International pirate broadcasting has long held a place in the popular imagination; now the impact of British offshore stations of the 1960s is being revisited.
Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, recently pointed to Radio Caroline and its ilk to illustrate his arguments about the effects of youth culture on the marketplace.
“Run-of-the-mill entrepreneurs look for gaps in the market, but pirates find gaps outside the market such as the English Channel, places they’re not supposed to go, where they can do things they’re not supposed to be doing,” Mason wrote in The Independent newspaper.
Mason goes on in the article to draw parallels between the impact pirate radio had on the BBC and the impact file sharing is having on the music industry.
A different look at pirate radio will be coming to cinemas in 2009: The Boat That Rocked began production in Weymouth Bay off the coast of Dorset, England.
The 1960s period comedy built around the operation of an offshore station, the station staffers, the government officials determined to shut it down and the music of the times. The big-name cast includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost and Kenneth Branagh. Richard Curtis wrote and is directing the film.
