Cultural Broadcasting Archive (CBA) is Austrian counterpart to Freie-Radios.Net: Members of the Association of Free Radios Austria (Verband Freier Radios Österreich, VFRÖ) use CBA as an archive of their broadcasts. More than 100,000 audio contributions in about 50 languages from a wide range of topics are available for listening and downloading: From podcasts of ethnic minorities to politics and media to music, literature, science, culture or philosophy. CBA thus is an archive of social, political and cultural events in different regions of Austria and Germany and has developed into an important contemporary document with strong local relevance since its foundation in 2000. In addition to private use, the archive is particularly open for educational work and research purposes.
Similarly to the German archive FRN one motivation for establishing the platform was exchange of programmes among community radios. In this function, more than 35,000 programme acquisitions from stations all over Europe have already been documented since 2004 alone.
Technically CBA is managed by Radio Fro – the free radio in Linz.
Last year CBA started to develop into a European Public Open Space. An independent association was founded. In addition to the radio library for VFRÖ freie-radios.online an independent frontend for CBA cba.media was launched. With collaborative development of digital tools to support the networking of archives, CBA is actively participating in the debate on the future of distribution channels as a European antithesis to the business models of Chinese and American Big Tech corporations.
