the most listened to channel in the area.24 Another study carried out by Radio Sata and Radio 957 showed that rock and iskelmä (Finnish schlager) were listeners’ two main favourite genres. It turned out that iskelmä fans were more tolerant of rock than vice versa so it was safe to increase the amount of rock music in the content targeted to them.25 Without doubt this change of attitude was caused by the omnipresence of rock music in the media. Music formerly connected with young and marginal groups was now heard on television series, sports programmes and grocery shops. !is had softened the attitudes of the wider audience towards formerly rebellious music.26 Two years after the renewal in September 1994, Radio 957 broadcast 143 tunes in prime time. !e music aired was fairly evenly divided between songs released in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (20/22/24 per cent respectively). !e music released in the 1990s dominated with one third of music broadcast. !e releases of 1994 accounted for 15 percent of the total amount of music broadcast (22 airings). !e share of domestic and Anglo-Ameri-can music was respectively 48 and 52 per cent during prime time. When music broadcast outside prime time is included, the per-centage of Finnish music decreases to 30 percent.27 All in all the music content was composed of familiar and nostalgic tunes. Radio Sata’s music pro"le was likewise thoroughly made over. Heavy rock, rap, old Finnish schlagers, disco, classical music,

24 Tampereen markkinatieto (1995) Brochure. Jari Niemelä’s archive.25 Ahto (2008); Purssila (2008). 26 Kurkela & Uimonen (2007). 27 Gramex archive (1994) !e broadcast music of Radio 957 in 7th September.

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folk music, jazz and religious music were banned.28 In September 1994 Radio Sata broadcast 118 performances in prime time, half of them domestic (52 per cent). Domestic neo-schlager singers were aired more than on Radio 957. !e Beatles and Elvis were accompanied by such artists as Don Henley, Tina Turner and the Sailor.29 Because the availability of CDs was relatively poor in the early days of Radio Sata, they decided to purchase a collec-tion of one hundred CDs from the USA meant for radio use. It included the essential performances of various artists. !ese compilations determined the style of American music broadcast by the station for some time. Finnish CD compilations were also utilised.30

!e costs of the evening programmes were reduced by broad-casting non-revenued material such as classical music and nature sounds e.g. sounds of the sea and seagulls. !ese were replaced by an innovation called Radiojukebox. !e aforementioned CD Music Editor was connected to a device called CDME Telephone Interface. By using the tone-dialling phone and dialling a code one could select a song which would be then be played by the automated system at a cost of FIM 5 (80 cents) per request.31 Jukebox was considered an important innovation in relation to pro"ling the station because right from the beginning Radio Sata was able distinguish itself from its competitors. !e song lists were published in a magazine/lea$et called Radiojukeboksi with a listing ef-fective for six months. !e paper was distributed in the premises of the companies that advertised in the paper and in local post o%ces. For the station the new device was a very convenient way to collect feedback on the music because every broadcast song was logged to the "le and then utilized in compiling the playlist.32

Not only formatting but also technological innovations were introduced in order to enhance the channel sound and the com-petitiveness of the station. !e balance between speaks and music

28 Tuominen (1991).29 Gramex (1994).30 Ahto (2008).31 Ahto (2008); Purssila (2008). 32 Ahto (2008); Purssila (2008).

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was improved by headphones-microphone headsets worn by the show host and the guests. !e distance between the speaker and the microphone and thus the volume remained constants during the show. !e headsets were acquired in order to compete with YLE on sound quality. In YLE the broadcasting was monitored by studio sound engineers, whereas the commercial stations had to rely on studio hosts. !e sound compression narrowed the gap between speech and music and improved fringe area reception.33 Compression had no e#ect on the music selection process con-cerning rock, pop or schlager genres. With classical music it was all di#erent. Radio Sata founded Classic Radio in Helsinki in 1992 and realized that the 1990s sound technology was insu%cient for classical music. !e problem was solved by selecting chamber music or solo works in prime time with less dynamics than in orchestral works. Compression would not be noticed to when music was listened from low-" car stereos and radio receivers. Classic Radio also took advantage of CD Music Editor and writable CDs in music selection and announcements. !e costs were reduced by recording speaks on CDs, loading them onto a programmable CD player and broadcast-ing them immediately after the music.34

Refining target group thinking

!e brand marketing of the mid-nineties guided format thinking to-wards more strictly de"ned listener segmentation. Di#erent lifestyles were combined with music styles and speech content was steered to-wards the phenomena considered important to listeners.35 By 1994 the Multinational Scandinavian Broadcasting Systems (SBS) had acquired 75 per cent of Radio Sata’s and 100 per cent of Radio 957’s shares. With the new business culture targeting was fur-ther narrowed by collecting facts about listeners. Occupation, hob-bies, consumer and reading habits and television watching were as-certained. A potential radio listener was even given a name: In 2006 Radio 957 targeted its programmes at a virtual person called “Masa,

33 Ahto (2008).34 Ahto (2008).35 Ahto (2008).

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aged 36”. BBC was using a virtual couple “Dave and Sue” for the same purpose.36 SBS left the domestic music selection process untouched. How-ever, the multinational company was able to provide research "nd-ings on the company’s radios and how they could be applied to Fin-land. Previously problematic high costs of music auditorium testing were no longer considered an issue, although it must be noted that Radio Sata and Radio 957 co-operated in order to reduce the costs.37 In auditorium music testing the samples of songs are played to the group of people evaluating them with the help of a certain select-ing device38. !e songs were tested in collaboration with a company specialized in music testing. !e music director’s job was to pick the song from the music scheduling programme. !e music directors of the corporation also discussed the suitability for songs to di#erent stations of the SBS. Gradually the music content was uni"ed in all four SBS stations belonging to the same radio chain. !e announce-ments were centralized to a single station in Tampere. It was more cost e%cient to use one music director and one host instead of four.39 When more radio licences were granted, Radio Sata’s person-nel began to o#er their tested and accomplished business solutions to other commercial stations. A limited company called Communi-cation Design was founded to o#er new radio entrepreneurs a total “package” consisting of planning the business, constructing the stu-dio and station’s premises, planning the programme pro"le, sales and image marketing and training personnel. Previous experiences were utilizes and tailored to meet the requirements of the new radio ac-cording to prevailing competitive situation. Communication Design had twenty-some business partners all over Finland.40

36 Jukka-Pekka Raeste (1994) “Radio Sata, Radio 957 ja Radio City saivat ame-rikkalaisen omistajan. Ulkomainen SBS tunkeutui suurkaupunkien radioihin.” Helsingin Sanomat 18th December; Anna-Maria Siljamäki (2006) Tiivistetty paikal-lisuus: Radio 957:n paikallisuuden tarkastelua uutisten avulla, MA theses, University of Tampere; Sjöman (2008); Martin Kelner (2008) “Heard the same song three times today? Blame the craze for ‘testing’ tunes”, Guardian 19th May. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/19/radio.bbc1 (Accessed 29th April.)37 Sjöman (2008).38 Uimonen (2009).39 Ahto (2008); Purssila (2008); Sjöman (2008). 40 Ahto (2008); Sjöman (2008).

