The Infinite Dial

Billboard's report yesterday that Clear Channel was looking at some sort of tie-in with Pandora.com -- the music recommendation-driven Webcaster -- makes a lot of sense. CBS already has its deals with Last.fm and, presumably for those looking for a less involved experience, the recently announced Play.It. And with ongoing speculation about its place in a world with increased royalties, Pandora is certainly a viable brand that some terrestrial broadcaster should take advantage of. (You could also see some less interactive version being one of the things that might actually drive listeners to an HD-2 channel.)

The Pandora report came on the same day that Last.fm announced a partnership with Lollapalooza for a Lolla Radio section. That followed, by a few weeks, the announcement of Clear Channel's eRockster.com, which used Coachella for its launch two weeks ago. With the two majors looking to lock in the major festivals, it's only a matter of time before Last.fm and eRockster's avatars come to virtual blows in the parking lot.

In the meantime, a possible Pandora/Clear Channel deal raises a few questions:

With the two major groups locking down two of the major Webcasters, what are other broadcasters doing along similar lines?

What implications do these or other Webcaster tie-ups have for broadcasters' HD-2 multicast channels, particularly in light of recent years' proof that it's not as easy to create this type of content as broadcasters thought?

Is there a way to use Pandora or Last.fm to reinforce radio's strong, but eroding authority in the music discovery area? "Here's a new song that you helped us discover through Pandora.com" has potential cachet on the air. "Here's a song that tested well in a similar market" does not.

Every now and then, I caution broadcasters about those breaknotes that sync directly to the "now playing" display on your Website or streaming audio player and often give more information about the internal workings of the station than you might wish listeners to have.

Here's a new one from a very successful station in a top 75 market:

Under the "Artist" field: "Voice Tracker";

Under the "Title" field: "Live Jock."

In other words, there was a live jock on at the time (and it certainly sounded that way), but there were obviously provisions for when there weren't that included letting everybody know about it -- which is a little more oversharing than merely showing listeners that you are playing "Music Image Promo #7."

Have any programmers/Website managers noticed this on their own stations? Is this an easy fix? Or is it one of those onerous things that PDs are aware of, but live with because it's not an easy fix.

When Radio IO announced their launch of an Internet radio station based on American Idol, I was certainly intrigued. My family has enjoyed the show together since the first season, and it seems like the best performances from the show combined with the best tracks from their subsequent albums might really make for an interesting online station.

Unfortunately, that's not what Radio IO is programming. Here's their definition:

"In addition to American Idol and its many international versions, RadioIO Idols plays songs recorded by contestants from other top TV talent competitions, such as Pop Idol, Pop Stars and The X Factor (UK); Australia, Germany and Canada's Pop Stars; America's Got Talent, The Next Great American Band, Nashville Star, Rock Star Supernova and more."

While 12 of the 19 songs I listened to during a stretch today were from American Idol, as you can see the other seven were from shows I never watched (Making the Band etc.) and international shows, which I would call "interesting but not worth it".

Other things became apparent during my trial. Some former Idols lost on that show for a reason. Sorry, Jessica Sierra but I really don't want to hear from you again.

The programming could use some genre coding ...look through the list of songs below and you will see a Bucky-Carrie-Brad-Josh-Miranda Country sweep. While I liked that, how many other people would? But amazingly, despite that clump, the whole sound is really genre-jumping, nearly to the point of distraction. To go from John Stevens doing Lounge, to Danity Kane dance, to Bro'Sis Dance, into five Country songs in a row - well it shows that even when you are inside a niche you can still be too broad.

Here's a sample of IO Idols from this morning:

Jordin Sparks, "Young and In Love" (American Idol Season 6)
Clay Aiken, "Invisible" (American Idol Season 2)
John Stevens, "This Love" (American Idol Season 2)
Danity Kane, "Pretty Boy" (Making the Band)
Bro'Sis, "You Better Not Come Home" (German Pop Stars)
Bucky Covington, "Hometown" (American Idol Season 5)
Carrie Underwood, "So Small" (American Idol Season 4)
Brad Cotter, "Blue Collar Nights (Nashville Star Season 2)
Josh Gracin, "Telluride" (American Idol Season 2)
Miranda Lambert, "Famous in a Small Town" (Nashville Star Season 1)
Brooke White, "You Must Love Me" (American Idol Season 7)
Will Young, "Don't Let Me Down" (Pop Idol UK)
American Idol Season 4 Finalists, "He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother"
Darius, "I'm Not Buying" (Pop Idol UK)
Taylor Hicks, "Levon/Trouble" (American Idol Season 5)
Jessica Sierra, "Every Reason" (American Idol Season 4)
Michael Johns, "Light My Fire" (American Idol Season 7)
Ruben Studdard, "After the Candles Burn (American Idol Season 2)
Leona Lewis, "Yesterday" (X Factor UK)

As long as we're on the subject of ampradio.com and a national younger-skewed music channel, it's worth a mention of Busradio.com, the Boston-based service that offers three channels of audio for school buses and is now streaming what appears to be the oldest-targeted of the three versions online. While parts of the station sounded voice-tracked, there was a real afternoon drive team handling such topics as letting your best friend tag along on a date. There's also the "win a free concert for your school" promotion (with Boys Like Girls, in this case). In other words, it's much more of a "real" radio station than the great bulk of what I'm uncovering on the Web or HD-2 multicast channels.

