WFMU

I am writing a cultural biography of New Jersey independent listener-supported freeform radio station WFMU. The station exemplifies the survival of alternative media for music in America, from the turbulent 1960s to the current streaming era.

“Electric Kokaine Karma: WFMU’s Proto Dose of Freakform,” LCD: WFMU Program Guide no. 29 (Summer 2025): 8-11. Illustrations by Danny Hellman

“WFMU-FM,” Radical Radio: Freeform Radio Archive, August 2024. — About WFMU in the 1960s.

“Freeform Radio and the History of Music Streaming,” in The Oxford Handbook of Radio Studies, edited by Michele Hilmes and Andrew Bottomley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 22-40. – About WFMU’s early experiments in “streaming” music via telephone, gopher, and the web in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Provincializing Spotify: Radio, Algorithms and Conviviality,” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 18, no. 1 (2020): 29-42. — About the Free Music Archive.

“The Past and Future of Music Listening: Between Freeform DJs and Recommendation Algorithms,” in Radio’s New Wave, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2013), 62-76. — About WFMU’s relationship with music recommendation apps.

Related

Mack Hagood’s Phantom Power podcast In November 2023, I was interviewed talking about radio audiences, freeform radio station WFMU, and the plundering of open source software movements by big tech.

WFMU Live Benefits Map - ongoing online project mapping benefit concerts for WFMU, including venues and musicians in the New York City-New Jersey area across genres and music scenes. The map includes links to first-person accounts, posters, and audio of performances.

Winter 2026 HIST329 Music in History Syllabus This course examines the intertwined histories of music, capitalism, and anticapitalism in the United States (and some global) context. We will examine corporate music industries, culminating in today’s streaming services, but focus especially on their alternatives, including DIY music practices, mp3 blogs, bootleg recordings, and college and community radio. We will consider the relationship between music “mainstream” and “underground” in aesthetic and economic terms, including questions of music taste and the phenomenon of “selling out.” Listening materials for this course come from an online audio archive of listener-supported community radio station WFMU in Jersey City—a complete run of broadcasts spanning 25 years. By the end of the class, students will know that the terms “underground,” “independent,” and “alternative” have described a range of historical music institutions and practices. They will understand how music genres emerge in and out of the corporate music sphere. They will also learn ways to discover music on their own, outside of limited recommendations from streaming services.

Sample audio: “Kenny G [Kenneth Goldsmith] and Vicki Bennett Go Apeshit in the Studio for 3 Hours,” The Hour of Pain, WFMU, May 14, 2003. Preceded by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) on what was going on in the studio. Interview recorded on December 30, 2022.

Image: Cover for WFMU newsletter, Lowest Common Denominator (LCD), for Summer 1986.