The Fight for Free-Form Radio

WFMU emerged at a moment in which radio stations were increasingly viewed as lucrative mouthpieces for major record labels. Since the late 1950s, radio DJs around the United States had lost their relative autonomy as cultural ambassadors thanks to the scandals of payola and the growing pressure to play only songs that appeared on the “Top 40” charts. DJs were, likewise, generally forbidden to improvise in their spoken presentation, forced to read scripts, advertisements, and obligatory mentions of station underwriters. The first exceptions to these rules came from a handful of AM stations that deliberately played “underground” music. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that college and, especially, free-form radio stations began to present a significant challenge to the hegemony of corporate radio models.

The ethos of WFMU derives, in part, from the earliest free-form radio station, Berkeley’s KPFA-FM. Founded by the pacificist Lewis Hill, the station was built on principles of free expression and listener-funded independence from corporate interests. It was a KPFA staffer, Lorenzo Milam, however, who did the most to spread the early ideas of free-form. Taking his cues from Hill, Milam went on to found KRAB in Seattle in 1962, based on an approach he called “free forum” radio, which eventually morphed into the term “free-form.” Milam would go on to found thirty other such stations across the South, West, and Midwest. The community model of KPFA quickly spread, inspiring a similarly minded approach at stations like New York’s WBAI and WOR-FM, which became important inspirations for WFMUs earliest free-form pioneers.

WFMU was established in 1958 as part of Upsala College, a small, Lutheran liberal arts school in East Orange, New Jersey. For the first decade of its existence, the station served a religious and academic purpose, broadcasting lectures, religious sermons, jazz, classical, and international music. But in the late 1960s, a student volunteer named Vin Scelsa began to transform the station. Inspired by the counterculture’s challenge to mainstream American society — and the blandness of most FM radio — Scelsa launched “The Closet” in 1967, WFMU’s first free-form program. It was, in many ways, an homage to existing free-form stations like WBAI in New York, in particular the programming of Bob Fass. Fass mixed new music from artists like Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and the Fugs with wry audience interaction, humor, and an aversion to formulaic programming. By 1968, WFMU had embraced free-form entirely.

The station’s shift coincided with a broader countercultural push to provide free music to the public. In 1968, for example, WFMU DJ Larry the Bagelman organized a free concert in Tompkins Square Park, featuring the now legendary electronic band Silver Apples, which attracted more than six thousand people. Inspired by the free, three-day “sound-outs” held in Woodstock, New York (precursors to the legendary music festival), WFMU DJs adapted the format into three-day fundraisers, featuring artists as diverse as the psychedelic rock band Quicksilver Messenger Service, the jazz guitarist Larry Coryell, and the proto-punk band David Peel and the Lower East Side.

Meanwhile, the station’s most influential show, “Kokaine Karma,” emerged as an offshoot of Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley’s music column in the East Village Other. Combining caustic humor, musical exploration, and leftist politics, the show treated free jazz and punk rock as part of a single cultural continuum — an ethos that would shape WFMU’s identity for decades to come.

The DIY Dialectic

By August of 1969, however, the station’s short-lived experiment with free-form came to a halt. Conservative listeners and the American Legion filed complaints with both the college and the Federal Communications Commission about offensive content, references to sex and drugs, and obscene lyrics. In response, Upsala fired multiple DJs, including Rudnick and Frawley, and demanded an end to the free-form approach. As a final act of defiance, Frawley played the uncensored version of MC5’s LP Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker on a loop for hours — a sonic middle finger to the custodians of cultural propriety, foreshadowing Freedman’s act of musical defiance in 1980. The station subsequently went dark for ten months. When it reopened, it was a tightly controlled, non-free-form operation.

While the late 1960s counterculture fueled a flourishing of free-form and college radio stations across the country, its influence waned as internal factionalism and identitarian infighting took hold. Meanwhile, corporate record labels began to exert more control over the airwaves during the 1970s. In the wake of WFMU’s short-lived free-form experiment, the station briefly adopted album-oriented rock (AOR), a format that grew out of free-form’s embrace of rock but ultimately relied on corporate “listener research” to determine playlists. DJs were increasingly forced to play a narrow selection of artists who had mass appeal. Moreover, it wasn’t long before major labels captured the “transgressive” ethos of independent music for their own purposes. Columbia Records, for example, stamped messages like “The Man can’t bust our music” on the inner labels of LPs, channeling what the historian Thomas Frank has described as the “conquest of cool.”

