“Radio studies” is a relatively recent term used to signal the explosive growth in scholarship on the medium that has developed as part of a larger interest in sound media and audio culture across the arts and humanities since the 2000s. However, scholarly studies of radio are by no means unique to the new millennium, extending back to the very earliest years of the medium. Prior to World War I, when radio was primarily a medium of point-to-point wireless telegraphy used for shipboard military and trade communications, radio scholarship was mainly the province of science and engineering. As dominant uses shifted to broadcasts of public news and mass entertainment after the war, radio garnered the attention of social scientists, whose methods for quantitative media effects research formed the backbone of work in newly constituted departments of communication studies during the 1940s and 1950s. An initial humanistic turn in radio scholarship came with the rise of dedicated programs in journalism and mass communication during the 1960s and 1970s, which spawned a series of historical studies and critical analyses of radio’s industrial and regulatory regimes. The formation of new departments of radio, television, and film in the 1980s and 1990s ushered in a second methodological shift toward close analysis of politics of representation in radio texts and their negotiations of ongoing struggles for cultural representation by traditionally marginalized social groups. This cultural turn generated increased interest in radio moving into the 2000s, which was further fueled by newfound attention to the medium within neighboring fields of music studies, literary studies, and media arts. Scholarship since the 2000s has been marked by five larger tendencies, including (1) further attention to alternative programming forms and listening cultures, from educational broadcasting to entertainment broadcasts by and for members of neglected or underserved communities; (2) explorations of radio at local and transitional levels, supplementing or challenging earlier emphases on national broadcasting; (3) considerations of digital distribution’s impact on dominant forms of content and listening practices; (4) analyses of radio aesthetics, including work on sound style, genre studies, and performance studies; and (5) a growing intermedial awareness of radio’s connections to neighboring technologies and cultural forms. While focusing on work produced during the height of the radio studies boom from the 2000s onward, this article also includes representative texts from earlier periods and other disciplinary traditions, synthesizing these under a series of broader headings. Beginning with general reference texts and theoretical works, it then moves to more technologically oriented studies of radio inventors and inventions, followed by work on radio’s industrial and regulatory contexts, its programming forms and on-air talent, and its reception contexts. Works listed are limited to book-length studies and English-language publications, with an emphasis on US radio but gestures also made toward other, competing broadcasting traditions within both Europe and the Americas.

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Radio is now such a vital part of every-day life, it is hard to realize in how short a time it has sprung up.… Great singers, great musicians, great actors of the speaking stage were [once] only names to the masses. It was national fashion to despise good music or intellectual fare of any kind.… Quite a hop from that to the spectacle of a popular cigarette broadcasting grand opera in order to reach an audience wide enough for its advertising message. And they say radio doesn't educate! It would have taken all the schools, pulpits, lecture platforms, newspapers, magazines, and the movies themselves half a century to raise public taste as much as radio has improved it in ten years. (Husing, 1935: 4) Give me your children, and I will make a nation of music lovers. (Walter Damrosch, cited in Wilkins, 1969: 125) Writing at the dawn of radio's Golden Age in 1935, NBC announcer Ted Husing opened his memoirs of Ten Years Before the Mike to reflect on both the rapid rise of his career in broadcasting and the astonishing growth of radio itself. During this 'era of expansion', as broadcast historian Gleason Archer has famously labeled the period (1938: 240), the number of broadcasters in the United States exploded, rising from only 30 in early 1922 to over 500 by the time Husing entered the field in 1924 (Sterling and Kittross, 2002: 862). The percentage of households with radio sets also soared during this period, more than doubling between 1922 and 1924, breaking 50 percent by 1931, and reaching a staggering 67 percent by the time Ten Years entered publication in 1935 (Sterling and Kittross, 2002: 862). In scarcely more than a decade, radio had achieved a critical level of cultural saturation, entering tens of thousands of homes throughout the

This article analyzes discursive linkages between acts of listening and eating within a combined multisensory regime that the authors label the gustasonic. Including both marketing discourses mobilized by the commercial music industry and representations of record consumption in popular media texts, gustasonic discourses have shaped forms and experiences of recorded sound culture from the gramophone era to the present. The authors examine three prominent modalities of gustasonic discourse: (1) discourses that position records as edible objects for physical ingestion; (2) discourses that preserve linkages between listening and eating but incorporate musical recordings into the packaging of other foodstuffs; and (3) discourses of gustasonic distinction that position the listener as someone with discriminating taste. While the gustasonic on one hand serves as an aid to consumerism, it can also cultivate a countervailing collecting impulse that resists music's commodity status and inscribes sound recording within alternative systems of culture value.

This chapter addresses processes of genre formation, exploring the role that concepts of radiogénie played in developing new programming forms and a larger sound-mindedness in period producers and audiences. Beginning with a survey of early radio genres and debates surrounding their sonic appropriateness, the chapter then pursues a more detailed case study of the period’s dominant genre, musical variety. Responding to pressures for programming with unity and distinction while ensuring varied content with broad appeal, producers pursued three key strategies for this genre: (1) inclusion of a program host as central unifying figure, (2) interstitial continuity uniting musical selections around a common theme, and (3) the “continuity program,” with weak dramatic frame stories linking otherwise diverse musical offerings. Fulfilling larger economic imperatives without compromising aesthetic potential, this third format was championed as proof of radio’s capacity to offer unique and valued contributions to an expanding field of modern sound art.