That’s the Parc de la Villette, also variously known as Parc La Villette, Parc Villette, or just Villette, here in Paris. I shot it two days ago, when we got here and the weather was clear. It got cloudy and wet after that. But it looks like things will clear up for:::::

From the About page:

The first major European event dedicated to the collaborative economy.

This three-day festival will bring together a global community of entrepreneurs, designers, makers, economists, investors, politicians and citizens to build a collaborative future.
Paris, May 2-3-4, 2013.

Not just another business conference.

Co-designed with its community, OuiShare Fest will feature a wide range of hands-on activities and great live music.
Day 1-2 will gather 500 professionals and public officials.
Day 3 will be free and open to the public.

Can’t wait.

I’ll be speaking there on Friday morning at 9:30. The title: Markets are Relationships. I’ll be there for most of the rest of the show too. Great line-up of topics, speakers and attendees. After that, it’s Silicon Valley for IIW.

See ya theres.

Later I gave the album to Ray Simone, to help him prep for doing Mike’s Eight String Swing album cover. It disappeared after that, and many years went by before I replaced it when  a double-CD of Mike’s old albums came out. It wasn’t easy to get then. I had to send off to somewhere in Europe, as I recall. Now its at that last link on Amazon. Cheap too, considering.

I actually became acquainted with Mike earlier, when he played with The Seldom Scene. But I had no idea he was so damn good solo until I heard that song, and that album.

A few minutes ago, when I was searching for something else, I ran across this tribute site, which was created just a couple months before he passed away, one day short of his 74th birthday, on December 29. This was bad news. We lost a treasure.

So was his music. Go listen.

Here’s WBUR’s press release, issued early this morning. The gist:

The sale of the 92.7 FM signal paves the way for WBUR to reach listeners on Martha’s Vineyard and most of Cape Cod and Nantucket, as well as the Massachusetts ‘SouthCoast’ including New Bedford, Fall River, Falmouth, Westport and Marion. WMVY, known on air and online as mvyradio, plans to create a non-profit, commercial-free business model going forward.

WBUR will now have all these signals:

1. WBUR-FM/90.9 in Boston. (Coverage Map.)
2. WBUR-AM/1240 in West Yarmouth (Coverage Map.)
3. WSDH-FM/91.5 in Sandwich (Coverage Map.)
4. WCCT-FM/903 in Harwich  (Coverage Map.)
5. WMVY-FM/92.7 in Tisbury (Coverage Map.)

WMVY will remain on the Web. If you go to their website, a brief message directs you to this page, where an all-text message says,

This is real. We must evolve. Or face extinction.

By early 2013, mvyradio will either become a non-commerical, listener-supported operation or go silent. It’s that urgent and that simple.

For almost 30 years, mvyradio has broadcast on 92.7FM, bringing the Cape, Islands and Southcoast an eclectic mix of music and a spirit deeply rooted in our surroundings. It’s also been a fixture on listeners’ home computers, smart phones, tablets and internet radios.

Despite a devoted listenership, mvyradio has not been solvent.

We’ve been fortunate. Aritaur Communications has covered our losses, but that is no longer feasible.

As a result, Aritaur has sold the 92.7FM frequency to WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station. Once approved by the FCC in early 2013, WBUR will be heard on 92.7FM.

This is both an opportunity and a pretty gigantic challenge.

First, the opportunity. Only the FM signal has been sold to WBUR. Aritaur is contributing mvyradio’s programming, online content, equipment and staff to the non-profit Friends of mvyradio. So, the core is there.

That means mvyradio, as you know it — all the music, personalities, shows and web content — can live on as a non-commercial, internet public radio station.

That’s the opportunity. The future. Commercial-free.

Now the challenge. We need — the Friends of mvyradio needs — to raise $600,000 in pledges by the end of January.

Yes, that’s an enormous lift. But, one well worth making to keep an independent radio gem like mvyradio on the air.