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In 1996 Data City Communications carried out research aim-ing to combine music tastes charting with the images pertaining the commercial stations. First auditorium music testing was used to as-certain the music and artistic preferences of the listeners. !e results were then placed on a map which showed that if a listener was fond of a certain artist he or she would probably prefer similar songs or singers.41 !e research was combined with telephone interviews. Inform-ants were asked to evaluate the suitability of certain pop and rock groups as content for a radio channel on a scale from one to seven. Alternatively the informants were played few-second hooks (i.e. re-frains or catchy melodies) and asked, if they would listen to a chan-nel playing that kind of music. !ey were also asked if the samples matched the contents of current radio stations. !e testing was not meant to evaluate the actual music content but the image of the sta-tions.42 By combining the map and telephone interview results the re-searchers aimed to identify the matching artists and songs, music tastes of di#erent age groups and especially the images associated with the stations. Similarly, the potential listeners without any ra-dio station were scrutinized. !is was justi"ed by the fact that the conceptions concerning the channel and the channel sound of the station were very often di#erent among the radio personnel and the listeners. When a new station went on the air, it clearly also changed the image of the old station. !is usually resulted in the re-pro"ling of the old radio with the appropriate research.43 In the late 1990s image marketing it was essential to conquer a given “space” before the competitor. !is position could be achieved e.g. with a slogan connected to music and to the radio station. More important to the actual broadcast content was the notion of what the station presumably broadcast. !e assumption and the actual music content were not necessarily identical.44 In relation to radio music research this actually challenges the role of the music, artist or an in-

41 Ahto (2008); Jaakko Hollmén (2008) Interview 10th December. Heikki Uimo-nen. In the author’s possession.42 Ahto (2008).43 Ahto (2008).44 Ahto (2008).

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dividual song when listeners evaluate the suitability of the station for themselves.

Special radios and radio chains

!e formatting of Finnish commercial station is part of a more ex-tensive transformation of music and listening cultures. !e rotation clocks continued the policies initiated by the background music companies that matched the music content to daily routines of the listeners and the social uses of music. Before the local radios started broadcasting music was one segment of radio content, not yet the es-sential part it became in the 1990s. Musically diverse and unconventional programmes were gradu-ally converted to streamlined broadcasting. American-style format radios were introduced with automated music control, playlists and audience music testing. !e changes were fostered by the increased competition caused by the change in the broadcasting regulations, the unexpected economic recession and technical innovations such as music jukeboxes. !ese business policies form the foundation on which current commercial radio still rests. Streamlining and the multinational ownership did not simply replace the experimental music content and broadmindedness of the early days. !e changes in production cultures took place gradually and in synergy with other factors. !e granting of broadcast licences at the turn of the 1990s created competition which led to a situa-tion in which genres and other content believed to be irritating were removed from prime time. !e reduction of the diversity of music is obvious when evaluated by the number of di#erent music genres. Radio 957 and Radio Sata composed their playlists strategically in accordance with local music tastes, although the artists and songs resemble each other very much. !e continuous broadcasting of an individual song was not characteristic of either station because the music was targeted at middle-aged listeners and the intense hit rota-tion was more typical of channels targeted at a younger audience. !e Finnish radio business professionalized in relation to con-sumer segments and music selection: centralized music selection made it easier to target certain music at speci"c listener groups. Economic considerations limited the music selection because the

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copyright revenues di#ered depending on the music. Domestic re-leases and music from the countries of the Rome convention were more expensive than e.g. music from the United States. On the other hand, the issue has been subject to di#erent interpretations and esti-mations. !e price of domestic music has been considered cheap or expensive depending on the position of the commentators, who are usually representatives of copyright organizations, commercial radios or the musicians union. !e introduction of format radio was accompanied by techno-logical innovations. At the same time they steered the radio produc-tion cultures in new directions: automated night time broadcasting was more cost e#ective that running an occupied studio. Following the latest innovations in broadcasting and studio technology and keeping up with changing radio production cultures and consumer research became an essential part of the radio business. !e image marketing was strengthened as well. So far there has been no detailed research on the changes in broadcast music caused by the chaining of individual stations and so-called special radios (e.g. Kiss FM and Classic FM). !e changes were again in$uenced by digitalization, which enabled centralized broadcasting control: the music content of a whole chain of radios could be managed by a single computerized system, with a limited number of employees and from one place.

(!e text is based on an article forthcoming in IASPM net journal 2010.)

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Pentti Kemppainen

DAB Was a Dud – So What?

Sound Radio Convergence Perspectives in Finland

In this paper, I try to outline and assess future developments in sound broadcasting in Finland. !ere are many questions await-ing answers. When will radio become digital – or will it never happen? What would be the killer application for digital radio – or is one needed? How and where do we listen to the radio in the future: will it be a separate device or just a function among oth-ers in a mobile multimedia unit or on a multimedia platform like the Internet? Will the radio of the future be similar to traditional radio or a combination of audio, visual and data content? Will analogue radio content be replaced by other digital audio content – and if so, what kind of content? What will be the basic motive of the future of radio: should it inform, educate, or entertain? Is there room for radio personalities or serious talk in the new ra-dio, or will radio degrade to just an endless stream of niche mu-sic channels? And, last but not least, who is willing to pay for the switch to digital radio? Today, there are still too many questions and too few answers. Only a few answers can be sketched here and even they, at the moment, may be quite feeble.

FM Radio

Current analogue radio programming enjoys a high status in Fin-land. !e average Finn listens to the radio three and a half hours per day. Daily radio listening exceeds the time spent on any other media, even television loses by half an hour. On a weekly basis,

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radio reaches almost all over nine-year-old citizens in Finland. Finns are, therefore, among the most radio-loving nations in the world. During the last "fteen years, there have been no major changes in the radio listening "gures. Most Finns, especially those living in the urban areas, have a possibility to choose from 15–20 analogue radio channels. !e Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) has four national networks and an extensive regional service on FM. Radio 1 is a channel for culture, art, and factual talk. It is also the home channel of clas-sical music and jazz. Radio Suomi (Radio Finland) is the most popular of all the channels, having one third of the entire radio listening share of the country. !e channel o#ers regional and na-tional news, current a#airs and also focuses on sports and popular music. Radio Suomi is the channel for hits, nostalgic pop, and melodic adult rock. !e channel’s daily prime time services are di-vided into 20 regional services. YleX is targeted at the young and young adults. It introduces the latest in popular music to its au-dience. !e fourth channel, YLE Puhe, is a talk channel o#ering news and current a#airs programmes and other factual program-ming, mostly reruns, from other YLE radio and television chan-nels or the YLE archives. !ere are also two channels in Swedish and one in Sami. YLE’s operations are primarily "nanced by a television fee (224,30 euros per person annually), and its programming carries no advertising. !e company is state-owned, supervised by the Administrative Council appointed by the Parliament, and oper-ates under the YLE Act. According to a recent parliamentary working group propos-al, fee-based public service funding will continue in such a way that all households and enterprises, organisations or associations would automatically be obligated to pay a fee, which would no longer be based on ownership of a certain piece of equipment. Ac-cording to the working group proposal, the new payment system, the public service media fee, will be introduced at the beginning of 2011.1 !e reasoning behind modifying public service funding

1 Yleisradio Oy:n julkinen palvelu ja rahoitus [Public Service of Yleisradio Oy and its "nancing]. Yleisradio Oy:n julkista palvelua ja rahoitusta selvittäneen työryhmän loppuraportti. Liikenne- ja viestintäministeriön julkaisuja 23/2009.