Here's BusRadio.com just before 4 p.m. ET yesterday:

Jesse McCartney, "Leavin'"
Sum 41, "With Me"
Lloyd, "You"
Taylor Swift, "Our Song"
Jordin Sparks & Chris Brown, "No Air"
Colbie Caillat, "Bubbly"
Teyana Taylor, "Google Me"
Panic at the Disco, "Nine in the Afternoon"
Ciara, "1, 2 Step"
Natasha Bedingfield, "These Words"
Creed, "One Last Breath"
Mario, "Crying Out For Me"
Fall Out Boy & John Mayer, "Beat It"
Timbaland & Onerepublic, "Apologize"
Sara Bareilles, "Love Song"

Officially launched at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival this weekend with a simulcast on KAJR (Jack FM) Palm Springs, Calif., eRockster is Clear Channel's bid at a national "indie rock" channel with a social networking component, pitting it in various ways against CBS's LastFM, Bonneville's iChannel.fm, Greater Media's Radio You, and others.

Here's erockster.com as heard on KAJR at 7:40 local time this morning, mostly unhosted but with various artist drops:

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps"
Beach Boys, "California Girls"
Tegan & Sara, "Burn Your Life"
Michael Jackson, "Billie Jean"
Bright Eyes, "Old Soul Song"
Ambulance LTD, "Yoga Means Union"
Sex Pistols, "Anarchy In The U.K."
Breeders, "Cannonball"
Pixies, "Gigantic"
Broken Social Scene, "Windsurfing Nation"
Grand Master Flash & Furious Five, "The Message (Part I)"
Blind Melon, "Tones Of Home"
Portishead, "Small"
Killers, "Bones"
Sly & Family Stone, "Family Affair"
Chemical Brothers, "The Salmon Dance"
Johnny Cash, "I Walk The Line"

In many ways, eRockster.com plays as a cross between KDLE (Indie 103.1) Los Angeles and Clear Channel's own WRFF (Radio 104.5) Philadelphia and that station's other adult modern bretheren, with the latter's emphasis on library. If, three years ago, you were one of those people who liked to point out that Bob- and Jack-FM were not your iPod on shuffle, this may well be.

That said, no matter how much credibility the Sex Pistols and Pixies/Breeders may have maintained over the years, if you're playing three in a row from them, you're not exactly the voice of the disenfranchised 19-year-old. This is a good-looking, well-thought out effort, worthy of a major broadcaster in a way that many of the HD-2 afterthoughts are not, but there's still a hole for somebody to fill.

And for that hole approached from another angle, see ampradio.com below:

Okay, WNEW-FM New York is back as an HD-2/Internet radio station. So which legendary stations should be next?

Some obvious and not-so-obvious suggestions to serve as the thought-starter for your list. This assumes, of course, that there are the resources and talent available needed to do it right. (Hey, it's a fantasy...)

* "Boss Radio" KHJ Los Angeles as it sounded in 1966;

* R&B WOL Washington, D.C.--the WPGC of its time--as it sounded in 1967;

* John Lander's KKBQ (79Q) Houston in its first six months as an AM Top 40 before moving to FM;

* Rick Carroll's KROQ Los Angeles circa 1982-83;

* Ed Salamon's WHN New York, with its 1977 "country for New York" aesthetic applied to today's Country;

* "The Big 8" CKLW Detroit in two versions: current and classic. (Sister station CKWW is picking up some of the latter's mantle);

* Mike Joseph's "Hot Hits" WCAU-FM Philadelphia, either with today's Hot Hits or early '80s hits (but definitely with the jingles that didn't make it to CBS' new version in Houston).

I could go on a while with this, but it's your turn.

So it looks like CBS Radio wasn't willing to give the legacy of heritage rocker WNEW-FM New York to Emmis and the WRXP people after all. Since its February launch, WRXP has been pretty overtly trying to answer the question, "What would WNEW-FM have sounded like if it had carried on through today?" Now, CBS is trying to answer that question itself with the launch of WNEW.com as a Website and as the HD-2 channel on the station's former frequency, 102.7, now the home of AC WWFS.

Programmed by WXRT Chicago's Norm Winer (who has also put in an appearance or two as "Norm" in the last hour), the station will be tied in to CBS's Last FM and will also use listeners as "staff" to introduce segments. (There is no mention in the station release of how it will be tied into CBS' new AOL Radio initiative.) On its first moning, Winer and the "staff" were taking turns setting up live performances and interviews from the station's archives, including one of the late Scott Muni, WNEW's longtime PD and best known staffer, and Aerosmith.

Here's what makes sense about the WNEW move: While the need to buy a HD Radio or stream Triple-A has been reduced for New Yorkers in recent months, it's still a well-loved brand and one with national potential on The Infinite Dial (if more for expatriate New Yorkers than others).

The flipside to going after the WNEW legacy, of course, is that even unscoped airchecks of the station from 1978 would have a hard time living up to its most fervent listeners' memories of the station. The other problem is that those fervent listeners are remembering the station from its most specialized era. The most successful WNEW-FM from a ratings standpoint was the late '80s/early '90s version that was a typically conservative response to the rise of Classic Rock. And if there's any station that demands that you bring back some of the former staffers in actuality, and not just in actualities, it's this one. And many of those personalities are now working elsewhere.

