I helped organize this memorial zine to my beloved doctoral advisor @jonathansterne.bsky.social. Thanks to all the contributors for their beautiful offerings. Sound ON for silly, apropos page turning sound effects.
intercomzine.com
I helped organize this memorial zine to my beloved doctoral advisor @jonathansterne.bsky.social. Thanks to all the contributors for their beautiful offerings. Sound ON for silly, apropos page turning sound effects.
intercomzine.com
Looking forward to co-presenting an invited talk with @sadiecouture.bsky.social at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC.
We'll discuss how we built - and more importantly have sustained - our Library of Congress academic/federal collaborative research project, now in its 12th year.
on the air raising righteous greenbacks for @wfmu.bsky.social with the legend @creamocoyl.bsky.social from now 'til 6pm! tune in, pledge, win swag, then drop back out! wfmu.org
03.03.2026 20:00 — 👍 21 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 0Hi Robby, amazing! I‘d love to interview you for my book on WFMU. Would you be up for that?
02.03.2026 11:07 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Back in 2014 I made a radio app using the Echo Nest's API that indexes all of the Free Music Archive. I just found out that on 2020 @erazlogo.bsky.social wrote about this in an article published in Radio Journal (sick). However, EN sold to Spotify and killed the API (shocking).
The goal here was..
Realized today that I'm working on the last and final project of the now-defunct Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Which is the official history of US public media, with Allison Perlman (Irvine), and Mike Janssen (Current).
26.02.2026 21:02 — 👍 307 🔁 55 💬 12 📌 6
Some context to the current situation in Iran. On 19 August 1953 Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup led by MI6 and the CIA under the name Operation Boot/Ajax. The aim was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mosaddegh nationalised the country’s oil industry.
01.03.2026 11:03 — 👍 22 🔁 13 💬 1 📌 1
U.S. Strikes in Middle East Use Anthropic, reportedly for "intelligence assessments, including target identification and simulation of combat scenarios" even after the supposed ban
01.03.2026 10:32 — 👍 26 🔁 16 💬 2 📌 4
Seriously exciting news. This, from eight years ago, gets at the scope of the book. Honored to have talked with him for it.
www.wired.com/story/invisi...
Congratulations!! Can't wait to read it
24.02.2026 01:13 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
microphones at Grateful Dead show
concertgoers hold boomboxes at Polish music festival
tapers sidestage at bluegrass festival
man in t shirt that reads Tape Master
snow day news drop: last week, i turned in a draft of the book i've been working on for the past 6 years! right now, it's called "the invisible hit parade: a taper's history of music" & will be out in 2027 from da capo/hachette. much more to come, obviously!
23.02.2026 14:23 — 👍 315 🔁 34 💬 37 📌 8Among other useful bits - the connection between the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the decline of R&B groups
24.02.2026 00:13 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Listening to a fascinating conversation about R&B history with Amani Roberts, @brandontensley.bsky.social & Emily Lordi & just realized that Whitney Houston grew up in East Orange, NJ, also home to Queen Latifah & WFMU. Part of Popular Music Books in Process Series: www.youtube.com/watch?v=htEX...
24.02.2026 00:09 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0aw, peace to a legendary taper/engineer, the link between bob dylan & ESP-disk'.
19.02.2026 15:36 — 👍 29 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0For you @bourgwick.bsky.social
19.02.2026 15:38 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Sorry to hear reports of the passing of audio engineer Richard Alderson. I interviewed him early in the newsletter's run about recording the Second Gaslight Tape and all the famous 1966 shows. You wouldn't know "Judas" without Alderson.
19.02.2026 14:12 — 👍 38 🔁 12 💬 2 📌 4I love the playlist feature in Live from the Underground. Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day also has playlists but he calls them “discographies.” Any book on DJs should have playlists.
12.02.2026 00:20 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
The brilliant Jessica Swanston Baker is required pregame reading today - on music, language, transmission, power, and the caribbean
www.theguardian.com/music/2026/f...
Watch Vanessa Díaz, co-author of "P FKN R," talk about Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl halftime show on CNN: www.cnn.com/2026/02/06/w...
06.02.2026 16:57 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0“Iyou could shove it in your purse or your pocket...There were, say, a few hundred book stores in the US but there were thousands of little drugstores+ bus stations+so on in small towns.That’s why they’re called mass market. There was a much more robust system for getting these books out there.”
06.02.2026 14:38 — 👍 42 🔁 14 💬 2 📌 0
Good news for Californians who like affordability and fairness in live music. Another sign of growing momentum.
05.02.2026 18:01 — 👍 5 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0"Musicians of every stripe are struggling. Re-erecting old hierarchies won’t solve that, but maybe pluralistic, noncommercial ways of valuing music and new solidarities between musicians will." Can we have a noncommercial solidarities turn in music studies too please? www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/o...
01.02.2026 18:07 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Big congrats to @akstuhl.bsky.social for winning the 2026 SCMS dissertation award. For “Unmaking a Medium: Automation and Art in American Radio, 1950–2010,” supervised by Jonathan Sterne (McGill).
31.01.2026 16:28 — 👍 44 🔁 10 💬 9 📌 1Congratulations Andy!! Totally deserved
01.02.2026 16:29 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Headlines for Susan Orlean's New Yorker article "Meet the Shaggs." The original print subheadline reads "Three girls from New Hampshire who became one of music's strangest legends." The AI summary online reads: "From a New Hampshire town hall to a cult following, the Wiggin sisters' awkward pop becomes outsider art--and a family burden."
Why is @newyorker.com denying me a pithy @susanorlean.bsky.social's original subheadline offering AI slop instead? Also, the article was published on September 27, 1999 not September 20. AI-slopped date perhaps?
01.02.2026 15:57 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 2
Riot police in Georgia, photo by by Jack Hubbell Rosene.
“Under the Ivanishvili regime, power is quiet, opaque, and cowardly. It doesn’t need tanks – its atmosphere and aspirations are enough oppression. If the system is choking culture, then culture has to push back with its full body."
Underground Music in Tbilisi, by Nick Hudson
buff.ly/JSfiqBR
404 Media has published the full user guide for ELITE, the tool Palantir made for ICE to bring up addresses for deportation targets. @evystadium.bsky.social has more.
Scoop here by @josephcox.bsky.social: www.404media.co/here-is-the-...