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is to maintain the current level of service provided by YLE in the new converging media environment. In Finland, commercial radio began in 1985. !e current concession period will last until the end of 2011. !e FM fre-quencies are crowded and there will be hard competition for the new licenses granted by the State Government. !ere are ten commercial national or semi-national radio networks and 47 concessions for regional or local commercial radio operations. Most of the nationwide services are music for-mat channels targeted at young or middle-aged audiences (Radio Nova, Radio Rock, Radio Aalto, Suomi POP, Energy, !e Voice). !ere is one channel for jazz (Groove FM), one for classical music (Classic radio), one in Russian (Sputnik Radio), and one targeted at religious audiences (Radio Dei). One nation-wide network (Iskelmä) broadcasts on regional concessions. In 2008, the total commercial radio advertising revenue amounted to 50.5 million euros. Advertising revenues are uneven-ly divided: local radio stations receive 30 per cent of the net sales revenue, whereas the national radio channels amount to 70 per cent. In 2008, radio accounted for approximately 3.4 per cent of total media advertising, which is noticeably below the European average. !e third tier of radio, community radio, has been very weak in Finland from its very beginning in 1985. A good balance exists between the popularity of YLE’s public service radio and commercial radio. In 2008, YLE had a 52 per cent share of radio listening. With a daily listening share of 39 per cent, Radio Suomi is the dominant market leader. Age is the fore-most factor in listening preferences. !e majority of those above 55 years of age listen to the YLE channels while the majority of those under 55 listen to commercial channels. Traditionally, old people listen to the radio much more than the young in Finland, which explains the overwhelming popularity of Radio Suomi. !e single biggest commercial network, Radio Nova, lags far behind and has a 12 per cent audience share, followed by SBS Iskelmä-radio with a 9 per cent share. !e "rst experimental phase of digital radio broadcasting in Finland lasted for a decade. In early 1994, YLE and Nokia initiated the "rst DAB "eld tests. In 1998, YLE launched the

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"rst digital service, Radio Peili, which was a speech channel. !e next year, this was followed by two digital-only channels and, by 2004, nine more channels. At this time, the digital network cov-ered about 40 per cent of the Finnish population. Commercial radio channels stayed out of the digital radio experiment. None of them launched DAB transmissions. In addi-tion, reasonably priced receivers were not yet on the market, and there were only about a hundred DAB receivers in the country. !e few digital services YLE o#ered did not alone o#er enough added value for the listeners to make them want to buy a digital radio receiver. !e Finnish radio regulator was also cautious: “At this stage, there are no particular reasons to hasten the digitalisa-tion of radio”. Meanwhile, YLE was digitalising its television networks which was in itself very expensive. In Finland, all analogue tel-evision broadcasting was to be switched o# at the beginning of September 2007. As YLE did not have su%cient funding for both simultaneous reforms, there apparently arose a convenient oppor-tunity to cut operation costs. It proved too laborious for YLE alone to try to conduct ra-dio digitalisation as well. In order to succeed, radio digitalisation should have been a joint e#ort between YLE’s public service radio and commercial radio. At this time, YLE was spending its money on digitalising TV broadcasting and no one else was willing to pay a penny on digitalising sound broadcasting technology. YLE shut down the DAB network at the end of August 2005, thus making Finland the "rst European country to end DAB broad-casting.2

Analogue is already digital

Even today, the radio production and distribution chain is digital from the very beginning of programme production to the top of

2 For more detail, see Marko Ala-Fossi & Per Jauert (2006) “Nordic Radio in the Digital Era”. In Radio, TV & Internet in the Nordic Countries. Meeting the Challenges of New Medias Technology, ed. Ulla Carlsson. Göteborg University, NORDICOM, pp. 65–87; Stephen Lax, Marko Ala-Fossi, Per Jauert & Helen Shaw (2008) “DAB: the future of radio? !e development of digital radio in four European countries”. In Media Culture Society 2008; 30(2), pp. 151–166.

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the transmitting antenna. Only the signal leaving the antenna for the receiver is analogue. !ere is a huge amount of analogue re-ceivers; on average, each Finn has two receivers. At the same time, radio programming is broadcast via digital platforms, such as digital television and the Internet. !ree YLE radio channels are available through digital TV; one of them, the YLE classical music channel, is only available digitally. !e digitalised YLE archives have been opened to the pub-lic. !e “Living Archive” [Elävä arkisto] is a free Internet service through which one can listen to voices from the past and follow the progress of history on the small screen. !e website presents the visitor with a library of hundreds of television programmes and thousands of radio programmes in both Finnish and Swedish. It is possible to listen to the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra play works by Jean Sibelius. !e archive also functions as a web radio, and transmits a stream of old radio programming 24 hours a day. All radio channels, both public service and commercial, have their own Internet websites, where one can listen to the channel simulcast and download some of the broadcast material. In many cases, one can watch a live studio broadcast, read news tailored for target group interests, and participate in the live broadcast by sending text messages to the interactive windows on the screen. Practically every Finn has a mobile telephone, and about half of the phones contain an analogue FM radio receiver, even though the GSM phone itself is digital. !e radio chip is so in-expensive that it is worth to install it just in case. However, in Finland, it is not very popular to listen to the radio with a mobile telephone. According to Finnpanel, in 2007 only about a half of those who had an FM radio receiver in their mobile phone had ever used their phones to listen to the radio. Until recently, earphones were needed to listen to FM radio with a mobile phone, as the earphone line has been used as the FM antenna. Now this problem has been solved, and there are new models with an antenna inside the phone. !ere has been a lot of research to develop high-quality miniature loudspeakers. !e advancement of technology has increased the performance of mobile phone batteries by 10 per cent each year. Quite soon,

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then, we will have a mobile phone, which can be listened to in the same manner as an old transistor radio in the 60s.

New radio

It is said that radio will not remain the only analogue island in the digital sea. But, according to most specialists, analogue radio broadcasting will not be end during the next 10 15 years. !e combination of extensive and established radio programming, a complete production machinery, a completed and well-function-ing transmitter network, a high number of receivers, and complex copyright issues surrounding alternative broadcasting forms create such a resistance to change that it is di%cult to imagine analogue transmissions coming to an end in the near future. And who would be willing to pay for the rather expensive technical costs during the overlapping period of change? Today, even the Finnish radio regulator is unwilling to press for the change from analogue to digital radio. !ere will, however, be changes in audio broadcasting as well, although they will not happen at once like they did in the Finn-ish telecasting environment in 2007. In any case, there will be a long transition and coexistence period of analogue and digital radio applications on many platforms. In other words, there will be both analogue and digital radio at the same time instead of a sudden shift from analogue to digital. In addition to DAB, there are also other digital standards to be considered. An EBU Committee was recently considering the future of radio broadcasting in Band II (FM, 87,5–108 MHz) and found out that there are only a limited number of projects aimed at replacing FM with a digital system in Band II. !ey con-sidered four digital systems: DRM+, HD-Radio, FMeXtra, and T-DAB. Of these, DRM+ "ts very well into the European system of FM frequencies and is designed for frequencies up to 129 MHz. It is anticipated that by the end of 2009 or at the beginning of 2010, DRM+ will be standardised by ETSI. One possibility under investigation is to reuse the existing FM infrastructure by trans-mitting a digital signal close to the FM frequencies in a simul-cast mode. Neither FMeXtra nor HD-radio can be introduced in

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Band II in their present format on a large scale without disturb-ing the existing FM services. Reasonably priced receivers and at-tractive new services must be available in order to overcome the chicken-and-egg dilemma. !e receivers should be multi-stand-ard, including both traditional FM and new digital receivers for Band II.3 DRM+ is a good technology for broadcasting in large areas. Russia and India, for example, are beginning broadcasts us-ing this standard.

