A few months back, I was invited by Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Creativity (SACAC), Delhi to share my reflections on setting up our internet radio. The title of this article was also the title of my talk. “How (Not) to Run a Radio” does not suggest an advisory stance. I’m still thinking through the project, so I am not in a position to share a conclusive understanding of how (not) to run a radio.
Rather, “How (Not) to Run a Radio” is an opportunity for me to a) frame my learnings from the project, b) to further form my ideas about the limits of our radio curation and c) to understand the importance of the ‘independent internet radio’ as a format, in cultivating a listenership especially in the current Indian context of sound and music publication, consumption and engagement.
By now, most of you who are music producers, DJs, promoters, fans or even remotely enthusiastic/aware of the global club cultures or the nightlife industry must be familiar with the trend of ‘community radios’. These need little to no introduction. <Insert City Name> followed by the term “Community Radio” and you’ve got yourself a spanking new way to repurpose the economy of the nightlife industry and “create a community”. The infrastructural setup is easy too. The internet based format helps bypass the bureaucracies and logistical challenges which come attached with tapping into the state run FM airwaves. All one needs then is a camera and a laptop to record the sets and some sort of electronic hardware instruments/DJ decks/playback equipment through which one can showcase the emerging talent of one’s city.
In many ways, these community radios have come to be perceived as the successors of pirate radios which promise an alternative to commercial broadcasting, algorithmic streaming platforms and state-controlled media by offering editorial freedom, niche programming and community-led participation. Sounds like a dream, right?
Well, after spending the last few years “recording broadcasts” with community web radios in different cities across Asia and eventually launching the KISSA In-Store Radio out of Delhi NCR, I found myself increasingly unsettled by a contradiction. I noticed that while most stations often speak the language of openness and experimentation, a language familiar to the format of a radio, many “community radios” have quietly inherited the value systems of the club.
Here, I’ll rest my argument on the derivations of anthropologist Louise Meintjes, who in her essay The Recording Studio as Fetish, argues that the recording studio is frequently imagined as a site possessing an almost magical creative power, obscuring the social relationships and labour through which music is actually produced.
I believe community web radios have become similarly fetishized. Their apparent openness often conceals the social, technological and cultural relationships that structure participation within them. What appears to be an open platform frequently reproduces hierarchies of expertise, aesthetics and access.
In this essay, I will make these relationships visible by detailing a set of four observations. The observations that follow are not intended as universal truths about community radio though. They are propositions that emerged through our own curatorial practice – especially through the contradictions of trying to build an internet radio that we thought could resist becoming just another extension of club culture.
Background
First, some context is necessary. In January 2025, Antariksh Records was invited to curate the KISSA Evenings at the VegNonVeg (VNV) store in Gurgaon. Conceived as a series of weekend listening sessions inspired by the Japanese Jazz Kissa tradition, the programme centred on a well-designed high-fidelity analogue listening environment, with vinyl records positioned as the primary medium of playback. Our initial curatorial response seemed obvious: invite vinyl DJs to play the space.
It did not take long, however, for the limitations of this approach to become apparent. These limitations exposed deeper questions about listening, curation and the infrastructures through which music is presented. Three, in particular, shaped our thinking.
1) The first limitation was technological. There is a dearth of vinyl DJs, collectors and sonic storytellers in our country. What little we can claim as our contemporary vinyl culture comes with a selective focus on playing records as an esoteric format aimed at creating value in an otherwise saturated market of DJs – for the F&B venues and the artists alike. Understandably so – a lot of DJs who work with the format create value and position themselves in the market with “vinyl-only” and “strictly-vinyl” DJ sets – a marketing tactic most F&B venues and promoters welcome with open arms.
This selective (and limiting) focus on the “vinyl-only” format acted less as an invitation and more as a filter for us. Many artists working with sound, field recordings, oral histories, archives, poetry and other forms of listening simply had no place within this framework.
2) The second limitation came as a form of social filtering. VegNonVeg as a brand sells sneakers and apparel, so any regular patron encountering a club grade audio setup inside the store is in for a surprise on any given day. A larger question to ask here is – how do we build a culture of listening when our patrons are not intentful or curious about our practice?
