Paul Rekret on DIY online radio and the fight against algorithmic playlists in The Wire

Dr Paul Rekret, Lecturer in Media Industries, has published a new essay in the December 2025/January 2026 double issue (503/504) of The Wire, the world’s leading magazine for underground and experimental music and sound. In “Against the Stream,” Rekret argues that DIY online radio stations allow humanity and personality to surface in a tide of soulless and reductive algorithmic playlists.

The essay traces how, during the pandemic lockdowns, artists and audiences moved online in search of somewhere to gather, and dozens of small stations appeared or flourished — from Clyde Built Radio in Glasgow to Budapest’s Radio Lahmacun and Seoul Community Radio. Rekret argues that what these stations offer goes beyond a human voice replacing an algorithmic proxy. Producers and hosts describe the physical and social space itself as crucial: the low-level drift of people coming and going, unexpected conversations, and idle time that contrasts with the ever more solitary and smoothed-out experience of platform-based music consumption.​

The piece situates today’s DIY stations within a longer history of autonomous cultural practices struggling against forces that seek to regiment and monetise them, from ham radio enthusiasts forced off the dial by regulators in the 1920s, to the stifling of freeform FM by the 1970s, to the European pirates threading through whatever cracks regulators had not yet sealed. Rekret draws on his broader research into the political economy of creative industries, sound studies and digital cultures, themes central to his recent book Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (Goldsmiths/MIT Press, 2024).

Read the essay at: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/against-the-stream

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