But it's an intriguing idea and one that made my co-workers look up from their desks this morning. And here's hoping that Winer receives the resources a station like this would need to work on an ongoing basis.

Here is an hour of WNEW.com at 10:20 this morning:

Elvis Costello, "Less Than Zero (Live)"
Peter Gabriel, "Solsbury Hill (Live)"
Wallflowers, "One Headlight"
Aerosmith, "Love In An Elevator" (preceded by an interview clip with Scott Muni)
The Band, "Up On Cripple Creek (Live)"
Beatles, "She Said She Said"
Bob Marley & Wailers, "Could You Be Loved"
Goo Goo Dolls, "Slide"
White Stripes, "My Doorbell"
Snow Patrol, "Chasing Cars"
Stevie Wonder, "Living For The City"
Led Zeppelin, "Trampled Under Foot"
U2, "I Will Follow"
Soul Asylum, "Black Gold"
Wilco, "Walken"

Country stations outside North America are always an odd bunch with an almost anthropological approach to the format. They are often older in focus and closer to Americana than the mainstream Country format as practiced on any major-market station here. But it was still amusing to discover France's Music Box 92.8, which bills itself as "La Radio Country Rock." Besides the perfect irony of hearing the Dixie Chicks' "Travelin' Soldier" for the first time on the radio in five years on a French country station, there were other amusing touches, including the odd rockabilly version of the Guess Who/Johnny Kidd's "Shakin' All Over."

Here's Music Box just after 6 p.m. local time today:

Dixie Chicks, "Traveling Soldier"
Hal Ketchum, "She's Something"
Steve & Heather, "Right Now" (odd cover of the Mary Chapin Carpenter song)
Beatles, "Michelle" (staged as "here's a flashback from the '60s")
Vince Gill, "What You Give Away"
Jesse Garon, "Je Crois En La Vie"
Little Big Town, "Good As Gone"
Kevin Wood, "Hello Love"
Gene Vincent, "Rocky Road Blues" (also with a flashback stager, but a little less out there than "Michelle")

It's not often that I learn about an Internet radio station in one market from a consumer press story in a newspaper in another market 15 hours away, but HitsvilleRadio.com, a Detroit-based Classic R&B station featuring the market's veteran artists and jocks is a concept that lends itself to national attention like this recent New York Daily News story.

I'm listening to former WJLB/WQBH personality Claude Young, and just as I thought he was only playing the Motown/classic soul hits that you'd hear anywhere, it started to get a little interesting around Jackie Ross. This is the station early this morning:

Temptations, "I Wish It Would Rain"
Junior Walker & All-Stars, "Road Runner"
McFadden & Whitehead, "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"
Four Tops, "Shake Me Wake Me (When It's Over)"
Jackie Ross, "Selfish One"
Fantastic Four, "You Gave Me Something (And Everything's Alright)"
Dells, "Stay In My Corner"
San Remo Strings, "Hungry For Love"
Marvelettes, "Beachwood 4-5789"
Temptations, "(I Know) I'm Losing You"
Temptations, "All I Need"

While the full Website for new Triple-A WRXP, "New York's Rock Experience," hasn't yet been unveiled, the station has made a stream available within the industry. Go to the station's Website and click the headphones.

A lot has been written here about the mess that many stations make of the on-line streamed versions of their stopsets. Some stations are doing a better job of selling local spots to parallel the national ones that would create an AFTRA issue. Others are still giving the audience 4 to 6 minutes of dire-sounding PSAs, bad incidental music, repeating morning show promos, fill songs, or some combination thereof.

In recent weeks, I've been spending more time than usual with Internet-only radio, and I've had the following moment of clarity (which I admittedly could have had a year earlier if I didn't do most of my on-line listening to terrestrial).

Almost every major on-line service offers a premium subscription level with no stopsets -- even though their stopsets are much shorter than most terrestrial stations. Terrestrial stations that at least do the work to fill their stopsets with actual songs are effectively giving the listeners that for free.

So while the best scenario would be to actually resolve the AFTRA issue (and the accompanying Arbitron issue of separately tallied stream listing), and the second best would be to sell more Web-only spots, stations that can't do that have a pretty clear mandate. It's time to fill those breaks up with songs, not fill music or McGruff the Crime Dog (the undisputed king of streaming PSAs) and to tell your stream listeners that they're getting commercial-free music without paying extra for it.

I've started to make my way through some of the 32 new Radio IO channels announced last month, beginning with '90s Pop. And even with the freestyle/early '90s rhythmic battle now taking place in New York, any listen to undiluted '90s for more than a few minutes brings one quickly to grips with just how lost most of that music is. (Songs from the '90s are also a topic of ongoing consternation for radio -- they're still the music of somebody's life, but a negative for everybody else.) So here's the station at 3:30 yesterday afternoon. How long has it been since you've heard more than one or two of these on the radio?