Moreover, the VNV Gurgaon store operates out of the Ireo Grand View mall, which itself advocates for a vociferous social filtering, policing and surveillance of the body on their property. One has to go through a security check while entering the premises. Pets aren’t allowed. Sitting with your legs up on the bench is not allowed. Eating in common areas or outside of restaurant premises is not allowed. Videography and photography are strictly prohibited.
For us, the question of “which section of the society gets to listen” largely got dictated by the context of “where they are listening” and “what they are listening to.” Here amplified sound, much like architecture and urban space itself, runs a risk of becoming a mechanism of social filtering.
3) The third one pertains to geographies which lie outside the usual club circuits. Even among those interested in attending, Gurgaon remained a difficult destination. Much of the independent music community is concentrated in Delhi, and convincing listeners to travel across the city for a listening session proved remarkably difficult.
This pointed to the absence of cultural infrastructures capable of sustaining communities of listening beyond prevalent nightlife circuits. Gurgaon possesses uncountable commercial infrastructures. Although, comparatively few public spaces exist where curiosity, conversation and cultural participation can nurture without first being mediated by purchasing power.
We eventually realized that our curation played up to these limitations rather than overcoming them – dictating the need to reconsider our own curation logic. Consequently, we launched the ‘KISSA In-Store Radio’ operating out of the VegNonVeg Gurgaon store on 18th April ‘26.
Two Ideas of Community Radio
Before turning to the observations, it is worth distinguishing between two very different ideas of what a community radio can be.
In India, the term community radio carries a specific legal meaning. Under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s Community Radio Station (CRS) policy, community radios were conceived in 2002 as a non-profit, hyperlocal broadcasting service intended to support education, culture and community development. These stations are expected to be participatory, locally accountable and embedded within the communities they serve.
At the same time, they operate within a tightly regulated framework. Editorial autonomy is limited, independent news and political broadcasting are prohibited, and the technological reach of each station is intentionally restricted through licensing, transmission power and coverage limits. The result is a form of broadcasting that democratizes access to radio while remaining firmly situated within a state-controlled sphere of public media.
Internet based community radios, on the other hand, emerge under very different conditions. Rather than broadcasting over licensed FM frequencies, these stations operate through the internet, bypassing many of the technological and editorial constraints that define terrestrial radio. Without the need for spectrum licenses or transmission infrastructure, the barrier to entry is significantly lower. Programming is no longer confined to local civic information or state-approved content. Instead, web radios have become spaces for freeform music programming, and editorial practices which value artistic experimentation.
This alternative model is well documented in Hyper-local, Hyper-global: Exploring Sustainability Models in European Community Web Radio – a handbook developed in collaboration between Refuge Worldwide (Berlin), Kiosk Radio (Brussels) and Radio Dopo (Palermo) — see below.
Perhaps the most compelling feature of community web radio is its ability to exist simultaneously as a local gathering place and a globally accessible broadcasting platform. Unlike FM radio, whose territory is determined by transmission power, internet radio produces a more fluid relationship between place and audience. A broadcast may emerge from a neighbourhood café, a record store or an artist-run space while remaining instantly accessible to listeners across the world.
At first glance, this appears to represent a profound expansion of broadcasting freedom. Editorial control is decentralized, technological barriers are lower and participation seems more accessible than ever before. It would be tempting to conclude that these freedoms have also transformed the politics of radio itself. My experience suggests otherwise.
Over the last few years, while recording broadcasts with several community web radios across Asia and eventually building KISSA In-Store Radio in Gurgaon, I began noticing a different set of patterns. These stations were undoubtedly freer than their state-regulated counterparts, yet many seemed to reproduce the same hierarchies of expertise, sonic aesthetics and cultural value that organise contemporary club culture.
Here I follow with four observations which helped me in understanding how these new forms of exclusion are produced – through the technologies, formats and value systems that increasingly define community web radio itself.
Observations
1: The Technological Erasure of Speech
The first thing I began noticing while participating at community web radios across Asia was not the music being played, but the absence of the use of the microphone.
