Sunday, July 29, 2012

Economy: Internet Rekindled The Radio Star

"Video Killed the Radio Star". This song by the British Synthpop/New Wave group "The Buggles" (released 1979 wikipedia) described the situation in the late 70s and 80s. Videos on MTV and other TV channels stole the audience of the radio stations then. But now it looks like that radio stations came back. It seems that the Internet rekindled the radio. On the world wide web you can find thousands of stations worldwide and listen to them for free.

One of them is "East Village Radio" (eastvillageradio) named after the popular neighborhood in South Manhattan, New York City. When you walk on 1st Avenue just north of Houston Street you can watch their disc jockeys doing their job in a kind of shop window. This is one of these stations I can even listen to in Germany in spite of copyright restrictions which hinder sometimes the international transfer of music.

Very helpful are radio aggregators like Apple`s iTunes, which offers a lot of stations catering differing tastes from Death Metal to Opera. On of my favorite stations is "Institutionalized Cows", which offers a fine mixture of alternative rock.  They compete against providers like "Internet-Radio.com" (internet-radio) or "Live365.com (live365.com). Sadly others like Pandora aren´t available outside of U.S. because of licensing constraints. But there is still enough program to find. Enjoy.

No comments:

Post a Comment