The Day the Music Died

By FREDDIE O’CONNELL
NYT

Nashville

LAST Tuesday I tuned my radio to 91.1 WRVU, Vanderbilt University’s campus radio station, and heard the exact moment when college radio in Nashville died. Instead of rock, classical music was burbling out of my speakers.

It wasn’t a complete surprise: as a former D.J. for the station, I knew that after months of debate, Vanderbilt Student Communications, the on-campus nonprofit organization that controlled WRVU’s license, had decided to sell it to the local public radio station.

The sale added Vanderbilt to a growing list of colleges and universities, including Rice University in Houston and the University of San Francisco, where college radio licenses are being sold off, backed by the assertion that today’s well-wired students no longer tune in to the medium. But that misses the point: college radio is not only a vital part of the communities it serves, but it is even more essential in the Internet era.

There’s a false but widespread image of college radio as a pointless, narcissistic exercise — that it’s nothing more than a crew of campus oddballs who like playing D.J., even though no one is listening.

(More here.)