Radio Free Harvard

Few freshmen venture to Pennypacker Hall unless they live there. Fewer upperclassmen venture to the dorm without questionable motives.

So what about those kids coming in and out of the Pennypacker basement in the middle of the night? Don’t worry. You’re not missing out on the crazy party—unless that’s the way you like to talk about college radio stations.

The Pennypacker basement is the windowless home of the Harvard Radio Broadcasting Company (WHRB), 95.3 FM. Apparently, college radio stations don’t perform photosynthesis. There must be some strange chemical reaction that allows them to survive—and even thrive—however isolated and sunless their location.

WHRB’s physical isolation from the rest of the campus, combined with the fact that Harvard students rarely tune in, makes WHRB relatively obscure in campus life.

But college students aren’t necessarily the station’s target audience and the rules of the college radio business just don’t work in the way you might expect.

WHRB’s inaccessibility to students is a result of the tried-and-true business strategy that is paying the station’s bills. Instead of catering to a college audience, WHRB focuses its attention on an older demographic through extensive classical (and to a lesser extent, jazz) broadcasting. Now, in the face of the imminent demise of WCRB 102.5 FM as a 24-hour classical station, WHRB is poised to become the number one option for the Boston listener seeking a daily dose of Bach or Mahler.

WHERE’S THE “H” IN WHRB?

Evan L. Hanlon ’08, a DJ for WHRB’s underground rock show Record Hospital (RH), has no pretensions about the station’s campus listenership. “At Harvard, we don’t have a great following,” he says. “Also, the bulk of our programming is classical and you’re not going to get 6,000 kids tuning into classical.”

WHRB President Jon A. Stona ’07 laments that “a lot of students don’t really know about the station.” And WHRB is not the only college radio station that faces the problem of attracting a student listenership.

Gilad Goren, a music director for Brandeis University’s WBRS, estimated that about 15 to 20 Brandeis students were listening to the radio station the afternoon he was interviewed by The Crimson.

Similarly, music director William Lynch, who works for Boston College’s WZBC, says that their station “is hugely insignificant in the scope of the student body. We’re under the radar. The students and administration are not even aware of our existence.”

These days, it seems pretty clear that students rely more on their iTunes than the radio for everyday listening. Radio just doesn’t seem to fit into the everyday routine.

Joshua R. Johnston ’06 explains, “I used to listen to the radio all the time in my car. But I don’t have my car here.” In his experience, “Most people don’t have radios in their rooms.” He believes students just have better things to do. “I watch TV and do work and...go out drinking.”

But even for the few who actively seek out campus radio, such as Amanda L. Shapiro ’08, they may find WHRB unsuited to their tastes. “I looked online at the program guide and I was really confused by it,” she complains. “It looked like it was mostly classical. I was disappointed.”

SO, WHO’S PAYING FOR THIS?

Unlike WZBC, a non-commercial station which is funded by Boston College, WHRB cannot afford to program music that is palatable only to the DJs and a niche of listeners—who are unlikely to contribute financially to the station.

WHRB is a non-profit commercial station, which means that its revenue is predicated upon the sale of advertisements. Although the university provides the station with the basement of Pennypacker, WHRB receives no financial support from the university.

In an e-mail, Stona writes with pride, “our sales persons aren’t competing against kids from other college stations, but rather against people from bigger stations in Boston who do this full-time (talk about real world experience).”

“Our main competitors are the major multi-million dollar corporate commercial stations in Boston,” Stona writes. “Our commercial status forces us to ‘play in the big leagues’ per se and to maintain a distinct level of professionalism.”

WHRB’s has found its golden ticket to financial security in the form of classical broadcasting. And it’s no big surprise that a decent number of Harvard undergraduates with a knowledge and enthusiasm for classical music make a staff of top-notch classical DJs.

Although anecdotes abound, it is impossible to know exactly how many people listen to the station and the demographics of the listenership. WHRB does not subscribe to Arbitron, a marketing research firm for international media that gathers and publishes information about audiences and their preferences.

The only concrete statistics pertain web-streaming, the newfangled way to listen to the radio online. According to WHRB’s General Manager, Kenneth D. Schultz ’07, over 15,000 streams were launched through their website last month for a total of 12,000 hours. During “Orgy Season” last January—when the various programs showcase the works of specific composers, groups, or artists—the tally reaches 17,000 hours.

