The Berkeley Blog

Berkeley Cybersalon hosts Radio Geeks

Tonight I went to a Berkeley CyberSalon panel on the future of Radio and saw a very different crowd than your usual tech event. While the Pre-Supernova party I went to Thursday was mostly under-40 crowd, the Berkeley CyberSalon was almost all over-40, some of it well over. Tim Pozar, Roger Coryell, Carol Pierson, and Gregg McVicar, had an interesting conversation about the decline of radio, with some great details of Berkeley history from the audience (the emcee of the first Grateful Dead show in Berkeley and the person who set up the first live internet broadcast of a protest had good stories to tell). Alas, I fear radio geeks may be a dying breed, as the demographics of this audience might indicate. I was surprised at how little most of them (Roger Coryell was the exception) talked about what was happening with internet radio and podcasting. The ominous shadow cast by the RIAA seems to have mostly taken it off the table for "legitimate radio", and the monopoly ownership of broadcasting encouraged since 1996 and the political climate seem to be killing off all but lowest common denominator radio (my conclusion, not the panel's conclusion).

Once again, an interesting discussion at the Berkeley CyberSalon, and I am grateful to Sylvia Paull and Jeff Ubois for putting them on in my backyard. Someday I'll have to join the Hillside Club.