One of the strange things about WFMU's online presence is that there are lots of people out there who remain happily oblivious to the fact that this blog is actually part of a live, working radio station. In addition to those who only
read the blog are people who gladly scoop up our podcasts via itunes or podcast directories and others who grab the mp3s we post here via aggregators like Hype Machine. Every bit of that is wonderful. One of the goals of the station is to be a venue for getting interesting music out to people hungry for content that isnt served to them on the blander shores of commercial radio, increasingly talk-laden NPR and more strictly indie-rock oriented blogs.
For those of you who read the blog but do not listen to the station, you might be aware from some of the posts lately that we're having our annual fundraising marathon. There are a few reasons you should consider making a donation.
One thing you might notice about our blog is that there is no advertising and nobody is trying to sell you anything. Contrary to what Courtney T. Edison says this is not because we are hippies or communists. For an organization that is perennially broke you may think its been difficult for us to literally turn down thousands of dollars to run ads on this site, but the decision has actually been pretty simple. Part of the station's raison d'etre is to remain one of the last places left on earth where the focus is completely on the content instead of serving as a platform for others to sell things to our audience.
Another thing you might notice is that unlike other blogs we keep links to mp3s up for a very long time. In fact the first mp3 post on this blog from January 2005 (an entry by Mike Lupica about punk rock and New Jersey) still has the audio linked and online. How many other blogs do this, even when they are monetizing the mp3s they post by running ads? Keeping content like this online along with putting projects like the 365 day project online costs an extraordinary amount of money for bandwidth and server hardware.
For those of you who like the station's programming, we also have roughly 8 years of shows archived and available on demand, something that even very well funded operations like the BBC and NPR stations don't have going. This year we even introduced the first (and possibly still only) live iphone stream. Keeping all this all running is not cheap and we've somehow managed to make this all work on a shoestring budget.
If you take advantage of any of our online resources, you should consider making a modest pledge to help us keep our online operations going.
Airing programs that consist of nothing but 78 rpm records in a major US radio market and putting Kenny G (the DJ not the sax guy) on air have never been wise money making decisions. The same can be said of spending thousands on bandwidth for blog posts documenting anthropological audio oddities. But if we don't do it nobody else will so consider helping us stay online.
Image above is by Andy Rementer. Psuedo valuation on top bears not much relation to reality.
it's like hearing rap or hip hop over cellphone speakers… just amazing!
Posted by: Custom web development | July 31, 2012 at 02:11 AM