My music discovery model mostly goes like this: I listen to campus/community radio on the internet (or the radio if I’m lucky), scribble down the names of any tracks I hear that are particularly interesting, then download them and others from the same artist via filesharing. A few tracks later I get a sense of whether I like the artist and should nab all I can or move on.

When I first arrived at residence in Waterloo, my clock radio dial randomly happened to be set to CKMS’ frequency, and for a couple of weeks my roommate and I had a morning ritual of waking up to whatever unfamiliar noise would come out of it until someone was awake enough to turn it off. “What kind of f*cked up radio station is that?” we’d wonder before shuffling off to the showers. Eventually there must have been a station ID, because I became aware that all the remarkable, often weird, sometimes beautiful, usually unexpected music was associated with the campus somehow. I’ve been in love with campus/community radio ever since.

The feeling seems to be mutual. Every university town I’ve lived in has had a good campus station. After CKMS in Waterloo there was the wonderful CFRU in Guelph and then balls-out KDVS in Davis. It’s been such a good run that I came to assume that good, open format, wide-ranging, adventurous radio stations came pretty much standard to campuses. I was a little surprised to hear the orientation-lady at KDVS bad mouthing campus radio as mostly being a willing sop to the standardization trends of the larger commercial radio industry. All the campus radio I knew was nothing like that. In fact, half the time it was too outer for even me to enjoy. How is that commercial, wondered I?

I may just have been having really good luck with my campus radio stations. I’ve been putting together a playlist of all the internet-broadcasting radio stations I like (more on that later) and as part of my searches I was trolling on Yahoo. Try entering “campus community radio” on yahoo.com – not the Canadian version – and have a look at the results. Of the first 30 links returned, 22 are Canadian. Six are from the wide world (nigeria, india, the netherlands X2, indonesia or malaysia, and australia). A whopping two are American references. I got bored counting at 30, but a quick glance suggests the trend continues through 50 or more.

Granted, I am presumably missing heaps of worldwide stations in non-english speaking countries or places where they don’t call it “campus” or “community” radio, but where’s all the American stations?

Now I know there are some good US campus broadcasters. California is flush with them. I can’t really explain how come none of those showed up in Yahoo. Searching on search engines and counting links is not a reliable survey tool. But I’m suspicous that the results may not be entirely false. I’ve gone through several lists of radio links now and they all have two things in common: either they’re for Canada or California.

Have I been that lucky? Are the only places in CanAm with good campus radio be the places where I have lived?

Is this a sign of intelligent design?

Hello, God?

One things definitley is clear: Canada has a lot of great campus stations. I wonder what that means to our music industry. One trend clearly emerging from the current churning and thrashing of the music industry is that while the “big 4” music companies are suffering because of insert your pet agenda here, indie labels are thriving like never before in the history of recorded music. Some more or less biased folk are claiming that as a win for file-sharing: the notion being that, like me, people are using music piracy as a way to test the waters with smaller acts that they previously wouldn’t have had any access to. Once hooked, some percentage of those listeners will then go on to purchase music or tickets from indie-label bands. And while that may not be a big percentage, any percentage of a lot of people is far more exposure than most indie-label bands could have hoped for when the only purchasing options were big corporate stores with homogeneous stock or little independent stores with limited stock.

If (big if) that theory is true and file-sharing is good for indies, and if (another if) other people are, like me, using campus/community radio as their pre-file-sharing step, and if (again with the if) the current trend of Canada being a haven for file-sharing continues, does that make Canada an really good place for Indie labels to do business?

That would be cool.