The microphone was there in its physicality, mounted on a boom arm beside the mixer, yet it often remained untouched – by me, and often by fellow DJs too. Entire broadcasts unfolded without a single spoken word. At most, a brief introduction marked the beginning of a DJ set before the voice disappeared again, giving way to uninterrupted music.
At first this seemed like an aesthetic preference. Over time, as we started our own radio, it became difficult to treat it as such. We realized that the disappearance of the microphone fundamentally altered what the radio as a format meant.
Technically speaking, the microphone is one of the simplest devices in a radio studio. It is a transducer, converting acoustic energy into electrical signals. Politically, however, it performs a much more significant function. It amplifies speech – the most accessible mode of making sound and noise available to an individual. The microphone transforms private utterance into public address.
Historically, radio did not become a mass medium because it could play recorded music. It became one because it could amplify voices of the commons and create publics through sound.
Contemporary community web radios have increasingly decentred or completely erased the microphone. Instead of amplifying speech, the community radio privileges uninterrupted musical flow. As a consequence, conversation becomes secondary to selection. This erasure/decentring of the microphone and the amplified voice is not a neutral choice but a political act.
By decentring the microphone, community web radio also decentres the skills associated with speaking, interviewing, storytelling, emceeing and holding conversations.
In their place emerges another form of expertise: music selection, beat matching and sonic continuity. The ideal broadcaster becomes someone who can curate records rather than someone who can sustain a conversation.
As the gap left by the erased/decentred microphone fills with music selection and mixing skills, the broadcaster slowly gives way to the DJ. This moulds a DJ into an archetype of an artist – one which is created on the idea of music mixing skills and selection. The archetype DJ doesn’t need the microphone. This is an act of social and political filtering taking place by platforming select sonic aesthetics – aesthetics which are made possible technologically.
I’m not arguing against DJing here. I am arguing against confusing DJing with broadcasting. The two require distinct forms of knowledge which in turn produce distinct relationships between broadcaster and the listener. A DJ set invites immersion; a conversation invites participation. When the microphone disappears, so too do the social worlds and publics that can only be created through speech.
Interestingly, some stations continue to recognise this distinction. Refuge Worldwide’s submission guidelines explicitly encourage broadcasters, and even DJs to use the microphone, treating speech not as an interruption but as an essential part of the radio form. Such decisions remind us that the marginalisation of voice is not technologically inevitable, but an editorial choice.
2: The Economy of Community Web Radios
The decentring of the microphone has altered the value of a radio. Many community web radios now operate according to the logics of club culture, where the emphasis is placed on showcasing music mixing skills rather than sharing knowledge. For DJs, a radio appearance often functions as evidence of competence – a recording that can later be circulated to promoters and venues in order to score more bookings.
In this way, the community radio becomes less a site of broadcasting and more a site of content production, creating digital nightlife centric portfolios and driving economies of social media. This transformation reshapes programming itself. Aspirational sonic aesthetics which are valuable to the club, the F&B venue and the promoter end up increasingly shaping radio programming.
Conversation appears less valuable than seamless mixing. Imperfection becomes something to edit rather than something to inhabit. Programming gradually aligns itself with the aspirational aesthetics already rewarded by clubs, festivals and online platforms.
Paradoxically, institutions founded to escape commercial music economies – such as the radio – begin reproducing many of their value systems. Even though community radios remain non-commercial in their organisational form, they increasingly participate in the symbolic social economy of artistic branding and value creation.
Technology plays a crucial role in this process. DJ decks have become the default infrastructure of many web radios, central in shaping not only how stories are told but also who gets to tell them. Turntables, CDJs and mixers occupy the physical and symbolic centre of the broadcasting studio. The microphone, when present, often occupies the margins. Such arrangements appear practical. In reality, they quietly (re)organise participation.
Technologies of amplification and playback do not merely facilitate cultural practices; they actively produce them. Every technology demands particular forms of competence. Learning to operate professional DJ equipment requires time, money, access and mentorship. These requirements are socially unevenly distributed. Expertise itself becomes technologically mediated.
Who gets to tell their stories and how they tell them are not separate questions, especially since acquiring skill and building expertise is a question of access to technology.