Radio on a mobile TV platform

!ere is a lot of room for audio broadcasting and radio-like audio services on other digital platforms, such as DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld), which is a digital distribution channel for television, radio, and other future services for mobile receiv-ers. Today, the DVB-H network covers 40 per cent of the Finnish population. As mentioned, some radio channels can already be listened to on a stationary digital TV set using the DVB-T (ter-restrial) or DVB-C (cable) standards. DVB-H belongs to the same family of standards, which means that there is good synergy be-tween them. !e European Union has strongly supported DVB-H and, last year, chose it as the o%cial mobile TV standard in Eu-rope. Nokia has also been backing up DVB-H and its "rst genera-tion multimedia mobile telephones Nokia N92, Nokia N77 and even the N95 supported DVB-H, but the latest model, the N97, lacks DVB-H support. Because of this, the discussion around DVB-H has been calming down. One of the big TV companies in Finland, Nelonen Media, ended its mobile DVB-H TV broad-casts a year ago because of copyright and licensing di%culties. !e Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE has never even begun DVB-H broadcasting. !ere is intense lobbying going on in Finland concerning the last free Band II multiplex standard: will it be used for mobile multimedia, DVB-H, high de"nition television, DVB-T2, which o#ers multichannel HDTV services, or perhaps innovative new

3 Looking to the Future of Broadcasting in Band II. An EBU Committee report in April 2009. Geneva, EBU-BPN 092.

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datacasting services? If the standard is decided this autumn, the new multiplex could begin operations by early 2010. If HDTV services are chosen, the future of digital radio in this context seems quite unlikely.

Radio and the Internet

!e Internet is undergoing a major phase of development. If the Internet becomes mobile, it can provide an audio broadcasting platform whose value will increase with the user habits of the younger generation. A broadband Internet connection in every home makes it possible to watch TV programming or download movies via the Internet, but it also to access radio and other audio content via the Internet. !e sector is about to take a big leap in time and place as intelligent software, MP3 players, and multi-media terminals are creating new audio environments and radio listening habits. !is will also create a new, user-friendly environ-ment for talk radio and high-quality programming. !ere are four basic ways to listen to the radio via the Inter-net:

1. Streaming simulcast. Most Finnish radio stations stream their broadcasts simultaneously on the Internet. !ere are tens of thousands of free radio stations online.

2. Streaming on demand. Most radio companies o#er a large library of their recent programmes, which can be listened to after the initial broadcast directly from their server for a limited period of time, for example a week.

3. Downloading. It is increasingly common that one can download programme "les from the server of the radio company onto the hard disk drive of one’s own computer. !e "le can be moved the computer to an MP3 player or a mobile phone, with which it can be listened to later, when and wherever convenient.

4. Podcasting is a distribution system in which new "les are automatically downloaded onto the user’s computer or other device for o&ine use. It is like a newspaper subsc-

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ription. One can subscribe, for instance, to a whole radio series in which one is interested but do not have the possi-bility to listen to when it is initially broadcast.

Recently, listening to the radio via the Internet has increased re-markably among the 15 –24 year audience group, but the whole computer generation, up to the age of 44, seems to be "nding ra-dio via the Internet (see Fig. 1.). Compared with traditional radio listening as a whole, the monthly reach is not yet that impressive, but there is an obvious upwards trend.

Figure 1: Radio listening over the internet in 2007– 20094

Radio-like services like Pandora, which calls itself a personalised Internet radio service, help you "nd new music based on your old and current favourites. If your favourite song is “All you need is love”, Pandora will play you an endless stream of music similar to your favourite. !e free service cannot be accessed outside the U.S.A., because there is no agreement on copyright royalties when it comes to webcasting. Certain listeners need services like Pan-dora or Last.fm more than those of traditional radio. A plenty of Web-only radio stations (eRadio) that concen-trate on certain music genres can be listened to on the Internet.

4 Source: Finnpanel, April 2009.

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For instance, Slacker.com o#ers on its main menu over a hundred music channels, focusing mostly on popular music. !e station has signed a contract with the big music companies, such as Sony BGM Music Entertainment, and hundreds of independent labels, and had around 2 million tracks available at launch. !ere is already a variety of mobile multimedia devices, like the iPhone, which also have global access to radio content as well as podcasting and music. !e Ovi service by Nokia connects No-kia mobile devices and PCs together. With Ovi it is e#ortless to organise and share content. In the Ovi service, one can choose from millions of music tracks and download them.

Discussion

As mentioned above, analogue radio broadcasting will obviously continue for at least 10–15 years. One reason for this is that it works so well; if it ain’t broke, don’t "x it. !e other reason is that in today’s converging media environment, it gets more and more di%cult to de"ne what the future of radio will be. Radio is mixed with other content: text, pictures, other audio content, and cin-ema. !e boundaries of radio as a media collapse when one can listen to radio broadcasts via a digital television set, read all kinds of additional information, and participate in live broadcasts with SMS messages. !e media landscape around radio changes more rapidly than could have been expected. Digital television, broad-band, the world wide web, interactivity, MP3 players, personal multimedia devices, and podcasting create a very demanding con-text for tomorrow’s audio broadcasting. New digital technologies will change the way people use radio. In 1992, Paul Sa#o wrote that it takes approximately 30 years for a new idea to fully seep into our culture, and this has been a steady constant for "ve hundred years since the times of Gutenberg. According to Sa#o, it takes thirty years to tame raw technology and turn it into a compelling information medium. Technology does not drive change at all, it merely enables change,

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Sa#o writes. It is our collective cultural response to the possibili-ties presented by technology that drives change.5

!e Internet radio scene is global and o#ers never-ending opportunities for content. Only the listeners’ native language sets some limits for the consumption of Internet radio and other forms of online audio content. !rough search engines and new podcast technologies, radio can be listened to anywhere and any time. But do people really want that of radio? !e unrelenting persistence of analogue radio supports Sa#o’s theory. It remains to be seen whether Paul Sa#o’s 30-year rule will still hold true. In the time of the Internet and personal mobile multimedia devices, thirty years appears to be, perhaps, too long a period. !e technical cycle is accelerating. At least it was quite impressive that YouTube had 60 million visitors per day in 2006, twelve months after the launch of the service. !is being said, it should also be pointed out that YouTube made the top 10 list of biggest technological failures of the dec-ade. !e list was compiled by 24/7 Wall St., a "nancial news and opinion website, and carried by Time Magazine. YouTube was on the list because the writers believed it would have to triple its rev-enue to break even. “YouTube is big, but that has not made it a success.” A newcomer on the list of failures is Sirius XM, a US satel-lite radio venture which tries to make radio digital via orbiting satellites. A subscriber would be able to access more than 100 stations coast-to-coast in either a moving vehicle or using a port-able version of the device. Initially, the service planned to run no commercials. As separate companies, both Sirius and XM grew quickly and analysts expected the "rms to be pro"table once they reached the level of over 10 million subscribers. Yet they took on a lot of debt to support their operations. !e companies an-nounced their merger, which took the FCC 13 months to approve “while the companies were bleeding cash”, states 24/7. Now the number of subscribers for the combined service is 18.6 million;

5 Paul Sa#o (1992) “!e 30-year rule”. In Design World, Number 24, 1992, pp. 16–23.

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it has declined by 400,000 from the previous quarter and neither Sirius nor XM have ever made a dime.6

