Excuse Me, I Have to Kill Myself…

Like just about everyone, some of the strongest memories of my adolesence and high school involve the music I grew up listening. And like a soundtrack to my life, WHFS (99.1) was there to expose me to bands that I might not have heard elsewhere: Garbage, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, etc. I even met one of the loves of my life at the venerable HFStival.

Tragically, HFS is no more. The wise owners of HFS (Infinity Broadcasting) have decided that their station and signal would be better suited to providing Spanish/Latin music and content. Hooray salsa!

I almost fainted when I heard the news, but in truth, I wasn’t too surprised. Infinity Broadcasting is doing their best to compete with Clear Channel in the race to homogenize the airwaves, alienate listeners, and literally reduce the radio broadcasting industry to a smoldering wreck.

And you know what? I’m cool with it. Fuck Infinity. Fuck Clear Channel. Fuck them all. Long live:

1. Satellite Radio (Sirius, XM)
2. Small, independant low-wattage broadcasters
3. Internet radio/streamcasts/etc

Of course, these alternatives will never reach mass-market fruition without help from all of us. We need to do whatever we can to ensure that the FCC keeps its hands off of satellite radio and low-wattage broadcasters. We also need to push Congress to apply the same rules to Internet radio that it applies to broadcast, which at the moment, is not the case. The fee structure that Internet radio stations must adhere to is radically different than broadcast, in that they must pay per user. So, the more listeners they have, the more they pay to the music industry for the right to play their copyrighted material. Broadcast radio has no such obligation, they play a flat fee per song they broadcast.