Radio Active

By Benjamin Nugent

The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools trying to anaesthetize the way that you feel. --Elvis Costello, Radio Radio

At some point or another, everyone thinks about taking a baseball bat to the radio. There's nothing on the air, goes the traditional gripe, aside from the latest flavor of mainstream pop, hard rock and hip-hop. It's a sterile teenage wasteland spanning the dial, disrupted only by the odd college station and NPR.

For the answer to that plaint, put down the bat and turn to the computer. Internet radio offers continuous treams of music, and other kinds of sound, to any consumer who can log on and download audio files. The software that makes this possible comes in the form of programs like RealPlayer that are available for free online. Users can listen to streams, called stations, created by others, or they can create their own streams. And the streams can run while the computer does other things.

Internet radio is a godsend for listeners whose tastes run too eccentric for the MTV Total Request Live navel-exposure set. Whether you hum merengue music in the shower or brush your teeth in rhythm to German techno, there's an online channel that offers what you want. Finding a station that matches your interests at a site like Sonicnet.com is like finding a date in the personal ads. All you have to do is scan the list of descriptions, and eventually you'll find the one that's approximately right for you. Globetrotter? To start, there's "African Experience" and "Brazilia." Headbanger? Try "The Pit" (metal) or "Axis" (adult alternative). With sites like Live365.com that provide average Joes with the bandwidth to open up their record collection to thousands of listeners a day, and sites like indiePOPradio.com that link users to stations geared toward particular interests, the Web holds out the promise of delivering radio from the hands of "such a lot of fools" (or profit-oriented entrepreneurs) into the grasp of the People.

What's even more democratic is that many of these stations are run by amateurs who have nothing better to do with their time than share their musical wisdom with the world. Even if you've never wielded a microphone, you can set up your own Live365.com channel. You can select the option to apply for a station on the site, free, and upload MP3s containing as many songs as you want. You can replace old MP3s with new ones to keep the flow of music fresh, or allow the same selections to repeat ad infinitum. Laws designed to ensure that Web radio can't function as a Napsterish file-sharing system forbid you to broadcast chunks of an album or a lot of tracks from one artist within a short period of time. However, just about any other narrower format is fair game. Computer technician and percussionist Amilcar Carvalho, of Brockton, Mass., who runs a Live365 station featuring the music of his native Cape Verde, uploads "over 100 songs a couple times a week" for pleasure. "I am a musician, and I love people to hear the music," he says.

While the Internet is good to hobbyists like Carvalho, commercial Web radio has fallen upon draconian times. SORRY YOU MISSED US! reads the Web page where the Net radio source iCAST once stood. Like Imagine Radio (subsumed by Sonicnet, which was bought by MTV's interactive division) and Launch.com (being acquired by Yahoo!), it's one of the many Internet radio sources that have gone out of business or been taken over by large corporations in the past several months.

"It's very expensive to do right now," says Jed Grodin, who is in charge of music programming at Hypnotic, the online entertainment company, owned largely by Vivendi Universal, which recently subsumed the Web radio site Nibblebox. "The cost for one person to listen to one minute of music is so high. Streaming providers charge by the megabyte, so every person you add costs money." That means the more listeners a Web radio station attracts, the higher its costs, whereas old-fashioned, "terrestrial" stations have relatively fixed costs for a license, staff and facilities, and tend to get more profitable as they acquire listeners.

Some argue that Web radio listeners, once they find a station to their taste, are thenceforth deprived of the joy of musical discovery. "On Internet radio they really try to lock in to a specific interest," says Brian Turner, a program and music director at Jersey City's fiercely independent-minded radio station WFMU. "I think some of the best discoveries you make happen when you're led down an alley by accident."

That's where the Internet broadcasts of terrestrial stations come in. Alaskans can tune in to the online WFMU as easily as New Jerseyans and thereby subject themselves to a cabal of DJs whose interests include Somalian folk, Italian film scores and klezmer. For that matter, a metal fan from Beijing can log on to BBC.com and come across a Manchester drum-'n'-bass turntablist featured on the home page.

For all these compelling reasons to listen to Internet radio, is any Web radio site a sturdy financial model? For now, the demise of iCAST.com and so many of its Web-only brothers appears to indicate that the durable stations are the ones connected to a terrestrial channel or some bricks-and-mortar business. Knittingfactory.com for example, broadcasts live music from shows at Knitting Factory clubs, and Rolling Stone Radio is part of the venerable rock mag's Web presence.

But Web radio's audience is expanding rapidly. "Two years ago, 6% of Americans had ever listened to Internet radio," says Bill Rose, general manager and vice president of Arbitron Webcast Services, a company that rates the popularity of Web radio stations. "Now it's 20%." Those numbers suggest that Web radio is on its way to capturing the imagination of the segment of the world with leisure time and connection speed to enjoy it. Perhaps one day we'll hear songs by the Elvis Costellos of the future about Web radio's glorious triumph over the bad, old radio--if only, somewhere in the mile-long buffet of channels, we can manage to find them.