By 1975, WFMU was still operating under the constraints of the AOR model. That February, DJ Irwin Chusid hosted his first show — and was suspended two weeks later for openly promoting the virtues of free-form. It wasn’t until 1985, when Freedman took over as station manager, that WFMU reclaimed the free-form model for which it is known and celebrated today.

Freedman’s arrival coincided with a period of radical shifts in American art and music. The advent of new genres like punk rock, hardcore, no-wave, and hip-hop broke just about established “rule” of cultural evaluation. Traditional notions of musical “skill” were questioned or entirely redefined, and long-standing ideas about musical authority and the avant-garde began to lose their hold. It was a moment that heralded our current moment of profound pluralism, where genres began to crack, morph, and blossom in ways unimaginable even twenty years prior. As the DIY ethos that informed so many of these musical scenes came to shape the cultural politics of music fans fed up with commercial radio, it likewise defined WFMU, Freedman notes: “The DIY sensibility, musically, has been a very strong musical current in the music we champion.”

As “independent” music became increasingly marketable in the 1980s, major labels turned to college radio stations as sources for new talent for commercial exploitation. Ironically, many stations previously committed to a free-form ethos began to reserve specific time slots for music unaffiliated with major labels in order to appease their major label backers. In contrast, WFMU relied on the New Music Distribution Service, an artist-led nonprofit established in 1972 for independent and experimental music.

Under the guidance of Freedman, WFMU endeavored to highlight the musical pluralism that had exploded over the past decade, championing independent music of every genre while never eschewing the popular in the name of musical “purity.” “We’re one of the only stations of our ilk that will play popular music. . . . We’re not too cool to play . . . Billie Eilish or Dua Lipa,” says Freedman. Indeed, there is nothing “pure” about WFMUs approach to music, other than its commitment to music itself as an indispensable part of the human experience.

WFMU vs. the Algorithm

Algorithmic music “recommendations” based on the mining of infinite user data create an insidious, self-reinforcing feedback loop. Listeners become increasingly directed toward music that that is comfortable, predictable, and familiar. This anesthetizes culture, reducing music to consoling background noise that eases Silicon Valley’s encroachment into every facet of human life on earth. By promoting convenience and instant gratification, algorithmic systems gradually render human judgement obsolete.

As the historian Elena Razlogova has noted, however, WFMU is not merely an analog throwback in a hyperdigital world. Indeed, the station was at the forefront of streaming music on the internet thanks to the efforts of Freedman and WFMU volunteers like the engineer Brian Redman and the computer musician Henry Lowengard. During the 1980s, Redman, an engineer for Bell Atlantic, experimented with WFMU’s broadcasts through a technique known as “phone phreaking.” Phreaking involved reverse engineering pre-digital telephone tone signals used to route calls, enabling early hackers to circumvent long-distance charges.

Through this process, Redman discovered that audio signals could be generated and edited using push-button phone keypads. He used these signals to create audio sequences that served as WFMU’s legal station ID. Redman also set up an 800 number service allowing up to a dozen people to simultaneously call in and listen to WFMU live. When this number was eventually disconnected, the station received complaints from listeners nationwide who had relied on the service on a daily basis.

This incident revealed to Freedman the necessity of embracing broader communication technologies beyond traditional radio. Consequently, Lowengard began posting WFMU’s program schedule and downloadable audio files to pre-web file-sharing sites like Bulletin Board System, Gopher, and Usenet. Eventually, Freedman transferred these files to web pages in 1993, and the station began streaming over the internet in 1997.

The station’s commitment to sharing music informs the station’s approach to copyright. Around 2005, Freedman started to worry about the implications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1996. Under the DMCA regulations, major record labels demanded exorbitant royalty payments from online broadcasters, threatening WFMU’s ability to continue streaming. But, as Freedman quickly realized, the royalty system laid out in the DMCA only applied to music licensed under traditional, commercial copyrights. In response, WFMU hosted two major campaigns in which they “wrote to every single record label, and every single artist who had ever sent us a record,” requesting waivers to stream their music for noncommercial use. The response from independent labels and artists was overwhelming.

