Archives

Past broadcasts, for private listening

The archive holds a rolling window of recent broadcasts — a minimum of about a month's worth of shows at any time. Programmes drop off the back of the window as new ones are added, so a broadcast worth keeping is worth listening to reasonably soon after it airs.

Terms of use

The archives are for the private, non-commercial use of our audience. Any rebroadcast or retransmission without prior written consent is prohibited. This is not boilerplate: the music on these broadcasts is covered by streaming licences that permit one-time transmission by this station, and redistributing a recording puts both the station and the person doing it outside those terms.

What is worth going back for

• Live broadcasts. The Sunday morning shows and the three-hour Saturday programme carry requests, dedications and announcements that never appear in the pre-recorded hours.
• Remotes. Broadcasts recorded at festivals and halls capture bands playing to a room, which is a different thing from a studio recording of the same group.
• Holiday shows. The Christmas and Dyngus Day programmes draw on repertoire that only comes out once a year.

Why the window is short

Storage and bandwidth both cost money, and an internet station of this size runs on a small budget. A permanent archive of every broadcast since the station opened would be a fine thing; a rolling month is what the budget supports. Where a broadcast has lasting value — a remote from a significant event, an interview with a band — it is kept longer.

What an archive is worth

Recorded polka radio is a thinner historical record than most people assume. Terrestrial polka programmes were rarely recorded off air, station tapes were reused or thrown out, and the shows that ran for decades on small-town AM stations have mostly vanished without trace. What survives of the genre on radio is patchy, accidental, and heavily weighted toward the last twenty years, because that is when recording a broadcast became trivial.

An internet station therefore carries an obligation the people running it did not ask for. Every broadcast archived here is a document of what was being played, by whom, and in what order, at a particular moment — and the running commentary that goes with it captures band news, hall closures and deaths that appear in no other source. That is worth more in twenty years than it appears to be worth today.