Constituents of a hit parade: Questioning democracy and listener participation in P4 i P1’s Det elektriske barometer

<p class="p1">Due to their historically inaccessible nature, public service broadcasters’ media archives have lent themselves primarily to internal refl ection while historical contextualisation of the cultural heritage in these archives has been broadcasters’ prerogative. In this study, digitised material from the Danish youth radio programme P4 i P1’s Det elektriske barometer forms the basis for an experiment into how access to digital archives can inform humanities scholarship. We argue that one important implication of the new digital archives is that they enable approaches independent of broadcasters’ own narratives since they off er the possibility for autonomous study of large quantities of material. The character of listener participation in Det elektriske barometer, which had the slogan ‘the listener-determined hit parade’, is approached from a micro-, meso-, and macro-level employing Carpentier’s concept of participation (2011b), to explore how diff erent approaches to digital archives can provide new answers to media’s self-presentation.</p>

From Reproduction to Performance: Media-Specific Music for Compact Disc

When the compact disc was introduced in 1982, it was considered the first recording medium to vanish behind the audio information carried by it. Artists nevertheless discovered media-specific features unique to the CD. This paper focuses not so much on sound production (skipping CDs, glitches, etc.) as on musical form and listener participation in music for CD, which seems to have anticipated certain aspects of iPod culture.

Beyond Media ‘Platforms’? Talkback, Radio, Technolgy and Audience

Technology has had an important influence on the constitution and participation of the commercial metropolitan radio audience. The introduction of ‘open-line’ radio from the 1960s was heralded as a novelty for audience participation in radio programming, but was hindered by technical impediments to the quality of telephone and radio recording technologies. In the 1990s, the advent of mobile telephony liberated talkback listeners from their anchoring in the domestic sphere. This article examines how successive media technologies have influenced the experience of commercial radio audiences from the 1960s through to the present. Acknowledging the increasing convergence between traditional media platforms and content, it considers whether newer technologies such as the internet are fundamentally altering the shape and function of listener participation in commercial metropolitan radio programs.