'N Sync, "I Want You Back"
Seal, "A Prayer for the Dying"
Human League, "Tell Me When"
Backstreet Boys, "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)"
Madonna, "Frozen"
Color Me Badd, "Slow Motion"
X-Scape, "Understanding"
Ini Kamoze, "Here Comes The Hotstepper"
Jamiroquai, "Virtual Insanity"
Ace Of Base, "All That She Wants"
Billy Joel, "The River of Dreams"
Aerosmith, "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing"
Michael Jackson, "Childhood"
Jewel, "You Were Meant For Me"

When word began circulating last fall that WNYZ-LP New York, the LP-TV station that broadcasts audio on 87.7 FM, was switching from Russian pop to some form of Top 40 with Star & Buc Wild as the morning show, it was immediately clear that they would need to do two things:

1) Find the format that will make people seek out a frequency that is not even on every radio dial and doesn't have any existing traffic (except for Russian pop fans).

2) Sound "big-time" enough to be taken seriously and simultaneously underground enough to take advantage of the odd "TV on the Radio" nature of the station. There is certainly an audience out there for whom broadcasting at 87.7 FM gives you some extra points for not being radio-as-usual.

Being some form of Top 40 instantly eliminated some of the things that would draw people to a left-field frequency in New York: an all-Caribbean format; a harder-core rap format than what's being played on the two mainstream Urbans, or some sort of younger-targeted/indie rock-driven format (in which case you could play the group TV on the Radio).

That left playing current dance music -- which hasn't been heard much in the market since WKTU segued to Rhythmic AC a year ago, although it still maintains some presence on WHTZ (Z100). And that was indeed the format that the new Pulse 87 unveiled yesterday under new PD Joel Salkowitz, who was doing a similar format on his "Original Hot 97" Website.

As heard in its first two days, the new Pulse 87 is about 40% freestyle and lost '80s/early '90s dance of the sort that would have been on the original WQHT (Hot 97) New York, (okay, Hot 103.5 actually), about 20% current pure dance product, and 40% dance remixes of current pop and R&B hits. (As Billboard's Silvio Pietroluongo pointed out, what's not there yet is some of the dance music from the last two years or so that the market never got to hear--something which was a big part of the current WKTU when it launched in 1996).

It's not a bad time to be launching a dance music station. With recent hits from Cascada, Enur, Bob Sinclair, and even Rihanna's "Don't Stop The Music," you have a better chance of finding enough hits to represent dance music in a research cluster or a TV spot. And we can set aside the issue of whether Rihanna or even Enur represents "real" dance music: there's a lot of danceable R&B and pop right now and regardless of how listeners view it, it still helps them accept the music that comes from the dance community (as opposed to Timbaland or the Neptunes).

As for that other question, of how an LPTV pushes its way into the market with the big guys, adding Salkowitz to the mix added some extra credibility. On its first day (sweepers only, no moring show yet), Pulse certainly sounded slick enough in the opening stage, with one misstep: sending listeners to the Website for audio, even though there's not yet a Listen Live link at this writing.

And streaming will be key for the station. I was told that the signal would be surprisingly good on the station and it was -- I can hear it at my home in Northern New Jersey, about 30 miles from the city, although it's sometimes spotty. It dies out about 10 miles to the west, about 20 - 30 miles short of where other NYC FMs start to fall apart. And here in Somerville, what you get on 87.7 is the audio from Philadelphia's TV 6. But it's a comparable signal to, say, KNGY (Energy 92.7) San Francisco -- a well-respected station that hovers just under a 1-share at most times, and which many market observers think would do better with a better signal.

There's been some speculation among dance and radio fans in the last day about how and if WKTU would react. Yesterday and this morning, it felt like the station was doubling down on freestyle/late '80s (a monitor this morning shows Samantha Fox, Lisa-Lisa & Cult Jam, and George Lamond in close proximity) -- music that has always been on the station but felt like it was appearing with greater frequency today. As for current dance product, it's likely to be there only if the combination of Z100 and Pulse 87 is able to create some more records of the magnitude of Enur.

Here's WNYZ from around 5 p.m. yesterday. All non-dance songs are represented by dance mixes:

Ida Corr vs. Fedde LeGrand, "Let Me Think About It"
Ne-Yo, "Because Of You"
Justin Timberlake, "Until the End of Time"
Corona, "The Rhythm of the Night"
Mary J. Blige, "Just Fine"
Nelly Furtado, "Promiscuous"
Sandee, "You're The One"
Santana f/Chad Kroeger, "Into the Night"
Erika Jayne, "Stars"
Cascada, "What Hurts the Most"
Filo & Peri, "Anthem"
Hillary Duff, "Stranger"
DJ Antoine, "This Time"
Flo Rida, "Low"
India, "The Lover Who Rocks You All Night"
Sean Kingston, "Take You There"
Jo Jo, "Too Little, Too Late"
Ne-Yo, "Sexy Love"
Samantha Fox, "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)"

Meanwhile, if you're looking for another dance choice, one of the other great brands in New York dance radio is now represented by an on-line radio station as well. Longtime A&R person John Parker, now of Robbins Entertainment, is paying tribute to B91, the Brooklyn non-comm that started dance music on its journey to Hot 97 in the late '80s. Check out his station here.

If that Star Registry thing isn't going over as well on Valentine's Day anymore for you, Triple-A WMVY Cape Cod, Mass., is offering the chance to give a personalized music channel. "Music fans design the playlist from our special love songs collection, we customize the player with their names, give it its own URL, show them how to access the player on blogs, sites or e-mail, and make it available to the world for a month," writes the station's Gary Guthrie. The player is available for a minimum donation of $50 to the station's Friends of MVY organization.