This became increasingly apparent while curating KISSA Evenings at VegNonVeg. Our reliance on vinyl did not simply determine the format of our listening sessions; it determined the pool of people who could participate. Artists working with oral histories, archival recordings, field recording, poetry or regional music traditions found themselves excluded not because their practices lacked value, but because our infrastructure had already decided what counted as legitimate broadcasting.
The politics of technology are therefore never confined to equipment. They shape social relations and in turn are shaped by them. They determine which skills become visible, which practices become professionalised and which forms of knowledge remain peripheral.
3: Fractured Spaces, Fractured Listening
Community web radios occupy an unusual position within contemporary media because they exist in multiple places simultaneously. Every broadcast emerges from a physical location – a cafe, a record store, an artist-run space or a cultural institution – while also circulating through the placeless architecture of the internet.
These two publics rarely overlap. As Raymond Williams observed, radio has always separated the site of transmission from the site of reception. Yet community web radio intensifies this separation because its physical site is often integral to its identity.
Listeners present at the point of broadcast encounter sound alongside architecture, ambient noise, social interaction and the behavioural expectations of the space itself. Online listeners, on the other hand, receive a comparatively sanitised transmission within their own listening environments. Although they hear the same broadcast, they participate in fundamentally different sonic and social experiences. These fractured listening contexts inevitably produce fractured aesthetics of sound.
Our own broadcasts from the VegNonVeg store repeatedly revealed this tension. The store’s identity is carefully constructed around sneaker culture, analogue hi-fi listening and vinyl DJing and listening cultures. Sound is already part of its brand language.
Yet once the microphone returned to the centre of our radio programming, the broadcasts began accommodating conversations about regional music traditions, personal archives, speculative futures and sonic memory.
These programmes exceeded the cultural vocabulary of the store and VNV’s brand language itself. The radio was no longer simply reflecting the identity of VegNonVeg; it was producing a different public with different expectations of what the space could become.
This points towards a broader transformation in the role of a community web radio. Historically, the legitimacy of a broadcast was derived from the institution that produced it – a recognised radio station with its own editorial identity. Today, the relationship increasingly works in reverse.
Cafes, galleries, record stores, brands and cultural venues establish radio stations not simply to broadcast, but to cultivate a public around themselves. The radio becomes a form of cultural infrastructure through which a physical site acquires social and cultural legitimacy and values of various kinds.
Community web radio, then, should not be understood merely as a broadcasting technology. It is a technology for producing publics that, in turn, reshape the cultural identities of the spaces from which they emerge. The significance of the medium lies in its capacity to continually renegotiate the relationship between place, listening and cultural legitimacy.
4. On the Question of Time
As mentioned before, the community radio has become less a site of broadcasting and more a site of content production. This has affected the “liveness” of the radio.
Traditionally, a live broadcast collapses the moment of capture and amplification into a single event. A broadcast unfolds in the present. The broadcaster and the listener share a moment that cannot be perfectly repeated. Unlike recorded sets, live radio remains ephemeral.
Pre-recorded sets premiered on a community web radio increasingly resist this temporality, especially since pre-recorded broadcasts are easier to edit, archive, circulate and monetise. They can be refined, corrected and repackaged indefinitely. Most importantly, they continue generating value long after their initial transmission. Their usefulness extends beyond listening and into promotion. Recorded time can be stretched in a way liveness doesn’t allow for.
Liveness refuses this logic. A live broadcast privileges presence over perfection. It foregrounds encounters rather than documentation. Mistakes cannot be edited away. Conversations unfold unpredictably. Silence remains possible. Time passes without the possibility of revision.
This ephemerality has always been one of radio’s greatest strengths. It produces forms of attention that recording (both as a product and as a process) and playback cannot. The listener participates in an event by paying attention rather than consuming an ever available object passively.
This in turn affects the aesthetics of sound propagated and platformed by community web radios. Music begins representing professional competence rather than facilitating shared presence. Broadcasts become archives of expertise rather than occasions for collective listening.
The question is therefore not whether community radio should archive its broadcasts. Archives remain invaluable. The question is what happens when the archive becomes more important than the broadcast itself.