New technologies are already questioning the two basic strengths of traditional audio broadcasting: commitment to time and space. Today, radio provides a frame for daily routines with on-the-hour news; it is a good companion for long and lonely hours, especially during the night time; it also allows one to drive a car and, at the same time, listen to an interesting programme. Radio is a strong local medium, too. What happens to radio when its strongholds are torn down by setting the medium free from time and place? !e step from new technology to new media content is a long one. Many media companies seem to believe that consum-ers adopt new technologies automatically when they are launched. !e failures of the short-lived MTV3 mobile portal and the Sa-nomaWSOY mobile portal 2ndhead proved that technology alone is not more important than content. Consumers were not willing to pay for just any piece of content in the new mobile media. !e desire for high-quality journalistic content still exists.7

!e entire "eld of media is on the move. Traditional print media is losing ground to digital media. !e same is happening to traditional radio and television. Perhaps the role of radio is diverging, rather than converging. Internet radio is listened to at home and work, traditional analogue radio rules supreme in the car. !e situation could stay like this, at least as long as there is no reasonably priced and reliable way to connect a car radio to the Internet. A vast array of terminals and platforms that provide both conventional and new forms of audio content will arise to compete with analogue radio. One of the key challenges of future audio broadcasting is how to become a natural part of the multimedia receiving unit of the future. !is does not only mean iPods and MP3 players, but also the future gadgets of which no one can even dream today. Many personal mobile units and MP3 players have an analogue

6 Radio World 05.20.2009.7 Tomi Lindblom (2009) Uuden median murros Alma Mediassa, Sanoma Osake-yhtiössä ja Yleisradiossa [Period of transition in Alma Media, Helsingin Sanoma Osakeyhtiö and Yleisradio]. Doctoral thesis in Helsinki University, Viestinnän julkaisuja 16, p. 245.

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radio receiver and are able to download digital audio content that can be listened to later. Both public service and commercial broadcasters have to be prepared to meet the challenges brought on by new technologies. On a medium time term, the radio re-ceiver as a separate piece of equipment may be giving way to oth-er appliances but at the same time radio and other similar audio contents will "nd their new form of existence. A fundamental technical question is should radio be digital-ised in its current form. In other words, should a digital broadcast replace the present-day analogue transmission, and should it be listened to with a digital radio receiver set, or could new digital platforms for radio and other audio services be invented, instead. !is is not just a technical question. !e technological decisions provide guidelines for radio content, too. Radio on the new plat-forms will not be the good old steam radio any more. If analogue radio is followed by digital radio in Europe, the receiver set should be a hybrid radio set with FM/AM, DAB+ and DRM+ capabilities to overcome the problems of the transitional simulcast period. Whatever the new platforms for radio are, copyright issues must be solved to create a new form radio, and there is still a lot of work to do. Last but not least, it should be noted that perhaps the fu-ture of radio is, after all, a generational issue. Young people have grown up with new technology and its new content. Many young people want di#erent things from their audio media than their parents and grandparents did. !e times they are a-changin’.

(Paper presented at the Conference Radio Content in the Digital Age organised by !e Cyprus University of Technology and the ECREA Radio Research Section, in Limassol, Cyprus, 14–16 October 2009.)

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Lost and Challenged Contents?

Music Radio Alternatives and Cultural Practices

Introduction

Today radio broadcasting is strongly in$uenced by digitalized communication technology. !e in$uence is seen not only in the number of stations but in the contents of radio programming. !eo-retically, the current radioscape consists of innumerable channels, enabling limitless possibilities of more diversi"ed music, contents and services than ever before. With the aid of new technology, ra-dio listening has become nearly ubiquitous: such things as cellular phone podcasts liberate radio listening from the constraints of time and space. In practice, the change in radioscape has not been as profound as one could imagine. !e number of channels has not increased considerably after the 1990s, and the content of aired music has by no means been diversi"ed. Actually, a diverse musical content "ts the idea of hit music radio quite poorly. In formatting their musi-cal content these radio stations typically rely on a few artists seen as would-be breakers or on nostalgic hit tunes. Nor is radio listening essentially more ubiquitous or mobile than in the end of the ana-logue era, in the 1980s. Some models of the most popular mobile equipment of the time, the Walkman recorders, also provided the possibility of radio listening. Moreover, Internet radio did not necessarily make radio listen-ing more ubiquitous, since until recent years, the use of computer has mostly been sedentary with cable connections. Today, how-ever, mobile broadband networks and smartphones are signi"cantly

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changing the situation. In the near future, a greater part of music ra-dio stations or compensatory music services will probably move into the Internet, which is increasingly mobile and ubiquitous in essence. !e question is, how fast all this will happen. !is review discusses the reasons why innovation technology seems to be incapable – in this speci"c case and generally – of chang-ing cultural practices overnight. !e variables explaining this can be found in legislation, radio economics, and the capacity of program production. !e cultural change is also slowed down and controlled by the habits of radio listening and leisure time in general. Everyday habits seldom change easily or in a short period of time. In addition, the article highlights the way in which the new dig-ital communication environment has in$uenced radio content. In or-der to test our hypotheses we carried out a survey among two groups, one of them consisting of music professionals and the other of music students. !e main object of the survey was to study the stability of listening habits and the changing mediascape in Finland today. Our main argument is that, despite the changes in online communica-tion, old listening habits and the insu%cient availability of new tech-nology prevent the domesticating of the new, Internet-based music services. We also study how music radio is de"ned and identi"ed in the era of new mobile technology. Music radio has no doubt consolidated its place in the medias-cape. At the same time the role of radio as an on-line transmitter is becoming increasingly blurred. In this process of change digital tech-nology has a central position: due to the new technology we can lis-ten to music on numerous music radio channels or from collections of recordings compiled in advance. When this can be done with a single piece of equipment, it is no wonder that the role of radio as a broadcasting medium will be rede"ned in the future.

New technology and change of music radio

In spite of all the promotion and excitement around new techno-logical innovations, we argue that radio broadcasting was more thoroughly in$uenced by the radical cultural transformations that occurred on the eve of the digital era. !e most important of them was the globalisation of the American-style music radio. !e he-

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gemony of classical music and popular education, which European public service radio had relied on, was replaced by Anglo-American popular music and commercial business cultures. As a consequence, rock music lost its position as the expression of rebellious youth. It was amalgamated with the hegemonic culture and neutralized into harmless and easy-to-listen radio content, thus becoming suitable for almost any radio channel. Provocatively speaking, rock music today is part of the musical establishment: it is brought to kindergartens and elementary schools, so that children are brought up as compliant consumers of rock. To-day, the main content of music radio is African American music and especially pop and mainstream rock. !is very same musical content has dominated the European radioscape since the 1980s, for more than a quarter century. If musical contents have remained almost the same, there are at least some demographic changes among the radio listeners. Origi-nally rock music radio was part of a lively and active youth culture, almost a mass movement. Today, according to radio scholar Michael Keith, US citizens under 25 years of age actually do not listen to the radio at all, and radio companies are facing enormous challenges due to losing their audiences.1

!e overall trend is similar to what is seen in the Finnish radio culture. Judging by public expressions of opinion at least, the young seem to be quite indi#erent to the radio channels repeating the same hit songs and using relatively limited play lists in music broadcast-ing. Most sided music radio – the idea of an all-round music radio is virtually unknown to them. On the other hand, they are used to listening to music on the Internet and to "nding whatever they need – with or without charge. Music is no longer the single factor uniting youth – if it ever was. Or, if it still is “connecting people”, the people have been frag-mented into adherents of numerous musical genres and at the same time expanded into a global network of Internet users. On the other hand, the well-branded music programs of the popular mainstream, such as the globally-known Idols, seem to attract audiences of almost

1 Michael Keith (2009) “!e absence of social impact curricula in radio studies”. Keynote in !e Radio Conference, York University, Toronto, Canada, 27 July 2009.

