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January 31, 2007

Radio to go

Doc Searls turns the announcement of the rescue of talk-left Air America radio into a riff on the Live Web.

Like most broadcasters, the AAR folks "get" the Net about as well as a fetus gets a fastball. While everybody with an iPod has iTunes, and while iTunes has a radio tuner for Internet stations radiating streams in MP3, Air America's website pushes Air America Radio Premium, with a picture of an iPod and a link to a page where you fill out a form to open an account, if you don't have one already. This is high-friction stuff, though countless sites put you through it.

Then, if you get past the Premium jivewall (yes, I did), you get a list of all the shows, available as podcasts. Sooo... why hide them? And doesn't "premium" suggest that it costs more? In fact it doesn't, but the suggestion (and the friction) is there.

Just as oddly, the tabbed directory on the Air America site makes a distinction between Listen and Find a Station. The top link under Listen opens a linkproof window that gives you a choice of Real Player or Windows Media Player. (Like many of us, I use neither.) Meanwhile, Air America is actually listed among 29 Talk/Spoken Word streams in iTunes' Radio tuner. Why not say so on the site?...

Radio is live. That's what makes it radio. Nothing is a better-suited companion to The Live Web than radio. If Air America 2.0 really wants to do better than Air America 1.0 (and to be as hip to the Digital Age as the version-number approach makes their ambitions sound), it needs to get hip to the Live Web. Right now it ain't.

I don't have an iPod or other portable player -- I'd lose it. But I was briefly a DJ in college, at the innocently named WBS, the Wellesley College station, and I love to find funky little niche stations where passionate fan play their private stashes.

I was psyched about Web radio till CARP (copyright arbitration royalty panel), in 2002 set the royalty rate at seven-hundredths of a cent per song, per listener, effectively wiping out a future filled with DJs in jammies excitedly sharing their discoveries with far-flung fellow fans. (Kurt Hanson's Radio and Internet Newsletter covered this extensively.)

So sometimes I listen on the Web to quirky alternatives such as KVNF, "Mountain Grown Public Radio" -- "KVNF is grassroots, creative, volunteer based, community oriented public radio serving Western Colorado since 1979." I learned of this one from Willie Hillyard, who comes off his ranch to do a once-a-month volunteer stint there.

And I seldom listen to political radio of any stripe. They're all so angry.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:55 AM | Permalink