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London's Radio Pirates Changed Music. Then Came the Internet. (nytimes.com)
Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a story which looks at the ways a network of illegal radio stations changed British music, and wonders where young people are going to make culture now, now that the internet is killing off the pirate radio. An excerpt from the story: Ofcom, the British communications regulator, estimated there are now just 50 pirate stations in London, down from about 100 a decade ago, and hundreds in the 1990s, when stations were constantly starting up and shutting down. Ofcom considers this good news, because illegal broadcasters could interfere with radio frequencies used by emergency services and air traffic control, a spokesman said.
But pirate radio stations also offered public services, of a different sort: They gave immigrant communities programming in their native languages, ran charity drives and created the first radio specifically for black Britons. Pirate radio was also the site of some of Britain's most important musical innovations, introducing pop to the airwaves in the 1960s and incubating the major underground British music trends of recent decades, up to and including dubstep and grime: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Skepta all launched their careers on the pirates.
But pirate radio stations also offered public services, of a different sort: They gave immigrant communities programming in their native languages, ran charity drives and created the first radio specifically for black Britons. Pirate radio was also the site of some of Britain's most important musical innovations, introducing pop to the airwaves in the 1960s and incubating the major underground British music trends of recent decades, up to and including dubstep and grime: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Skepta all launched their careers on the pirates.
...or maybe this is more complex?
Rather than being the promised burgeoning of the "long tail", the web has become a giant (western)world-wide game of winner takes all.
Go to a council estate in London/Manchester in the 1990s and you would find local culturally relevant microcosms of expression. Those expressions would hold and find resonances in thousands of people in the local area. Some of them take root in a wider sense and give rise to "stars", but it is that expression of a local identity that was the value.
Go to youtube now and you will find 40e6 videos with 10 views, and 10 videos with 40e6 views, posted per day. That isn't a long tail, that is a delta function.
Winner takes all. Diversity wiped out, homogeneity rules. The web is the enabler of that, for better and (more likely) worse.
I was an SWL (short wave listener) from the 1950s until about 1990 and I can't recall any "pirate" radio station that could possibly interfere with emergency services or air traffic control.
You appear to have a ham callsign as your ID. Words like "harmonic" and "spurious emission" should be familiar to you.
Most "pirate" broadcasters operated on frequencies in the domestic AM and FM broadcast bands
They had their primary emissions there. The fifth harmonic of 92 MHz is 460MHz, which is a US public safety allocation.
or in the Maritime Mobile bands.
The Maritime Mobile bands are involved in safety of marine operations, and indeed, people use those frequencies for emergency traffic.
None of the "pirate" stations wanted to interfere with anyone else
Maybe. Maybe not. But "want" is not "didn't". If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. The guy who thought it was a great idea to have a mobile cell jammer in his car to try to prevent other people from legal use of their phones in their cars "wished" he hadn't interfered with police and fire communications, I bet -- but didn't consider it until after he was caught.
because then they would suffer interference too. (Radio interference is a two-way street, you see.)
No, I don't see. If I am operating on 3.900MHz and getting splatter from the third harmonic of a pirate AM station on 1.300MHz, how is my operation interfering with him?
I think the Ofcom statement is simply a regurgitation of some self-serving bureaucratic mythology.
The fact that you don't understand the technology doesn't mean the regulators of that technology are ignorant. The fact that you understand so little about radio and yet appear to have a license to use it unsupervised does say something about Canada's licensing system.