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all tastes, ages and social groups. !is popular mainstream is also a central content of most music radios. !ose complaining about the change of radio music are mostly middle-aged music lovers, whose musical ideals derive from the golden days of their youth and have been rudely by-passed in the streamlining of music radio channels. !e average middle-aged mu-sic listeners are happy with nostalgia radios that play the music from their youth. However, the passive attitude of the young audiences can be considered more dangerous to the future of music radios than the dissatisfaction of middle-aged listeners. Almost all former innova-tions and reforms in the Finnish radioscape have had their origins in the discontent with prevailing practices or the activity of the youth. A well-know example of this is the break-through of “Rockradio” in public broadcasting in the early 1980s.2 From the business perspective the changes in music consump-tion in Finland have been remarkable, and have followed technologi-cal innovations closely. !e sales of vinyl recordings peaked in 1984, of music cassettes in 1989, and of CDs in 1992. In the "rst years of the new millennium the increasingly moved to Internet services, while the record companies have failed to provide an alternative to peer-to-peer downloading: so far selling music on the Internet does not look like a success story . !ere is also a remarkable change in the contents of music sales via the Internet: previously the share of single records was about "ve percent of the total phonogram sales, but now singles almost dominate the market of Internet downloadings.3 In-ternet buyers seldom download complete albums; single tracks are a typical way of buying music on the net.

Spotify – an alternative to music radio?

!e music industries seem to be very keen on new ways of making business on the Internet, and most likely with good reason. !e Swedish music streaming service Spotify provides music via the Inter-

2 Vesa Kurkela and Heikki Uimonen (2007) “Usko, toivo ja petollinen rakkaus. Rock-kulttuuri ja suomalaisen radiopolitiikan muutos”, Etnomusikologian vuosikir-ja Vol 19. Helsinki, Suomen Etnomusikologinen Seura, pp. 9–28.3 Antti Alanen (2009) “Miljardin klusteri. Kasvu keikoilla ja peleissä”, Tieto&trendit 4–5, pp. 28–33.

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net. !e service is di#erent from conventional music services due to the method of dissemination: the users are not downloading the mu-sic "les on to their computers, but listening on line. !ere are com-peting streaming services, such as Deezer in France, and in July 2009 Microsoft announced the plans of launching its own music streaming service. !e name Spotify is composed of the words ‘spot’ and ‘identify’. !e service was founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, the development was started in 2006, and the service was launched on 7 October 2008. !e headquarters is in the UK, the research and de-velopment in Stockholm and the parent company in Luxemburg, the total number of employees being 45.4 visual and aural advertisement and information on the service between the music tracks. Alterna-tively, the user can pay what is called a premium for a day, a month or a year, and then enjoy the service without the ads. Currently the expanding Spotify is available in eight European countries, including Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. In May 2009 Spotify listed 3 million songs. !is means that listening to the whole Spotify catalogue would take 20 years.5 Spotify consists of many facilities that resemble music radio. It contains a special “Radio” operation that plays tracks from new and old albums in accordance with the user’s preferences. !e user can select one or several of eighteen fundamental popular music genres, mainly African American music, and then limit the selection to one or several decades. !e Radio operation creates an automatic selec-tion and plays one track per album in succession. !e result is a complete non-stop program of music radio, without disturbing com-ments by the DJ. Furthermore, Spotify songs are listed by the popularity of indi-vidual tracks: the more frequently-listened songs are positioned high-er on the play list. !is causes an incidental listener to select them "rst, which of course helps the song to keep its high position. An interesting feature is the listeners’ ability to create their own playlists and to share them with their friends. All possible music tracks from all possible record companies and countries are not available, due to

4 Wikipedia, accessed 21 September 2009; A. Kinnunen (2009) “Spotify challenges the traditional mp3 business”, Blue Wings, September 2009, p. 14. 5 www.spotify.com/en, accessed 21 September 2009; macmaa.com, accessed 21 September 2009; Kinnunen (2009), p.14.

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the agreements between Spotify and certain countries. !e service is also mobile. !anks to an agreement between Spotify and Apple, on-line music became available to mobile listening devices such as iPhones in August 2009. By now, Spotify’s revenue is already higher than that of iTunes. In addition, the service gives recording compa-nies the option to promote their music free.6 In Sweden, lawsuits paved Spotify’s way to success. !e new law on Internet piracy allowed copyright holders to obtain the IP addresses of Internet users who were suspected of copyright viola-tions. Furthermore, the Pirate Bay trial was extensively covered by the media. Spotify quickly became an alternative to "le sharing. It has already one million users among the nine-million population of Sweden. According to the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, the number of Spotify users is already four million.7

What is the actual musical content of the Spotify service? Gener-ally speaking, the supply is overwhelmingly abundant, and it is quite di%cult to pinpoint a single musical genre that is absent. Alongside the major genres the supply includes somewhat marginal types of music, even in the "eld of ethnic music. However, certain geographic areas of world music are represented by only a few tracks (e.g., Bul-garia, Romania, and Finland) and some locally important popular styles, such as the Bulgarian chalga, are totally missing. It must be noted, though, that the same styles and traditions are very poorly available even in commercial Internet music libraries, such as the Contemporary World Music or the Smithsonian Global Sound. !e biggest gaps in the Spotify supply are related to some prom-inent names of rock and pop music. Some labels and artists consider that Spotify pays too small a remuneration for music that sells stead-ily without any Internet promotion. Accordingly, the original re-cordings of the following top artists are poorly represented or fully missing in Spotify: !e Beatles, Michael Jackson (back catalogue reis-sues only), Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Pink Floyd, and Frank Zappa. Furthermore, many artists and recording companies have decided

6 www.spotify.com; Kinnunen 2009, 14.7 “Spotify to make ‘signi"cant’ revenue for UK record labels ‘within six months’”. Telegraph, 25 August, 2009; “Musiikkipalvelu Spotify tulee kännyköihin”, Helsin-gin Sanomat, 8 September, 2009.

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to announce that “the artist or label has chosen to make this track unavailable”.8

However, cover versions of the music of the above-mentioned artists are extensively available. For instance, there are almost 3,000 cover tracks from the Beatles. !ere seems to be a very good reason why original Beatles songs are not accessible via Spotify. In Septem-ber 2009 the opera omnia of the group was released as a series of re-mastered albums. If the original songs were available on the Internet for free streaming, the number of potential buyers would be consid-erably smaller than it is now. Composers and songwriters have criticized Spotify, saying that the remunerations for artists are insu%cient. Magnus Uggla, a Swed-ish musician with a long career, argues that his six-month remunera-tion from Spotify is on the same level as a busker’s daily earnings. It is somewhat contradictory that Uggla’s record company Sony paid 3,000 euros for a share of Spotify with the market value of about 250 million euros. Uggla decided to withdraw his music from Spotify, thus following Bob Dylan, who made his recordings unavailable to all streaming services, such as Deezer, Last.fm, and we7.9 Streaming is not based on music downloading. From the copy-right perspective, the musical works are actually not sold, but hired for broadcast listening. For instance, when using Apple’s iTunes the users download the music to their computers. Services such as Spotify give an opportunity for listening without downloading. In this sense Spotify resembles a music radio more than a record shop. Due to this di#erence Spotify remunerations are considerably smaller compared to Internet music sales. !e agreements concerning streaming are signed between the record companies and the stream-ers. In due course, the record companies forward the royalties to the artists. According to therefore the artist’s share is even smaller. A Spotify spokesman considers that it will take the company “up to two years” to grow big enough to become a “material revenue generator for artists”.10