It is here that community web radio most clearly begins to resemble the attention economies it originally sought to escape. Its political challenge is no longer simply remaining independent of the state or the market. It is recovering the forms of listening that only broadcasting, rather than content production, can make possible.
Listening is an Act of Curiosity, Curiosity is an Act of Resistance
सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है
मुर्दा शांति से भर जाना
न होना तड़प का सब सहन कर जाना
घर से निकलना काम पर
और काम से लौटकर घर जाना
सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है
हमारे सपनों का मर जाना
— पाश
While the store’s physical and technological limitations pushed us towards adopting the radio format, the above stated observations ultimately shaped the nature of the radio we wanted to launch.
The biggest challenge we faced was the fact that the boundaries between listening and production have changed. The listener is now treated like a consumer. The act of listening has been replaced by the act of consuming music and sound. How do we revive and rethink these boundaries between listenership and production – together taken as an engagement with sound, music and sonic storytelling?
Central to this approach was bringing the microphone back into focus. Rather than centring DJing as the preferred mode of storytelling or reproducing the value systems of promoter and club-driven booking models, the radio for us became a platform for artists, researchers, storytellers, and other voices whose practices do not necessarily fit within conventional nightlife infrastructures.
This also required distinguishing the logic of curating a radio station from that of curating a club programme, allowing broadcasts to develop their own editorial and cultural priorities. The result was a radio that could accommodate a wider range of narratives and sonic experiences: stories about regional music traditions, stories about sounds which subvert, broadcasts that disrupt the sonic environment of the VNV store, and conversations that move fluidly between memory, history, speculation, and futurity.
Launching the radio was a crucial lesson in ownership as well – not only towards our own music, stories and people producing them, but also towards our own social infrastructures. All of our radio staff are broadcasters and radio residents, with a stake in the radio which goes beyond their logistical support. This was a valuable lesson we learnt from the handbook, which helped us further dissolve the boundary between producer and participant.
These approaches fundamentally made us realize the power of cultivating curiosity through the act of listening. For us, the radio is a powerful format which can cultivate a culture of listening to stories, songs, sounds, poems, noise, music, recipes, personal and regional histories, speculative futures and a plethora of other sounds which do not fit the singular narratives currently being propagated throughout the world.
For the poet Paash, the most dangerous thing for us is for our dreams to die – सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है हमारे सपनों का मर जाना. It is no wonder that the importance of dreaming is highlighted by a poet, for a poem is meant to be listened to and to be dreamt along with.
The act of listening, dreaming and being curious are inherently linked. By extension, listening becomes an act of courage and resistance, for cultivating curiosity and dreaming is an act of resistance. But how do we cultivate a culture of listening in order to cultivate dreamers? This, for us, is one of the most crucial questions we are yet to answer through our radio curations.
Thanks for the read and don’t forget to tune into our radio every Saturday and Sunday, 6-9PM IST. In the meantime, follow us on @antarikshrecords and @antarikshradio.
Stay Tuned. Stay Curious!
Anandit for After EOD and Antariksh Records
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About the Author:
Anandit Sachdev is a practitioner and researcher of sound based in Gurgaon, India. Anandit is also the founder and curator of Antariksh Records, an independent record label promoting underground electronic music and sound cultures in the Indian subcontinent since 2018. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Sociology from Shiv Nadar University, India where he is looking at the question of technologies and aesthetics of amplified sound and electronic music in India and how it creates a sense of the social. Contact Anandit here: contact@ananditsachdev.com
Fantastic read! One stakeholder I feel web radios have omitted is the radio jockey, or RJ, and this role has been replaced by the DJ.
A good RJ can often make for a fantastic DJ, but the reverse is not always true. In fact, many well-known DJs first developed their sense of music, pacing, and audience connection through radio. For me, listening remains exciting when there is someone guiding the experience through stories, context, and personality. Otherwise, sound can easily become background noise unless the listener is already tuned in with intent.
That said, the RJ does not have to be understood in the traditional sense. This role might just need to be meaningfully occupied by people from different backgrounds: sociologists, historians, writers, cultural researchers, or experts within specific musical worlds. If web radios want to build deeper listenership, whether through retention or discovery, it may be worth bringing the RJ back, both as a skill set and as a distinct creative presence.