Do you want mvyradio to live on? Or will it die like so many other independent broadcast treasures?

Please click through to the pledge page and help save mvyradio.

It goes on, but that’s the pitch.

Now let’s say you live on the Cape and like noncommercial radio. In addition to WBUR and mvyradio, you also have WCAI, the Cape And Islands station. Located in Woods Hole, it broadcasts from Martha’s Vineyard on 90.1fm, plus over WZAI/94.3 in Brewster and WNAN/91.1 in Nantucket. While WCAI is “a service of WGBH,” it operates independently, and is very much a regional station. Its only drawback is its dinky home station signal, which radiates from the same tower as WMVY. While WMVY is 300o watts, horizontal and vertical, at 315 feet above average terrain (height matters at least as much as power), WCAI is 1300 watts at 249 feet.It also radiates only in the vertical plane, and at full power only to the north, toward Woods Hole. In other directions it’s as little as 234 watts. (You can see the directional pattern here and the coverage here.) WCAI does have a construction permit for 12500 watts at 241 feet, from a different tower in the same location. That signal is directional too, but the dent is smaller and only toward the northeast, where the notch in its null is still 5087 watts. WZAI and WNAN are also good-size signals.

Then there is noncommercial classical WNCK in Nantucket, with these translators on Cape Cod:

1. W230AW-FM/93.9 in Centerville (Coverage Map.)
2. W246BA-FM/100.7 in Harwich Port (Coverage Map.)

WNCK carries WGBH’s classical programming from WCRB. It wants funding too.

That’s a lot of radio mouths for listeners to feed. I’m curious to see how it all sorts out, with WBUR horning in on WCAI’s home turf, and with mvyradio going Internet-only. As a “statutory webcaster,” mvyradio’s music royalty rates might be a bit higher at first. (See here.) In any case, they’ll have serious costs. They’ll also be competing with every other webcaster in the world.

This is a liminal time for radio, as the bulk of usage gradually tilts between over-the-air and over-the-Net. In the long run, the latter will outperform the former, just as FM outperformed AM back when the difference began to fully matter.

Coverage via the Net is worldwide: basically, anywhere with a good mobile data connection. Right now navigating one’s way to a stream is still complicated. Even good “tuners” on phones, such as TuneIn, can be frustrating to use. And without the old “dial” positions or “channels,” stations can be hard to find. And then there’s the whole matter of data charges by mobile phone companies, “caps” on usage and the rest of it. But we’ll work that out in time.

Meanwhile, check out the ratings (from Radio-Info.com) for the top markets. Look closely at Washington, D.C. (where I’m headed on Amtrak while I write this). WAMU a public station, has the top position with an 8.7 share. By radio standards, that’s just huge. And it’s ahead of all-news WTOP, which is the top-billing station in the whole country. Then scan down to the low-rated stations. WAMU’s stream gets an 0.3 share. That’s tied with several AM stations and 3 times the share of bottom-rated WFED, Federal News Radio, which transmits from WTOP’s original 50,000-watt powerhouse transmitter on 1500am. That’s a harbinger if I ever saw one.

Curious to know if any readers are following this, and how they weigh in on the changes. I can’t help writing about it, because I know the field — so well, in fact, that I can see whole parts of it going away.

One tune, the name of which I missed, reminded me of two contemporary songs by young artists with roots in bed-Rock. One is Dynamo, by Si Cranstoun, who is the living incarnation of Jackie Wilson, even though he’s a young dude from the U.K. The other is North Side Gal, which you can download free at  J.D. MacPherson‘s site. Here’s J.D.’s backstory. And a review. He’s a punk veteran and former art teacher from Broken Arrow, Nebraska.  Not sure who he embodies, other than the whole of rock’s deepest geology.

Both are happy, super-upbeat songs that demand dancing. Great, great stuff.