8 www.spotify.com9 “Musiikkipalvelu Spotify tulee kännyköihin”, Helsingin Sanomat 24 August 2009.10 Telegraph 25 August, 2009; Helsingin Sanomat 8 September, 2009

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According to Jari Muikku, Manager at the Finnish Compos-ers’ Copyright Society Teosto, the pricing of music streaming is still incomplete and the remuneration is proportioned to the "nancial success of the streaming service. !e share of the artists and labels is based on the streaming duration of each musical track as well as the turnover of the service company. Nevertheless, the market value of the company is not a good basis for de"ning the royalties of mu-sic streaming, since “the market values will not be realized before the company is sold or when substantial dividends are given”. However, in August 2009 a representative of the music industry stated: “If Spotify’s user base and advertising revenues continue to grow at their current rate, the music industry is looking at a really signi"cant new revenue stream in about six months’ time”.11 Ano Sirppiniemi, another representative of Finnish Teosto, supposes that, at least partly, Spotify was originally launched with-out remuneration contracts. !e deals were "rst made with the big labels, and smaller Finnish labels, for example, made their contracts with Spotify in the "rst half of the 2009.12 Indeed, Spotify has signed agreements with the four largest record companies in the world. Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal were followed by the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA). IODA brokers for independ-ent labels and thus brings two million indie tracks to Spotify.13 From the artist’s perspective, licensing music online is quite problematic. In accordance with the publishing contract the labels and their publishers have licensing rights for a diverse public use of the music without the artist’s permission. Actually the publisher’s main mission is to increase the public performances of musical works and "nd new ways and methods for public use. If the deal with the labels proves to be di%cult or takes too much time, the streamer can test the copyright system by “crashing”. In other words, the service simply makes the music available on line. !is is followed by a possible court case or arbitration with the record company in order to reach an agreement on the remuneration.14

11 Telegraph 25 August, 2009; Helsingin Sanomat 8 September, 2009.12 Ano Sirppiniemi, interview, 18 August 2009 by Heikki Uimonen.13 Kinnunen (2009), p. 14.14 Sirppiniemi, interview.

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All this resembles the early years of Finnish commercial radios in the late 1980s, when the remuneration practices were unclear and unsettled. !e radio companies paid only nominal sums for air-ing music. !is was to indicate that they accepted the principle of copyright fees but not the sums claimed by copyright organizations. Negotiations and court proceedings took several years because the parties did not reach an agreement concerning the price of radio mu-sic.15 Spotify’s business is based on paying the revenues of the copy-rights, although the fees are relatively small at the moment. !eir business strategy seems to be to get the free users hooked to the serv-ice so "rmly that they will buy the premium subscription after get-ting tired of irritating ads. !e service is especially suitable for young people. !ey are used to getting music free from the Internet, but on the other hand they have been enculturated into a mediascape where they or their parents pay the monthly subscription for mobile phone use. Another source of income for Spotify are the advertisements. !ey appear to be irritating on purpose, and it seems that the user is compelled to listen to them increasingly if s/he is listening to music for free for a long period.

The changing listening habits in Finland 2009 – a preliminary survey

Internet services such as Spotify anticipate the changes in our listen-ing habits. In order to get at least a tentative picture of the current situation, a minor case study was carried out among music research-ers, musicians and students. Our presupposition was that these peo-ple would form the vanguard when it comes to active music listening and innovations in the "eld. A small survey among music professionals and music students was carried out on 25 August and 9 September, 2009. !e question-naires were "lled in by a group consisting of 22 professional research-er-musicians, eleven of them male and ten female, aged between 28 and 63. !e average age is thus 41.3 years. Another questionnaire

15 Markku Veima, the former CEO of the local radio station Radio 957 in Tampe-re, interview 11 March 2009 by Heikki Uimonen.

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was presented to a group consisting of 24 university students, seven of them male and seventeen female, aged between 18 and 50. !e average age of the second group is 27.2 years. Among other related issues, radio listening habits and the use of compensatory ways of lis-tening to music were inquired about.16

!e professionals mainly listened to the radio as background while doing something else: driving, commuting, cleaning, in the kitchen and so on. To a lesser extent, individual programmes such as radio plays and concerts were listened to. However, individual programmes aired by the publicly-funded YLE (Finnish Broadcast-ing Company) and the commercial Radio Helsinki were mentioned, as well as a semi-nationwide radio chain airing Finnish schlagers and pop. !e respondents in the student group also listened to the radio in the background in similar situations as the professionals. !e channels listed were more diverse. !ey included not just the Radio Suomipop, Radio Dei, Auran Aallot, Radio 957 and Iskelmäradio. !e large number of channels implies sur"ng between the channels. !e listening was sometimes involuntary, as stated by a 24-year-old male who had to listen to the radio at his workplace. What is striking is that 50 per cent of the students (13) listened to the radio very little or hardly at all. !is echoes the U.S. "nding mentioned above that young people under 25 years of age do not listen to the radio at all. All but three of the professionals had used portable listening devices since the 1970s. !ese included compact cassette record-ers, cassette Walkmans, portable CD players, Minidiscs, laptop computers, mobile phone radios and iPods. All except two re-spondents in the student group had used at least one of the de-vices as well. Eight individuals among the professionals (38 per cent) had not changed their listening habits with the portable lis-tening devices and new technological innovations. !e remaining informants were using their laptops and iPods to listen to music on the train or while travelling or jogging. Radio programmes were searched from the Internet and lis-tened to not only during leisure time but also at the workplace.

16 A case study of music listening, radio and the Internet. 25 August and 9 Septem-ber 2009, carried out by Vesa Kurkela and Heikki Uimonen. !e questionnairies are "led by the writers.

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Even if the possibilities of music listening were manifold, they were not necessarily utilized. A 44-year-old male pointed out that he listened less to music than “20 years ago”. On the other hand, a 48-year-old male no longer purchased records due to the MSN Music and Spotify services. A 45-year-old female thinks of the radio receiver as connected to a certain location, which is why she does not listen to music on her cell phone. !irteen students answered that their listening habits have not changed. It must be remembered, though, that some of them were virtually born with the mobile technology and the Internet, so that they have not ex-perienced similar changes as the middle-aged respondent have. Eighteen professionals used Internet music services such as Spotify, Youtube, Myspace, Elävä arkisto (!e YLE Living Ar-chive), iTunes, and classical music channels. A 28-year old female complained that the American web radios are not available due to “a change of the law”. !e services are utilized for nostalgic music listening/watching, for teaching and research and for work and entertainment purposes. !e respondents used Spotify and Deezer mainly to "nd new music, to monitor the success of Finnish en-sembles abroad, in listening to records they already own or get-ting to know “classics” so far by-passed. Music recommended by friends and Spotify’s genre radio were also listened to. All but one of the students used the above services, plus one called the Prog archive, for the purposes mentioned above. Nine professionals (43 per cent) used Spotify to listen to new music or music already acquired, although Spotify had not replaced radio or record listening. !ey felt that the advantages of the new service were the extensive collections of music and the easy-to-use interface. !e disadvantages were the irritating adver-tisements, but they were considered intentional by the provider: they were used to lure the listeners to buy non-commercial serv-ices and to use the chargeable premium option. Some respondents listened to music before purchasing the record and thus were hap-py to avoid buying “bad records”. A 48-old male said that Spotify replaced not just the buying of the records but the MSN service as well. A 40-year-old male used Spotify instead of the municipal music library. However, at the same time he wondered who would actually pay the musicians. A social use of Spotify was represented by DJ turns at parties: according to a 30-year-old woman, tunes

