Podcasting continues to be a hot form of broadcasting, growing from an audience of about 12 per cent of people 12 and up in 2013 to more than 31 per cent today. In Sweden, the number is at least 47 per cent. Canada is around 34 per cent; that number …

The early signs were there. Several Australian music festivals scheduled for the Down Under summer months were cancelled. Then word started to come out of Britain about more festivals that wouldn’t happen because of various financial and logistical issues. But the biggest wake-up call came when Coachella 2024 failed to …

It’s happened again: before you get a word out, the person or machine who answered the phone at the doctor’s office/tech support/airline/customer service centre slaps you on hold and music starts to play. In some cases, it’s a local radio station. Other times, it’s something terribly innocuous, generic, and mildly …

When something bad happens, our natural reaction is to ask why. It’s also natural to look for something or someone to blame for this misfortune. And this can often lead us into the world of conspiracies. I was on the air on Friday, April 8, 1994. In the pre-internet, pre-social …

If you’re into alternative history — thought experiments regarding things that might have happened to alter the course of history — you’ve run across the term hinge points. The most common probably have to do with the Second World War (Like, if Hitler won, if the Americans didn’t drop the …

A couple of decades ago, I mentioned during a radio show that I’d acquired several bootleg records by several bands I absolutely adored, mostly live recordings, some outtakes and alternative mixes. A few days later, I received a letter from the head of a music industry organization in which I …

The 1960s were a turbulent time. Assassinations, riots, civil rights protests, and angry opposition to the war in Vietnam. This unrest wasn’t confined to North America, either. It seemed that the whole world was about to come apart at the seams. Japan had its own issues. There was the Anpo …

Does vinyl really sound better than a compact disc? This is a debate that is not only very scientific but also very emotional. To explain this is very difficult because the appreciation of audio quality is a very, very subjective thing that involves everything from your emotional state to the …

In the days before the internet, music was a scarce and regulated commodity. Yet the current landscape tells a different tale. With so much music to go around, the dynamics of the industry have changed what was once a “macroculture” into a “microculture.” To show you what I mean, let’s …

Like a lot of Canadians, I received a lot of music music education by wandering around a Sam the Record Man store. In my case, I’d be dropped off at the Garden City Shopping Centre in Winnipeg while my mom took my sister to music lessons. I spent untold hours …

James C. Petrillo was apoplectically mad. As head of the American Federation of Musicians, the largest musicians union in the country, he was sick and tired of seeing members not being paid what they were owed when it came to record sales. The people who made records were not getting …

On June 1, 1999, a university student named Shawn Fanning sent a message to his friends telling them about a new program he’d written called Napster. It offered music fans a way to connect and trade digital music files quickly and efficiently using a new type of compressed file called …