It won’t kill the cable companies, which will still carry data to your house, and which will still get a cut of the content action, somehow. But the division between cable content and other forms you pay for will be exposed for the arbitrary thing it is, in an interactive world defined by the protocols of the Internet, rather than by the protocols of television. It will also contain whatever deals Apple does for content distribution.

These deals will be motivated by a shared sense that Something Must Be Done, and by knowing that Apple will make TV look and work better than anybody else ever could. The carriers have seen this movie before, and they’d rather have a part in it than outside of it. For a view of the latter, witness the fallen giants called Sony and Nokia. (A friend who worked with the latter called them “a tree laying on the ground,” adding “They put out leaves every year. But that doesn’t mean they’re standing up.”)

I don’t know anything about Apple’s plans. But I know a lot about Apple, as do most of us. Here are the operative facts as they now stand (or at least as I see them):

1. Apple likes to blow up categories that are stuck. They did it with PCs, laptops, printers, mp3 players, smartphones, music distribution and retailing. To name a few.
2. TV display today is stuck in 1993. That’s when the ATSC (which defined HDTV standards) settled on the 16:9 format, with 1080 pixels (then called “lines”) of vertical resolution, and with picture clarity and sound quality contained within the data carrying capacity of a TV channel 6MHz wide. This is why all “Full HD” screens remain stuck at 1080 pixels high, no matter how physically large those screens might be. It’s also why more and more stand-alone computer screens are now 1920 x 1080. They’re made for TV. Would Steve Jobs settle for that? No way.
3. Want a window into the future where Apple makes a TV screen that’s prettier than all others sold? Look no farther than what Apple says about the new iPad‘s resolution:
4. Cable, satellite and over-the-air channels are still stuck at 6MHz of bandwidth (in the original spectrum-based meaning of that word). They’re also stuck with a need to maximize the number of channels within a finite overall bandwidth. This has resulted in lowered image quality on most channels, even though the images are still, technically, “HD”. That’s another limitation that surely vexed Steve.
5. The TV set makers (Sony, Visio, Samsung, Panasonic, all of them) have made operating a simple thing woefully complicated, with controls (especially remotes) that defy comprehension. The set-top-box makers have all been nearly as bad for the duration. Same goes for the makers of VCR, DVD, PVR and other media players. Home audio-video system makers too. It’s a freaking mess, and has been since the ’80s.
6. Steve at AllThingsD on 2 June 2010: “The only way that’s ever going to change is if you can really go back to square one and tear up the set-top-box and redesign it from scratch with a consistent UI, withall these different functions, and get it to the consumer in a way they are willing to pay for. We decided, what product do you want most? A better tv or a better phone? A better TV or a tablet? … The TV will lose until there is a viable go-to-market strategy. That’s the fundamental problem.” He also called Apple TV (as it then stood) a “hobby”, for that reason. But Apple is bigger now, and has far more market reach and clout. In some categories it’s nearly a monopoly already, with at least as much leverage as Microsoft ever had. And you know that Apple hasn’t been idle here.
7. Steve Jobs was the largest stockholder in Disney. He’s gone, but the leverage isn’t. Disney owns ABC and ESPN.
8. The main thing that keeps cable in charge of TV content is not the carriers, but ESPN, which represents up to 40% of your cable bill, whether you like sports or not. ESPN isn’t going to bypass cable — they’ve got that distribution system locked in, and vice versa. The whole pro sports system, right down to those overpaid athletes in baseball and the NBA, depend on TV revenues, which in turn rest on advertising to eyeballs over a system made to hold those eyeballs still in real time. “There are a lot of entrenched interests,” says Peter Kafka in this On the Media segment. The only thing that will de-entrench them is serious leverage from somebody who can make go-to-market, UI, quality, and money-flow work. Can Apple do that without Steve? Maybe not. But it’s still the way to bet.

Cable folks have a term for video distribution on the net Net. They call it “over the top“. Of them, that is, and their old piped content system.