The information that is available on the demographics comes from a study that was conducted some years ago, but which was not made available to The Crimson. According to Stona, the paperwork seems to be lost.

Stona writes of the survey that “the basic conclusions were that our listener base was upscale, highly educated, and extremely loyal.”

However, Stona shies away from this quick-and-easy characterization, claiming that it does not embody the whole listenership. Such a conclusion, it seems, would discount a younger audience which, at least anecdotally, listens to programs like Record Hospital (RH) or The Darker Side (TDS), a hip-hop show that broadcasts on Saturdays and Sundays.

“I’ve definitely been to clubs and bars like the Enormous Room in Central Square and have had hip-hop DJs as well as Grad Students tell me they listen [to TDS],” he writes.

“ELDERLY GENTLEMEN, MANY OF WHOM I KNOW BY NAME”

Although a show like RH may be incredibly popular inside its niche, it does not have the potential to support the station financially. To understand what makes the station tick, one must look to WHRB Classical.

WHRB Classical not only provides quality programming for its niche listeners, but according to Jeremy R. Siegfried ’08, a DJ for WHRB classical, “the vast source of revenue comes from classical ads.”

In an e-mail, Stona lists the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Opera Boston, and the Bank of America Celebrity Series as groups that buy air time for advertisement. Although businesses like Massive Records also buy air time, Siegfried is quick to assert that “everyone at the station knows that classical music is the reason people have a budget.”

Now it looks like WCRB, Boston’s 24-hour classical station, will be taken over by Greater Media, and the 24-hour classical programming will come to an end. This leaves WHRB in a singular position—there will soon be half a million listeners looking for a new favorite classical station.

For the small and enthusiastic group of classical DJs at Harvard, this is huge.

“WHRB will be broadcasting the greatest number of hours a week of classical music,” says Schultz.

He notes that WCRB’s demise as a 24-hour classical station provides WHRB with an extraordinary opportunity to enrich itself financially.

Schultz continues, “We think [WCRB’s folding] has the possibility to bring in more money. We will have the most dynamic classical programming in Boston. That’s a big opportunity.”

Siegfried stresses, however, that the expansion of the WHRB Classical listenership does not indicate that there will be a change in the variety and richness of their programming.

Siegfried argues that WHRB’s appeal lies in its willingness to play music that is “more exploratory, more adventurous,” as opposed to WCRB, which is more like “easy listening classical,” he explains.

“I doubt that WCRB would play some of the stuff we play,” he says. “We never want our music to be background music.”

By default, this means the station will continue to cater to the same audience, whom Cambridge S. Ridley ’06, a classical DJ and head of promotions, describes in an e-mail as “classical music aficionados who are interested in the latest works coming out on CD.”

Her audience, she writes, “is the sophisticated classical listener who is at the point where different recordings of the same performance matter.”

Ridley believes her listeners are mostly “middle-aged and likely male.” Who calls in? “These are generally elderly gentlemen, many of whom I know by name,” she says.

THE ACID MOTHERS’ TEMPLE

Although WHRB is distinctive from other college stations in its popular classical broadcasting, it bears a striking resemblance to other college radio stations in the diversity of its programming. The financial success of WHRB Classical allows the station to feature more experimental programming that does not bring in as much revenue.

What this means is that depending on what time you tune in, you might catch a song by “Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno,” or alternatively, Zemlinsky’s “Symphonic Songs” played by the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Come Sunday, you can tune in to hear Reverend Gomes preaching to the fold in Memorial Church; “Crimson Sportstalk” comes on a half-hour later.

Unpredictable? Yes. But the programming is typical of a wider trend—particularly prevalent in college radio—known as “niche broadcasting.”

Among students who work in college radio these days, niche broadcasting seems to be the new favorite term. It appears to be a sort of a code word for “obscure,” which often connotes “cool.”

William Lynch, music director for WZBC (Boston College’s radio station), says that one of the most popular shows on his station is called NCP, which stands for “No Commercial Potential.”

NCP plays music that listeners might not find anywhere else—music that is unequivocally bizarre and unmarketable. During the day, Lynch says, WZBC features “rock shows.” However, “our definition of rock is hugely flexible,” he adds. “It’s almost a misnomer. When we say rock, it’s distinguished from NCP.”