Today the station continues to archive its playlists and makes them freely available without time restrictions. Indeed, WFMU is the only station in the world that offers this sort of access to free, carefully curated playlists, created by thoughtful and dedicated DJs whose only interest is in sharing the music that they love. As algorithmically determined playlists are redefining both music production and consumption, WFMU represents a lonely alternative that prioritizes artistic expression over profit.

The battle over royalties inspired Freedman to create the Free Music Archive, a massive database of music licensed under noncommercial copyright agreements such as Creative Commons. Funded by a grant from the New York State Music Fund — established in 2006 following a $30 million payola settlement between then attorney general Eliot Spitzer and several major labels like Universal Music — the archive was designed to provide podcasters, webcasters, filmmakers, and music fans with access to free or affordable digital audio files. It quickly became a source for other open-access platforms like Vimeo, providing its users free access to music to be used in films and short videos. Although the archive was eventually sold out of necessity to a company that has since attempted to monetize its platform, its original model embodied the virtues of creativity and community — values that are utterly inimical to streaming platforms like Spotify.

The Free-Form Antidote to Spotify

At its core, WFMU is a community-oriented radio station dedicated to music and culture beyond commercial interests. On most days, eager volunteers can be found at the station, folding T-shirts, helping to ship out merch to donors, and performing various necessary tasks. The station’s pledge drives exemplify mutual aid and cooperation, attracting volunteers from across the United States and even internationally who answer phones, prepare food, and provide general support to the station at all hours of the day and night.

WFMU also offers its DJs and volunteers a true sense of community. Despite variations in taste, musical preference, politics, class, race, and gender, the station comprises a community that is committed to the broader goal of preserving WFMU as an important cultural institution dedicated to music as a vital counterbalance to corporate-dominated musical consumption. For Freedman, WFMU “is a leftist institution, although we’ve often had many conservative people on the air as well.”

Since the 1980s, the station has deliberately resisted identity politics, viewing it as a reflection of market-driven consumer segmentation. In Freedman’s estimation, beginning around the early 1970s

community radio fell prey to identity politics, so that every program had one audience for one thing. A jazz program, a punk rock program, a bluegrass program, an LGBT program, a woman’s program. . . . I saw that happening in the ’70s and immediately thought, “That’s no way to build a radio station.” Free-form radio seemed to be the antidote to that. It was saying “Find the overlap between jazz and punk rock and bluegrass. . . . Can you take a Clash fan and turn them into a gospel fan?”

WFMU’s model, emphasizing thoughtful, genre-spanning programming, offers an aesthetic template for the kind of coalition building to which the Left often seem resistant. It provides a vision of unity through diversity, challenging the segmentation logic of streaming services like Spotify, which categorize and monetize listeners into predictable market segments.

When the station has fallen on hard times, WFMU’s listeners have consistently stepped in to offer support. For example, in 1989, when four other New York–area independent stations sued WFMU over signal encroachment, five listener-lawyers volunteered pro bono legal support. Venerable DIY venues in New York such as ABC No Rio and CBGBS hosted benefit shows, featuring bands like Sonic Youth and John Zorn, the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and the artist Cindy Sherman. And when Upsala College closed due to financial insolvency in 1994, an anonymous donor contributed $150,000 to allow the station to purchase its operating license, granting them full independence from the college.

Today WFMU continues to operate as one of the most successful and important arts nonprofits in the United States. Its ethos is rooted in the idea that people, communities, scenes, whatever are ultimately far more important than profits and commercial interest. It is “done by humans, live, in real time, by human beings. . . . That’s become really unusual, as has the idea of not having any advertisements and not having any prerecorded spots, which tend to sound like advertisements,” says Freedman. In a media landscape increasingly shaped by automated platforms and predictive algorithms, WFMU stands as a reminder that public culture can still be shaped by collective labor, not just engineered by metrics of profitability.