That’s actually what many — perhaps most — viewers would prefer: an à la carte choice of “content” (as we have now all come to say). Clearly the end state is one in which you’ll pay for some stuff while other stuff is free. Some of it will be live, and some of it recorded. That much won’t be different. The cable companies will also still make money for keeping you plugged in. That is, you’ll pay for data in any case. You’ll just pay more for some content. Much of that content will be what we now pay for on cable: HBO, ESPN and the rest. We’ll just do away with the whole bottom/top thing because there will be no need for a bottom other than a pipe to carry the content. We might still call some  sources “channels”; and surfing through those might still have a TV-like UI. But only if Apple decides to stick with the convention. Which they won’t, if they come up with a better way to organize things, and make selections easy to make and pay for.

This is why the non-persuasiveness of Take My Money, HBO doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. The ghost of Steve is out there, waiting. You’ll be watching TV his way. Count on it.

We’ll still call it TV, because we’ll still have big screens by that name in our living rooms. But what we watch and listen to won’t be contained by standards set in 1993, or by carriers and other “stakeholders” who never could think outside the box.

Of course, I could be wrong. But no more wrong than the system we have now.

Bonus link.

Another.

Independently owned WFNX has been competing in the Boston market for nearly 30 years. Until yesterday that is, when Stephen Mindich notified his staff he was selling to Clear Channel. He then fired 17 of the 21 employees. Mindich said, “Despite its celebrated history, its cutting edge programming , its tradition of breaking new music, its ardent fans among listeners and advertisers, for some time it has been difficult to sustain the station  — especially since the start of the Great Recession.”

NECN reports,

The sale also means 17 of the 21 people working at FNX were suddenly let go Wednesday. The remaining three full-timers and one part-timer will keep the station on air until the sale goes through in next couple of months.

WFNX Program Director Paul Driscoll said, “I think of it as a two month Irish wake, so we’re going to send this legendary station off the right way.”

That will mean celebrating the station’s roots and its 29 year run – one that had a hand in bringing groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam to wider audiences.

Driscoll said, “The community, the artists that we’ve developed relationships with, the listeners, it’s more than just a spot on the FM dial.”

No doubt the change has been coming for a long time. WBCN went away (actually to an HD subchannel, which is pretty much the same thing) a couple years back after 41 years as one of the country’s landmark rock stations. FNX was always more alternative than BCN. WBOS and WAAF still fly the rock flags; but there was only one FNX, and now it’s headed out the door.

Since coming to Boston in ’06 I’ve been surprised to see FNX continuing to make it. The ratings in both March and April had dropped to nil (literally, nada). You can’t sell advertising with that.

The signal is also sub-second-tier. Licensed to Lynn as a Class A station (maximum of 3000 watts at 300 feet above average terrain), it radiates with 1700 watts at 627 feet (equivalent to 3000 watts, trading watts for height), from atop One Financial Center, but with far less power in most directions other than north:

Meanwhile, most competing Boston commercial stations are Class B: 50,000 watts at 500 feet, or the equivalent. (Most radiate with fewer watts at higher elevations, on either the Prudential Building or out at Boston’s antenna farm in Needham, where a collection of towers exceed 1000 feet in height.)

Presumably WFEX, which simulcasts WFNX from Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire, will also go to Clear Channel. (See the engineering and ownership details here.)

There’s a lot of tweeting on the matter. The most poignant so far is this one from David Bernstein (@dbernstein):

Why #WFNX mattered (photo taken by @CarlyCarioli) http://pic.twitter.com/dIjOjsfT

Make that minus seven now.

[Later...] The sale price is $14.5 million.

She was the composer behind dozens of songs I still hum or sing along to. She wrote or co-wrote 118 Billboard top 100 songs, between 1955 and 1999.  Though I always enjoyed her music and appreciated her talent, I hadn’t thought much about why they were appealing before listening this morning to this Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross (who, it turns out, was a neighbor of Carole’s when they were both growing up in Brooklyn). When I heard that some old videos of Carole had leaked out on YouTube, I went there and was blown away by this performance of Chains, a hit she and Jerry Goffin wrote for the Cookies, which was then Little Eva‘s back-up group.

