The Infinite Dial

As long as there's been The Infinite Dial, I've resisted the temptation to choose the stations that would comprise my ultimate radio dial. There were just too many potential landmines and sins of omission. Too many choices between what I would listen to and what I thought, in the abstract, I should listen to. In other words, it would be hard to choose between the perceived "best in category" and a station that filled a hole on my local dial.

But now that I have an iPhone (just in time, I realize, for the rest of the world to start talking about the iPad or at least the Nexus One), the stations that I chose as my "presets" are less of an abstraction. There are, of course, a boatload of them, far more than I've actually listened to in my month of iPhone ownership. And enough that even just listing them one format at a time, I risk making many of you glaze over. But the list is shared here to show you both the plethora of choices that your own listeners face and some of the biases that go in to choosing them.

Because so much of Top 40 here is owned by a handful of groups, it was easy to load up on Clear Channel stations in iHeart Radio or Entercom stations in Flycast or CBS Radio stations. There was definitely a lot of "oh, yeah, I should listen to them" at play here. The smaller guys can take some comfort in knowing they were really top of mind for me to search them out in my WunderRadio app. You'll also see a ton of Canadian stations here (again, I was looking for what I couldn't get from stations between New York and Philly).

But here's the Mainstream CHR list -- spread out across five aggregators (which is another reason why I certainly haven't listened to all of these equally) since last month. If your station isn't here, it doesn't mean I don't like it. (It also doesn't mean that I might not have listened on my desktop. And there are stations bookmarked on my desktop that I somehow never got around to here.) It just means that a station wasn't yanked off the shelf during my initial shopping spree of going through all my new apps for stations to bookmark. And not every inclusion consttutes an endorsement -- some are there because I needed to keep up with a market. But, for today, here's the list:

.977TheHits -- Figured it was time to check them out and they were, of course, easy to find/bookmark because of how most aggregators list them.
BBC Radio 1
Capital FM London
CFBT (the Beat) Vancouver
CFUL (Amp 90.3) Calgary
CHBN (the Bounce) Edmonton
CHUM-FM Toronto
CIHT (Hot 89.9) Ottawa
CJCH (the Bounce) Halifax, N.S.
CKMM (Hot 103) Winnipeg
CKOI Montreal
Clear Channel's "Hit Nation" (essentially the Premium Choice Top 40 feed)
Fun Radio Paris
Goom Radio Just Hits
HKGFM.com's Top 40 format
KBFM (Wild 104) McAllen/Brownsville, Texas
KDWB Minneapolis
KHKS (Kiss 106.1) Dallas
KIIS Los Angeles
KJLT (The Breeze) Tyler, Texas
KLSX (97.1 Amp Radio) Los Angeles
KLUC Las Vegas
KMVQ (Movin' 99.7) San Francisco
KPTT (95.7 The Party) Denver
KRBE Houston
Krone Hit Radio Austria
KZHT Salt Lake City
Mix Megapol Malmo, Sweden
NRJ Paris
Nova 96.9 Sydney, Australia
Pandora -- my Top 40 channel which was created 18 months ago and thus will forever be known as "I Kissed A Girl" radio!
Radio DIsney
WAKS (Kiss FM) Cleveland
WBZW (B94) Pittsburgh -- they hadn't yet announced a pending format change
WDCG (G105) Raleigh, N.C.
WDJQ (Q92) Canton, Ohio
WEZB (B97) New Orleans
WFBC-FM (B93.7) Greenville, S.C.
WIFC Wausau, Wis
WKFS (Kiss 107) Cincinnati
WKQI (Channel 95-5) Detroit
WKSE (Kiss 98.5) Buffalo, N.Y.
WMEG San Juan, P.R.
WSPK (K104.7) Poughkeepsee, N.Y.
WXKS-FM (Kiss 108) Boston
WVMV (98.7 Amp Radio) Detroit
WWHT (Hot 107.9) Syracuse, N.Y.