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were retrieved from the service and then played to the rest of the partygoers. Nine students (38 per cent) also used Spotify. !e pros and cons were similar to those reported by the professionals. In addi-tion, the availability of minor labels was greeted with joy, though the gaps in the supply were considered irritating. A 35-year old female answered that Spotify replaces service as such, but instead preferred to listen to music from “real” recordings. Another 21-year old male pointed out that thanks to its ease of use and speed, the service was replacing the illegal downloading of music. Both professionals and students bought 0–200 items of tra-ditional recordings per year. !e records were acquired while trav-elling abroad, from Finnish record shops and music festivals for personal use and as presents. !e Internet was used to buy not only CDs but also vinyl LPs and singles. However, relatively little or no music was downloaded: a 44-old male had stopped using Finnish downloading services, and two of the respondents used the downloading opportunity in their profession. A 20-year-old male student used Pirate Bay to download records not available in other formats; a 23-year-old female answered that “the money that used to be spent for a few records per month was now spent in support of Spotify”. Six professionals shared their own music or that of others via the Internet. !e most popular distribution channels were Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and iLike. Fifty per cent of the re-spondents had learned about the Internet music services from their friends and relatives, the other half from the Internet and music journals. Only three student respondents agreed that they used peer-to-peer networks in order to search for “hard-to-"nd music” or “ripped versions” of cassettes. !irteen respondents had heard about the Internet services from their friends or relatives. Concerning the impact of the Internet on acquiring or listen-ing to music, the professionals’ opinions di#ered. !ey considered that the Internet supply will change listening habits by making the listening more diverse and making it easier to get to know new artists. However, they were more sceptical as to whether the Internet would change their music acquisition. A 35-year-old female records as objects and sleeve art to be important to her, which is why she does not listen to music only via the Internet.

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!e respondents considered that listening was increased by its ease of use and low price. A 38-year-old male stated that listening to music via the Internet will increase, since he is not prepared to pay for music. A 44-year-old male said that he was giving up music listening and if he listened at all, he concentrated only on his existing col-lection. A 35-year-old female considers that "nding information about live concerts is part using the Internet for music purposes. A 54-year-old male forecast that music radio will disappear and that the record industry will have to "nd new ways of doing busi-ness in the future. Radio was considered a more $exible medium because the Internet was not suitable for mobile listening (soon after the survey was taken, Spotify was introduced to iPhones). A 30-year-old female considered opting for the monthly payment to Spotify, as long as the copyright and revenue issues are settled in the future. To a large extent the students were in agreement with the professionals. A 23-year-old female wanted to visit the record shops in order to "ll her record shelf; a 21-year old male bought more records inspired by the Internet listening services. !e col-lections of the municipal music library were also mentioned (per-haps a Scandinavian phenomenon?). A 21-year-old female was the only respondent who struggled to reduce listening to music via the Internet because music sounded better when listened to with “proper equipment”. What remained obscure was whether the perceived di#erence in sound quality was related to the Internet music itself or to the listening equipment used. !ere might not be too many listeners who have an Internet connection attached to their Hi-" equipment. And if they had, would they notice the di#erence between the high-"delity or “packed” sound of music?

Remarks and conclusions

It can be concluded that at least the music professionals have adapted to the use of the Internet as a medium for new music services. Unfortunately this survey does not reveal how common the innovations have become among laypersons. On the other hand the rapid expansion of Spotify could mean that the profes-

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sionals’ attitude to new technology is more or less the same as that of other Internet users or music listeners. !e respondents stressed the discovering of new music with the help of Spotify. Listening to the radio does not meet this need because formatted stations rely mainly on old and nostal-gic music. Furthermore, music radio is not an interactive on-line service and it thus prevents e#ectively the musical expeditions of an active and avid listener. Spotify encourages these expeditions and for the music professionals this kind of information is self-evidently an important part of their work. It is worth noting that hardly anyone paid attention to the sound quality of the Internet music. One might assume that broad-band-mediated music has reached a level where even the professionals are satis"ed. If this is the case, one of the biggest ob-stacles to disseminating music via the Internet has been removed. Because of their young age, Spotify and the other streaming services are not necessarily known to the vast majority of music consumers. Our case studies among the music professionals of today and tomorrow really cannot verify or falsify the assump-tion that music streaming could replace music radio in the future. However, it is evident that the new Internet services have man-aged to stir things up a bit. !e growing popularity of streaming is bound to cause record sales to drop even more. Hit music ra-dios are threatened as music streaming in mobile devices becomes more common. In a few years it might be interesting to look back and see who managed to ride the gravy train in the music business. If someone did not get on board, was it the record industries and the hit music radios essentially connected to them? Perhaps it took too long for the hesitating record companies to establish their Internet music shops, not to mention winning the court cases in pirate/peer-to-peer network trials. Now there are new ap-plications such as Spotify which are rede"ning the listening and consumer habits of the public. Public service radio is probably be-coming resigned to its fate and at the same time "nding its niche in the Internet in diversifying its services with the help of their vast archive material. !e use of the Internet for purposes of music includes the acquiring of physical records and retrieving information about

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music events. Some of the Internet music listeners still want to deal with the tangible artefacts such as records and their sleeves. !is tactility and the record as an aesthetic entity will help the record markets to survive. On the other hand this is more or less involved with record collecting which is related to not only music listening but also to extramusical values. !e copyright and revenue debate around the Spotify mu-sic service resembles the perennial dispute related to music and broadcasting. Whenever there is a new innovation or business ap-plication in broadcasting, old and established practices are chal-lenged and confused for some time. !e identical arguments were presented when music radios were introduced in Europe; also the Internet applications raised opinions about the copyright issues. !e criticism concerning the matter is self-evidently presented not just by the music makers, but also the other bene"ciaries such as publishers and producers. Philosophically the situation is a very interesting one. Broad-casting is genuinely business dealing with immaterial rights; the delivering of actual goods is not included in it. !e delivered from the seller to the buyer. In addition, broadcasting continues to disseminate music very broadly to an audience unattainable by record sales. It might be a bit challenging for the consumers to think that the delivery of something immaterial could be com-pared to the selling of more tangible or digital goods. In addition, there is reason to assume that every time there are strong opinions or criticism concerning the copyright rev-enues, new interesting modes of music business are about to emerge. Sometimes the new business practices lead to the court-room, which is not unheard of in the history of music publishing. In early 20th century modern music publishing, the related legisla-tion and moneymaking especially in the UK and in the United States came to a collision and thus had to de"ne their boundaries constantly in courts and by precedents (Coover 1985).17 !e his-tory of the radio has also been a history of disagreements about the revenues. And evidently, when there is a disagreement about money, someone de"nitely stands to gain it, be it only the lawyers.

17 J. Coover (1985) Music Publishing, Copyright and Piracy in Victorian England. A twenty-"ve year chronicle, 1881–1906, London & New York: Mansell Publishing.

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(!e article was previously published in Papers of the Conference Radio Contents

in the Digital Age. Limassol, Cyprus 2009.)

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Music Breaks In. Essays on Music Radio and Radio Music in Finland .

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