What you see on that video is pure fun. The song is a simple one, almost a throw-away. But the energy is amazing. Watching and listening to that performance, it’s hard not to fall in love with her. The Carole King I got to know through Tapestry, and other mature works, was more seasoned and complete. But what I see here is something I also realized I knew all along: that her work was also play.

I’m also sold on her memoir, A Natural Woman. Looking forward to checking it out.

I started out by setting up three “stations,” based on three artists: Lowell George, Seldom Scene and Mike Auldridge. I’m on the Mike Auldridge station now, and guess what comes up? Dig:

Not just a great Mike Auldridge album cut, but a cover by Ray Simone, my late good friend and business partner, about whom I wrote this yesterday and this last month. It’s like seeing a friendly ghost.

Anyway, some first impressions and thoughts…

• Need an Android and iPad app [Later... See the top comment below, with better information than I had when I first wrote this.]
• Would like integration with creative terrestrial stations like KEXP, KCRW, WMBR, WFUV, et. al. (I other words, FM still cuts it. Think symbiosis, not just competition)
• Would like opportunity for comments with skips, thumbs up and thumbs down. A skip isn’t always a dislike, or a preference. Sometimes it’s just curiousity at work.
• The Twitter link works well. Give us a short URL for the current song.
• Need more genres and decades. How about the ’50s?
• Idea: Let listeners add their own audio — to be their own DJs — for some of the tunes. Make the ability a paid premium service
• Work with the VRM development community on EmanciPay. Hey, some of us might like to pay more per play than SoundExchange wants. If you’re interested, DM me at @dsearls or dsearls at cyber dot law dot harvard dot edu.
• Add a back button.
• Make one’s whole listening history available as personal data one can copy off and use on their own.
• RadioInk has quotage from the CEO, Tom Brophy, from this week’s launch announcement. I’d like to find that from a link at Raditaz.com.
• Says here, “when you create a new station, your station is automatically assigned geographical coordinates so other users can find your station in our map view or when browsed on our explore page.” That’s cool, but what if my head or heart aren’t really where I am when I create a station? I do like exploring the map, though. Listening right now to Johnny Cash from Cleveland, while I’m in Boston.
• Integrate with Sonos.

Gotta go. But that’s a start.

That’s what many thought when they first saw the poster for Hassle House, in Durham, North Carolina, back in ’76 or so. As soon as any of the posters went up, they disappeared, becoming instant collectors’ items. At the time, all I wanted was to hire the cartoonist who did it, so he could illustrate some of the ads I was creating for a local audio shop. That cartoonist was the polymath Ray Simone, who went on to become the creative leader of Hodskins Simone & Searls (HS&S), the advertising agency I co-founded with Ray and David Hodskins, in 1978, and which thrived in North Carolina and Silicon Valley for the next two decades.

When I put up Remembering Ray, which (among much else) expressed my wish to re-surface the Hassle House poster, Jay Cunningham said in a comment that he could scan his copy. Which he did, and the results are here. In another comment Rob Gringle gives more of the back-story than I had known at the time.

Before HS&S, David and Ray were both with a small “mutilple media studio” called Solar Plexus Enterprises, which grew out of the Duke Media Center. Also there was Helen Hudson Whiting, who was a first-rate epicure as well as the fastest and most capable typesetter I had ever known. I just looked Helen up and found this nice write-up from Duke Magazine Books:

In Helen’s Kitchen: A Philosophy of Food By Helen Hudson Whiting. Regulator Bookshop, 2000. 241 pages. $17.95.

In the text below is this:

Helen Hudson Whiting ’75 was, among other things, a bookseller and co-owner of Durham’s Regulator Bookshop, a reader, a writer, and an amateur chef. For nineteen years, she wrote food commentaries for Triangle area publications: first for WDBS-FM’s The Guide, and then for The Independent.