Growing up as a record collector, there was one readily available consumer publication specializing in obscure '50s and '60s records (and what they were worth as collectables) and that was Goldmine. Two decades later, Goldmine -- like Oldies radio -- has evolved away from the '50s and '60s to the Classic Rock era and beyond. The lead story on its Website invites debate about the greatest Southern Rock album of all time. You have to scroll down a little to get to the older stuff.

Now, Goldmine has ventured into Web radio with the launch of Goldmine Radio, which editor Peter Lindblad describes as "the pefect avenue for [the serious record collector] to listen to their favorites without compromising the condition of their vinyl collection." (It's a little too late for much of my vinyl, unfortunately.) Down the line, he promises "interviews with artists, collectors, auction houses, music industry players, and more."

For now, it's mostly uninterrupted music with very occasional spots for Goldmine itself. The era is late '70s through today. The music is somewhere between Classic Rock, Triple-A and Americana in texture, although that's where the overlap ends with surprisingly little punk and no R&B -- at least in the segments I've heard. There have also been a number of seemingly featured artists, represented by multiple songs, albeit they're never identified as such: Carlene Carter, Billy Hancock, jazz singer Sheila Landis, Popium, the Confusions, Brian Setzer, and Donnie Iris among them.

If the promise here is discovery, Goldmine Radio certainly delivers. I never knew that Eric Carmen ever cut a disco song. (It's hidden on a 1978 album where I knew only the singles.) In fact, in my listening, I've encountered only two songs I actually knew and a few others that I had heard of but never heard. And I've actually identified a few songs I want to buy as a result of my listening. (Although, given the obscurity level, only about 65% of what I've heard is available on the iTunes Music Store.)

The challenge for Goldmine Radio is that almost every Webstream available now--save the few in major portals that cover mainstream formats -- is a record collectors' Webstream. And each is programmed by its own Jack Black and John Cusack characters from "High Infidelity," who now have a better outlet for their personal tastes than merely railing at anybody unlucky enough to ask for "I Just Called To Say I Love You."

That said, I'm looking forward to hearing the more produced version of Goldmine Radio. I'm also hoping they do well enough to spin off a Goldmine Oldies stream. (There are more places to hear obscure '50s and '60s oldies these days, too, but the brand name would still have some sway for me.) I'm still waiting for somebody to do the channel with a rock critic/music collectors' sensibility, but not necessarily the obscurity level.

Here's Goldmine Radio last night around 10:30 ET:

Haircut One Hundred, "Lemon Firebrigade" (1982)
Popium, "Suits My Soul" (2004)
Sheila Landis, "I Don't Speak Your Language" (2001)
Brian Setzer, "Haunted River" (1986)
Donnie Iris, "Sweet Merilee" (1981)
Lou Ann Barton, "Sudden Stop" (1982)
Eric Carmen, "Haven't We Come A Long Way" (1978, the aforementioned disco song)
Carlene Carter, "You Are The One" (1990)
Billy Hancock, "The Universal Soldier" (2005)
Dr. Hook, "I'm A Lamb" (1977)
The Confusions, "Trampoline" (2002)
Sheila Landis, "Summertime" (2001)
Brian Setzer, "So Young, So Bad, So What" (1988)

As Cumulus' WNNX (99X) Atlanta ran promos in its final days, promising to return after its terrestrial format changes as "the first visual radio station," it was intriguing to contemplate the possibilities. Was this going to be the station that CBS honcho Dan Mason often talks about in interviews--radio reimagined as TV?

Perhaps in the long run. On the day that 99X relinquished its frequency to Top 40 sister WWWQ (Q100), 99X.com was a good-looking site, but the visual element, so far, is a series of rotating promos, many emphasizing clips from the station's ample "Live X" performances, as well as station events. The good news is that the stream starts immediately--after a promo explaining the site--something we're in favor of. The bad news is that if you click anywhere else on the site, it takes you away from the stream, instead of opening a second browser. Videos, the site notes, are "coming soon." There's also only a brief mention in the opening promo of 99X's availability in HD-2.

Musically, 99X.com is actually a little more conservative than the station it replaced -- as if you were launching a new terrestrial station in cume-building mode. But I did hear one 99X signature record, Spacehog's "In The Meantime," this afternoon.

Here's 99X.com at 12:15 p.m. today:

Soundgarden, "Black Hole Sun"
Rise Against, "The Good Left Undone"
Jimmy Eat World, "The Sweetness"
Live, "Lightning Crashes"
Finger Eleven, "Paralyzer"
Stone Temple Pilots, "Plush"
White Stripes, "You Don't Know What Love Is"
Killers, "Read My Mind"
Lenny Kravitz,Are You Gonna Go My Way"
Trapt, "Headstrong"
Nirvana,About A Girl"
Evanescence, "Call Me When You're Sober"

It was an intriguing announcement yesterday from the Beasley/Fort Myers, Fla., combo. Classic Rock WRXK's HD-2 channel had flipped to a combination of "Southern Rock, Blues, Americana, Roots Music and Real Country" as "Haney's Big House 96.1 HD2," tied in to the station's morning co-host. Country/Rock hybrids aren't uncommon in HD multicast world, but I'm eager to listen to this one when it starts streaming.