Lynch names “drone” as a genre that is presented on NCP—the music “is just a drone for a half-hour to an hour,” he explains. The pitch is, for the most part, unchangeable.

“It’s hugely avant-garde,” he explains.

WHRB broadcasting might not go so far as to broadcast drone, but many of its members pride themselves on the degree to which they target an audience with a very specific set of tastes.

David A. Rios ’07, a DJ for RH, WHRB’s underground rock program, has an opinion about the station’s mission that is as large (but not nearly as fuzzy) as his wildly-unkempt hair: “All the departments have the same goal: to play music geared to a niche…to have people listen to good music that they won’t hear somewhere else.”

Focusing on music that is unrepresented in the mainstream music industry leaves RH with a following that Hanlon describes as “small but fierce.”

Fierce might also be a word to describe some of the music the DJs play on the show, which can be “really abrasive…with really really throaty vocals and sludgy instruments,” Hanlon says.

He continues, “It attracts a crowd that’s not represented as well in radio.”

When asked who listens regularly to their show, Rios smiles and answers, “Old drunk guys, prisoners, hipsters, knowledgeable twenty-to-thirty-somethings.” He gleans this information, he says, from the people who call into his show.

Some of the listeners do not seem entirely sane to the DJs; Hanlon describes how one man frequently phones in, asking in an extremely depressed voice: “How’s it going? Do you like cheesecake? Like when it has strawberries on it?”

Of course, not all their listeners are pathological or incarcerated (or both).

Since their show is a “word-of-mouth type of thing,” according to Rios, the listeners are often “as knowledgeable as the people who are in the department,” meaning other DJs, musicians, and students from the Boston area.

The insularity of the RH niche, Hanlon admits, makes “a lot of people think of RH as snobbish.”

The RH website does not attempt to offset that stereotype. Clicking on the “Members” link will take the curious web-surfer, unaffliated with the show, to a blank page saying, “Insufficient level of pretensiousness [sic] detected...aborted.”

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

“We’re satisfied to have a base in classical,” Stona says, “but we’re working on getting the other departments to gain more of a share in their market audience.”

Looking at the program guide, however, the overwhelming amount of classical music is probably enough to scare off a large percentage of college students who are seeking some palatable pop, and will probably listen to their iTunes instead.

Lynch claims that WZBC has no interest in courting a student listenership. When asked whether WZBC had any interest in student outreach, he bluntly replies, “No. As matter of fact, we don’t view that as a goal at all.”

On the other side of the spectrum, Goren considers planning WBRS-affiliated outreach events his number one priority. WHRB’s approach to campus outreach falls somewhere in between Lynch and Goren’s. Both Schultz and Stona express a great deal of interest in increasing WHRB’s student listenership.

Stona claims to have been in touch with UC President John S. Haddock ’07, with whom he hopes to plan events that will increase students awareness of WHRB and its diverse programming, while bringing valuable entertainment to the Harvard community.

Stona also cites TDS’s recent freestyle battle at Massive Records and the upcoming RH Fest—a festival planned for April 28-29 that will feature Carlos Giffoni and the band Daniel Striped Tiger, among others.

Erika L. Solomon ’08, a WHRB News broadcaster and member of the Administrative Board of the radio station, acknowledges that there is some debate surrounding the importance of a student listening base; however, she is one of the few who claims that increasing the student listenership is a major goal.

When asked what exactly the station planned to do, she was unsure. Nevertheless, she says, “it’s all in our best interest, because it’s still a student station.”

WHRB’s acceptance of classical as the backbone of the station’s success—partly for financial reasons, to be sure— in addition to highly specialized niche programming, means that there is fundamentally no future for WHRB to become a station that primarily caters to mainstream college students.

So to attract a student audience, WHRB would have to completely revamp its programming. But to change its programming would mean financial catastrophe for the station.

And even in the unlikely scenario that the station were to start broadcasting music that catered to mainstream student interest—whatever that is at Harvard—how many students would listen anyway?

What this means is that WHRB may continue to flourish in the basement of Pennypacker—but its success necessarily factors out a wide student listenership.

And herein lies the strange contradiction of WHRB—that it’s run by students, identified with students, yet ignored by students.

And things, it seems, are not about to change.

When Siegfried was asked if he had any plans for outreach to younger audiences, he laughed.

“Probably not,” he says. After a little more thought he firmly concludes, “Honestly, I don’t.”