In Helen’s Kitchen, organized posthumously and edited by her friends and colleagues, features an eclectic selection of these columns, as well as remembrances from people who knew Whiting and cherished her enterprising, adventurous culinary attitude and her zest for pleasure and her keen intellect.

I worked with Ray, Helen and David at Solar Plexus before we founded HS&S, and Helen continued to work alongside the new agency, doing most of our typesetting. So she became a good friend as well.

But that’s not my point here. My point is that ours was a special community, and at the beginning of many things, although we didn’t know it at the time.

At Ray’s memorial gathering in Pacifica last Sunday, Steve Tulsky made that point beautifully. He said our artsy-hippie community in Durham and Chapel Hill back then was a special group. Much was born there, in music, art, performance, writing, publishing, business, events, and other fields. The Independent, modeled by The Guide, is still going strong. So is the Regulator Bookshop. WDBS is long gone. So are WQDR and WRDU (as what they were then, anyway), which carried forward the radio torch WDBS lit when it went on in 1971. But their spirits survive in Good Radio everywhere. The Festival for the Eno, still going strong, began as the Folklife Festival, in 1976, on the country’s bicentennial. WDBS was highly involved, as the station broadcasting the many musical acts playing there. (Perhaps some old tapes still survive.)

While I was working with David, Ray and Helen at Solar Plexus in ’77, I also worked with the Psychical Research Foundation, which studied scientifically evidence for life after death, and was located at Duke University. The PRF spun off of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, led by J. B. Rhine, who launched the whole parapsychology field out of research he conducted at Duke in the 1930. Among the many decendents of that work is the Institute of Noetic Sciences, headed by Marilyn Schlitz, another member of our community back in the decade.

Here’s another weird connection. One of the central institutions of that time in Durham was the Durham Bulls single-A baseball team, which played at an old athletic field surrounded by brick tobacco warehouses. It was a special team at a special time and place. You might remember the movie about it.

Anyway, I just wanted to bring back to the foreground some of what we’ve lost or forgotten from that wonderful formative period in so many lives, and in so many ways.

Great radio lives

On this latest trip to Austin (I was there from Thursday to Monday, March 10-14), I was worried at first when I found KGSR missing on 107.1, replaced by a Spanish station. But I quickly discovered that KGSR had moved to 93.3, and a much bigger signal. (This wasn’t KGSR’s first move. It’s long history is explained in Wikipedia.) Other new and old radio finds were:

• the variously eclectic (and very locally-focused) KOOP and KVRX, sharing time on 91.7, and KAZI on 88.7;
• classical KMFA on 89.5;
• alternative KROX (101x) on 101.5;
• landmark news/public/music KUT on 90.5; and
• old-fashioned “beautiful music” (aka “easy listening”) over KNCT on 91.3.

Back to KGSR. I didn’t hear them bragging, but what they have now is the biggest FM signal in town. The old one (now KLZT) was 49,000 watts at 499 feet above average terrain. The new one is 100,000 watts at 1927 feet above average terrain — only 73 feet below the legal maximum height of 2000 feet. With more than twice the power and nearly four times the height (both matter on FM), the coverage area is much bigger. Other stations in the market equal KGSR’s power, but none radiate from the same height. (There are coverage maps at both those last two links.)

Another fun find is that KUT kicks butt in the ratings. Check this out. KUT is tops in Austin in January with a 9.3 share of 12+ listening. Far as I know there are no other public stations in the country that come out #1 in the ratings, over and over, which KUT appears to be doing. KGSR is pretty far back, with a 2.3. KMFA gets a 2.4. KROX gets a 3.3. KNCT gets a 1.8. KOOP gets an 0.2. KAZI and KVRX are no-shows. KLZT, the Mexican music station that now radiates from KGSR’s old transmitter, gets a 5.3. It’s also cool to see five streams listed in the ratings, which is impressive just at the factual level.