Beasley streams some, but not all, of its multicast channels. Same goes for Bonneville and CBS. Many of the Citadel channels don't seem to be streaming. Regardless of owner, the HD-2 multicasts are even hard to find mentioned on their HD-1 station's Websites, even when the two formats are complimentary. (Most of the Clear Channel HD-2 stations are streaming, but you can generally find a similar format at its Format Lab site when they're not.)

At this moment, when there are a lot more people listening on-line than on HD radios, the logic of streaming your multicast station far outweighs the only reason not to do it--the fiscal one: Even a modest investment in a station that few listeners can hear is a wasted one. The bulk of the listening to HD-2 multicast stations will likely be done in the future on a wireless broadband radio, so why not start building the brand today? And the notion of a handheld or in-car device that lets me listen to every multicast channel is a lot more compelling to me than just having to make due with the handful from my market.

Beasley/Fort Myers, in particular, seems to have put a lot of creativity into their HD-2s. Top 40 WXKB has a reggae channel. Modern Rock WJBX (99X) has an "emo channel." None, as best as I can tell, stream. And I'd be interested in hearing all of them.

And then I got curious about who else would be worth hearing if they streamed. I made it halfway down the HD Radio Alliance list of multicast stations and came up with two dozen that I would listen to, if they were streaming which, to the best of my knowledge, these stations aren't. (If they were, the listen live link was elusive.) They include:

* KMVQ San Francisco's Top 40 "Northern California's Hit Music Channel";

* WVEE (V103) Atlanta's "Neo-Soul" channel (although WHUR-2 D.C. serves a similar need);

* WKRQ (Q102) Cincinnati's "interactive" Top 40 channel;

* KPLX (the Wolf) Dallas' top 40 Vibe 99.5;

* KVIL Dallas' female singer-songwriter format;

* WLHK (Hank FM) Indianapolis' Americana sister station, "Bubba FM."

* The forthcoming Black Talk format at WMGL Charleston, S.C., and the Classic Country channel at WIVK Knoxville, Tenn. (Classic Country is, of course, amply available on HD-2 and the Web, but you've gotta wonder what WIVK's would sound like.)

As is the case whenever we cover major format changes, the impending departure of WNNX (99X) Atlanta from its terrestrial frequency has brought forth a lot of comments from listeners, many of them seemingly from outside our industry, and many of them ending with that common last line of angry listener e-mails, "From now on, I'm going to listen to satellite rado and/or my iPod."

In the world of The Infinite Dial, of course, there are lots of other replacements for 99X. Which leads me to pose this question for readers: What currently extant terrestrial Alternative stations would a former 99X listener enjoy? While it's hard to replace a legend -- particularly one that is already looming larger in listeners' minds before it even goes away, there are still plenty of choices for a long-time 99X listener, who misses some of the music that the station made famous, still cares about new Alternative rock, and has sensibilities that lean toward the pop/singer-songwriter/true alternative side, not the harder side of the format.

That description covers probably 40-45% of the format these days, including two of the longest running success-stories, KROQ Los Angeles and KXRK (X96) Salt Lake City. Both have become slightly more adult over the last year in a way that might appeal to a 99X person, and X96, like 99X, prides itself on having a thinking person's morning show. You might also steer a former 99X person to:

* The first wave of Adult Moderns (which 99X briefly joined) like KBZT San Diego or KNRK Portland, Ore.

* The new crop of stations on the cusp of Modern Rock and Modern AC. And lest this become one more plug for WRFF (Radio 104.5) Philly, any of the Clear Channel hybrids have similar appeal, including WDVI Rochester, N.Y., or KJMY Salt Lake City. So, for that matter, would its Hot AC WMAX Grand Rapids, Mich., where the top 5 most played oldies are from the Bodeans, Shawn Mullins, Black Crowes, Nine Days, and Toad the Wet Sprocket.

* The more contemporary half of the Triple-A format (e.g., KBCO Denver, KMTT Seattle, KINK Portland, Ore.)

There's also the radio station that kept me on the terrestrial dial for Modern Rock when WXRK (K-Rock) New York went all-Talk for a year, WHTG (G-Rock) Monmouth/Ocean, N.J. Even after being tightened up by a new PD, it's still aggressive with both currents and gold and still has some "what will they play next" aspect to it.

Okay, this is a very partial list -- that's where you come in.

A friend of mine mentioned to me that his mother has been listening Imus via the Internet since his return to radio on WABC. She had been a fan of his on MSNBC, but does not have RFD-TV on her cable system (and she is not in a current Imus radio market).

Intriguingly, he said she is not really enjoying the experience, not because of any changes in Imus, but "because of the endless commercials for the other WABC personalities in the breaks."

This blog and plenty of others have made the point that the listener experience of Internet Radio from over-the-air brands is being hurt by what we are covering the spots with. It always helps to get this kind of evidence. People are listening on the streams, and yet we are tolerating negative experiences that we would simply never tolerate on our over-the-air signals.

As Cumulus' WNNX (99X) Atlanta heads into its final weeks as a terrestrial radio station, it's important to remember how influential the station was a decade ago. Launched in late '92 on the former WAPW (Power 99), 99X was built by Top 40 people (Brian Philips, Leslie Fram, Sean Demery), and was, for that reason, one of the easiest Modern Rockers for industryites outside the format to follow or relate to. And in the mid-to-late '90s, 99X was one of the reasons that the Southeast was dominated by stations that tilted to the modern AC side, whether they were Alternative reporters (WRAX Birmingham, WAVF Charleston, S.C.) or nominal CHR stations (WAPE Jacksonville, Fla., WDCG [G105] Raleigh, N.C., WYOY Jackson, Miss.). Indeed, the song I most associate with 99X in that era is Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason," one of those songs that fit nowhere until it got played everywhere.

