This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate DeMoeu.

Brief eulogy for a commercial radio station upon hearing that 95.5 WBRU FM and Providence

for Dalland would cease operation.

We could get into the economics about how media consolidation unleashed by the Telecommunications

Act of 1996 that has continued unabated and largely unchallenged in the years since.

As yielded a business environment in which a decreasing number of national and international

conglomerates, own an increasing number of local radio stations, broadcasting licenses,

and concomitant physical infrastructure.

And how as they sought efficiencies in ways to extract profit and increase shareholder value,

these companies typically cut local staff and often program and operate their portfolio

stations centrally and in effect broadcast from server farms half a continent away.

It was little to no concern about regional variations in taste or musical traditions or

collective memory.

We could get into the economics.

And we could get into musicology and or music history and discuss how it came to be that

an idiosyncratic and poorly defined radio format that combined musical styles popular primarily

among white college age Americans could in the early 1990s, gain a larger audience and

cultural relevance on the heels of the success of the bandirvana.

And how this and similar stations enjoyed commercial prosperity for several years, until

demographic, technological, and other changes altered tastes and swung cultural attention

away from what had come to be known as alternative music and from rock and roll based forms in

...