What sent me to the ratings was this September 2009 piece in the Austin Post by Jim McNabb, about KGSR’s move to 93.3. Writes Jim, “According to Arbitron, the #1 Radio station is KLBJ AM, broadcasting news and information, recently in the news for its decision to reinstate the Todd and Don Show.  The show had been cancelled earlier this year after Don Pryor used the slur “wetback” repeated for about an hour on the air with no management stepping in to stop it.  The station is still #1 with a 7.1 rating.  The #2 station is breezy KKMJ FM.”

Used to be Arbitron didn’t publish noncommercial numbers (and I’m guessing they didn’t when Jim wrote that piece), but now they do, at least through http://radio-info.com. If you’re reading this, Jim, go here: http://www.radio-info.com/markets/austin . Lots of interesting Austin radio story fodder in that list.

For most of my life all I knew about Austin radio was that KLBJ’s story was tied up with its former owner, Lady Bird Johnson, and her husband Lyndon Baines Johnson, the former President. Writes the KLBJ history page, “In December 1942, a buyer, armed with limited capital, a dream, a journalism degree from the University of Texas, and no broadcasting experience, became the new licensee – Lady Bird Johnson.” But there’s more to that story. Here’s Wikipedia:

In January-February 1943, Ladybird Johnson spent $17,500 of her inheritance to purchase KTBC,^[3] an Austin radio station that was in debt. She bought the radio station from a three-man partnership which included a future U.S. Secretary of the Navy and a future U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Robert B. Anderson.

She served as President of the company, LBJ Holding Co., and her husband negotiated an agreement with the CBS radio network. Lady Bird decided to expand by buying a television station in 1952 despite Lyndon’s objections, reminding him that she could do as she wished with her inheritance.^[6] The station, KTBC-TV/7 (then affiliated with CBS as well), would make the Johnsons millionaires as Austin’s monopoly VHF franchise.^[27] Over the years, journalists have written about how Lyndon used his influence in the Senate to influence the Federal Communications Commission into granting the monopoly license, which was in Lady Bird’s name.^[28][29]

Eventually, Johnson’s initial $41,000 investment turned into more than $150 million for the LBJ Holding Company.^[30] Johnson remained involved with the company until she was in her 80s.^[6] She was the first president’s wife to become a millionaire in her own right.^[3]

That squares with my own recollection of the story, from  back when I was involved in broadcasting, in the 1970s.

KLBJ is on 590 on the AM dial, radiating 5000 watts by day and 1000 by night. The night signal is also directional, with dents (“nulls”) to the north and the southeast. From my window seat on the flight out to Houston, I spotted KLBJ’s four-tower transmitter , and got this series of pix, which I’ve posted at the Infrastructure collection on Flickr.

By day, KLBJ’s primary coverage area stretches from Waco to San Antonio, 90 miles in opposite directions. Secondary coverage includes Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. Fringe coverage reaches across most of Texas and into Oklahoma to the north and Mexico to the south. And that’s with just 5000 watts, or 1/10th the legal limit. The reason is ground conductivity. Texas has some of the best in the country. (Here’s a station in Atlanta on the same channel with more than twice the power. And it basically covers North Georgia and that’s it.)

Here’s Jim McNabb on what has happened to KLBJ since he served as news director there 35 years ago: that it’s become another mostly-right-wing foghorn. (Here’s a schedule.) The same can be said about countless other news/talk stations, of course.

Back on FM, the most anomalous station I heard was also the most anachronistic: KNCT, out of Central Texas College in Killeen. Its format is “beautiful music,” or what we once called “easy listening.” This was the “mood music” often disparaged as “elevator music” or “music on hold” back in the decades. I didn’t miss it when it went away, but it did kinda give me the warm fuzzies to hear it again. Sadly, the station doesn’t stream, or you could sample it.

Anyway, I just wanted to dump my thoughts on Austin radio before moving on to other matters, also involving broadcasting.