So with the news that 99X would be relinquishing its frequency to Top 40 sister WWWQ (Q100), it was nice to be able to get in at least one more listen to 99X as a terrestrial station. (There are several promos an hour for the station's online/HD-2 successor which, the ads promise, will be "the first visual radio station.") To Cumulus' credit, it doesn't sound like a radio station that's going away next week. It's still a very listenable radio station, but the old 99X mystique has been gone for a while -- worm down by the series of direction changes since the early part of the decade that many Alternative stations have gone through.

In some ways, Modern Rock's earliest success stories, particularly the ones evolved from pop stations, were the stations that had the most problems when Alternative and Modern rock smashed together in the early '00s. Stations like 99X and the former WPLY (Y100) Philadelphia were among the last to harden and could never entirely satisfy either the rockers or the "true alternative" people again. When 99X went to adult modern in 2004, it seemed to go narrow just as WBZY (the Buzz) came along to siphon off the rockers.

Things ultimately weren't any easier for Y100 or the more recently departed WAVF and WRAX. WKQX (Q101) Chicago -- another station with similar origins and challenges -- is still among us, but recently moved back toward the harder side of the format. The irony, of course, is that WPLY's departure helped set the stage for WRFF (Radio 104.5) and a resurgence of Adult Modern. But with a few exceptions, most notably KNRK Portland, Ore., it has been easier to do that format with a blank slate (e.g., WSWD Cincinnati) than a set of heritage calls.

But just as WPLY left Philadelphia with a hole for WRFF to cover multiple positions, there's now a hole in Atlanta for somebody to come in and play the Greatest Hits of 99X, whether it's a new Modern AC, a new mass-appeal Alternative, or WZGC (92.9 Dave FM) moving a little more toward the center. Whatever the station and format's recent travails, 99X will leave its musical footprint in the market -- whether that's felt in format changes a month from now or 18 months from now.

Here's 99X this morning at 11 a.m.:

Beastie Boys, "Sure Shot"
Wolfmother, "Woman"
Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Scar Tissue"
Incubus, "Dig"
Weezer, "Buddy Holly"
Foo Fighters, "Long Run To Ruin"
Nine Inch Nails, "Head Like A Hole"
Paramore, "Crush Crush Crush"
AFI, "Love Like Winter"
Bob Marley & Wailers, "One Love/People Get Ready"
Linkin Park, "In The End"
Oasis, "Champagne Supernova"

Before XM and Sirius, HD-2 multicast channels, or even "Real Oldies" stations on AM, there was Richard Kaufman, a/k/a "Ricky the K." and his one-man crusade to bring back pre-Drake '60s-style radio. When I first interviewed Kaufman for R&R in the mid-'80s, he envisioned his wide-playlist, throwback Oldies format on a satellite network (of what would have then been the SMN or Transtar variety). Later, he brought it to the Saturday night Oldies show on KOMA Oklahoma City, then began offering his "Solid Gold Time Machine" on the Internet as a subscription service, which still exists. Now, Kaufman is looking to promote himself with a series of Internet videos, the first of which can be seen here.

Okay, I finally managed to hear the U.K.'s KMFM Ashford, one of the few international stations doing all Christmas over-the-air, as opposed to on a DAB channel or Web-only station. The 45 minutes I've heard so far are more like an American AC station's Christmas in terms of vintage and texture, but still considerably more eclectic than our holiday formats. Here's the station just before 7 p.m. tonight:

Britney Spears, "Santa Can You Hear Me"
Westlife, "White Christmas"
Vanessa Williams, "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"
Ashanti, "We Wish You A Merry Christmas"
Beach Boys, "The Bells Of Christmas"
Tony Bennett, "My Favorite Things"
Pretenders, "2000 Miles"
Stevie Wonder, "The Christmas Song"
Paul McCartney & the Frog Chorus, "We All Stand Together" (1984 childrens novelty)
Andy Williams, "Happy Holiday (Medley)"
Bruce Springsteen, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"
Pogues & Kirsty MacColl, "Fairytale Of New York"
Melanie Thornton, "Wonderful Dream (Christmas Is Coming)"

In the course of yesterday's posting about WRKS (Kiss FM) New York, I realized how weird it was to be writing in this day and age about stations that don't stream. During 2007, most of the major-market and large-group holdouts finally became available on the Web. If I moved out of range of New York radio tomorrow, I'd lose Kiss and its Emmis sisters -- at least for now -- and the oddball Oldies/Standards mix on Long Island's WNYH. And that's it.

That got me thinking about what I'd like on The Infinite Dial that still isn't streaming. And it's a gratifyingly short list. I haven't been able to listen to any of the British stations that are running an all-Christmas format (with some Web-only exceptions, as previously noted). I haven't been able to check out some of the intriguing looking HD-2 multicast channels. I wasn't able to write about Adult Standards WNMX Charlotte, N.C., when I was at NAB because they neither streamed nor were audible in my downtown hotel room. And I never got to hear Saul Levine's Southern California Classic Country AM, which promised to be as iconoclastic as any of his other stations.

