BYU and Classical Radio

BYU has just announced that it is planning on dropping Classical 89, the classical music radio station that it runs.

I’m going to be tremendously blunt: this is a terrible idea, and it betrays the school’s educational mission.[fn1]

I understand that classical music doesn’t have the listenership it did once upon a time: in 2013, less than 3% of album sales were of classical music. And there has been a trend for a while of classical stations shifting to alternate formats.[fn2] And I get that consultants and industry professionals recommended the change. But BYU’s in a unique position that allows it to ignore consultants.

A quick personal story:

Years ago, after I had my mission call but before I went to the MTC, my family took a vacation to San Luis Obispo. Sometime on that vacation, I was waiting in the car while my family was doing something, and a song came on the radio. The song blew my mind, with a remarkable, and beautiful, cello over an orchestra. I ended up calling the radio station a couple days later to ask what I’d listened to. It was Joaquín Rodrigo‘s “Concierto como un divertimento,” they told me.

I immediately started looking for the CD. This being long-pre-Amazon, I went to the local Sam Goody (remember those? they didn’t really have very good classical sections) and the slightly-less-local Tower Records, but had no luck. I left on my mission, returned home, and eventually found it, and the concerto is still in my CD collection.

And for me, this is one of the tragedies of losing a classical radio station. The radio station is apparently going to spend the last 8 months of its life “educating” listeners on how to find classical music on Amazon Prime and Google (and, I presume, Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music). Which is fine and good, but it loses the serendipitous encounter music that you didn’t know you’d love. On Amazon, you have to search for what you want to hear, which means you need to know in advance. On Pandora, you have to give the algorithm a starting point, but that doesn’t do much for allowing you to discover what you didn’t know you’d love. Those services are fine for what they do, but I find them ultimately unsatisfying.

And sure, there’s satellite radio and streaming classical stations from elsewhere, but those, too, are ultimately unsatisfying. There’s something valuable about local radio. I wrote, years ago, about KSDS, a San Diego-based jazz station that I loved. It turns out, though, that I haven’t listened to them in years, because I’ve started listening to WDCB, a Chicagoland jazz radio station. Is it better than KSDS? Probably not. But it’s local: it will spotlight local artists, it has its thumb on the pulse of local jazz listeners, it provides information about local shows and festivals, and I can pick it up in my car. And it, too, allows for serendipitous discoveries of musicians and songs I otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

So that’s at least part of the value of local radio. And why should BYU provide it? Two reasons, at least:

First, BYU is an educational institution in Utah. Its mission is to “assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life.” In pursuit of that mission, BYU says that “[a]ll instruction, programs, and services at BYU, including a wide variety of extracurricular experiences, should make their own contribution toward the balanced development of the total person.” That is, BYU’s not there just to give individuals what they want; it’s there to give them what they need to become a total person. That includes providing cultural and artistic experiences that individuals might not seek out on their own.

Second, BYU and other colleges and universities are in a unique position: they don’t need their radio stations to be self-funding. The school has other sources of revenue that it can use to subsidize noncommercial endeavors. Schools are not unique in that regard, but they’re pretty close. Standalone classical radio stations might face significant pressure to change to a more popular format, either for advertising dollars or to appeal to donors or otherwise to raise revenue. At BYU, though, a classical station is mission-appropriate, and, in pursuit of its mission (as well as the education of its students who want to pursue careers in radio), the school can afford to participate in an endeavor that consultants and industry insiders recommend against.

In the end, I don’t have a significant dog in this fight. I don’t live in Utah, so I don’t listen to Classical 89. But as an educational, cultural, and moral matter, taking away the state’s only classical radio station is a terrible move. The only good news is, BYU has eight months to change its mind.

[fn1] It’s also dropping KBYU, its PBS affiliate, which is also probably a terrible idea, though, because Utah apparently has another PBS station, may not be as cataclysmically bad a move.

[fn2] Heck, we only have one classical station in Chicago.