It's not like I don't already have more radio than I can possibly get around to listening to. But in a pefect on-demand world who else would be streaming?

* WTIX-FM New Orleans and WAKY Louisville, two quirky Oldies FMs that are reanimating some vintage call letters;

* The Emmis stations that are still MIA, particularly KBPA (Bob FM) Austin and KPWR (Power 106) L.A.;

* Adult Top 40 WBMX (Mix 98.5) Boston;

* The English/Spanish-language CHR hybrid on KSSE (Super Estrella) Los Angeles, and Bob Perry's American "Radio Digital" Spanish-language CHR clients;

* KRXY Olympia, Wash., the unusual Adult Top 40 that was my P1 station for several months from 3,000 miles away when it did stream around the early part of this decade.

And after that, the list gets even more eclectic. And a lot of the list above is likely to appear on the Web sometime during 2008. But you definitely take for granted having so much radio available: I went looking for KEGL (the Eagle) Dallas in its first day back as a Rock station yesterday and was surprised to find it not yet there.

So what's your list? What station would you listen to right now if it was streaming?

As hard as it's been to find pre-Beatles Oldies on the radio, it's also been hard to find Classic Soul--at least during the week. The handful of terrestrial R&B Oldies stations available on the Web in recent years have either disappeared or segued to Urban AC. So I was more than willing to click through when I got the e-mail invite from Soul-Patrol.com's Bob Davis for the Classic R&B channel that he was now programming at RadioIO.com.

In his e-mail, Davis promises to find the "sweet spot" for both "hardcore and casual" R&B Oldies fans with a "deep and wide" playlist that was 1,500 songs (as of a month ago). Referring to the New York radio dial of the late '60s, he describes it as a combination of R&B WWRL and WBLS, Oldies WCBS-FM, Top 40 WABC, and Jazz WRVR, but you could as easily think of it as the crossover hits from the Jammin' Oldies format, the Urban AC Oldies that are known only to those who grew up with R&B radio, the R&B titles from a "Real Oldies" station, and then a healthy dose of collectables on top of it.

Here's Radio IO's Classic R&B channel at 3:30 today:

Ad Libs, "The Boy From New York City"
Bob Marley & Wailers, "No Woman, No Cry"
Santana, "Oye Como Va"
Miracles, "Love Machine"
Bo Diddley, "Road Runner"
Dionne Warwick, "Alfie"
B.T. Express, "Give It What You Got"
Marvin Gaye, "Got To Give It Up"
Isley Brothers, "Fight The Power"
Angela Bofill, "This Time I'll Be Sweeter"
Isaac Hayes, "It's Heaven To Me"
Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, "Going To A Go-Go"
Billy Preston, "Nothing From Nothing"
McFadden & Whitehead, "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"
Ruth Brown, "5-10-15 Hours"
Dusty Springfield, "Wishin' & Hopin'"
Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk, Pt. 2"
Luther Ingram, "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want To Be Right"

I've been looking forward to hearing the all-Christmas format spread to the U.K., just out of curiosity about hearing the format in a parallel universe, particularly one that has historically had a lot of Christmas hits of its own. The commercial all-Christmas stations (Real Radio's digital format and the KMFM group) are either not streaming or blocked outside the U.K. But Internet broadcaster Play Radio UK can be heard here, and the segment I heard late this evening is indeed a very different take on Christmas.

(Play Radio UK's stream didn't have song and artist information, BTW. So it took a lot of surfing the British iTunes music store to figure out what some of these songs were. There was also one instrumental I couldn't place that would be two songs from the bottom. But you'll get the idea.)

Here's the station around 10:45 p.m. tonight local time.

Whitney Houston, "Do You Hear What I Hear"
Britney Spears, "Santa, Can You Hear Me?"
Wizzard, "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday"
Pogues, "Fairytale Of New York"
Frank Sinatra, "Hark The Herald Angels Sing"
Bob Seger, "The Little Drummer Boy"
Chris Hill, "Bionic Santa" (a 1976 Dickie Goodman-type novelty record using '70s hits)
Jethro Tull, "Ring Out Solstice Bells"
St. Paul's Cathedral Choir, "We Three Kings"
Whigfield, "Last Christmas" (Euro-disco diva who had the 1994 UK hit "Saturday Night")
Roxette, "It Must Have Been Love" (have no idea how this got here)
Slade, "Merry Christmas Everybody"
Bob Rivers Twisted Christmas, "Grabbe Yahbalz (Like Michael Jackson)"

The press release was intriguing, not the least of which was because it quoted Edison Media Research. It was from a portal called RadioTime.com, promoting a new application that "automatically detects a listener's location and displays all local AM/FM radio stations and programs. This Local Radio search engine makes it easy for people to browse and listen to local programming on their PCs or streamed to wireless Internet radio devices."

I'm always a little unnerved by Web applications that let me know they can pinpoint my exact location. But I did log on. And the program did immediately know that I was in Somerville, N.J., and gave me the list of available stations. That list was pretty comprehensive with locals and New York stations (about 45 miles away), less so with Philadelphia stations (had a few, although I can get 80% or so of the market in the car), had some not all of the Allentown FMs (most come in here), and didn't have the handful of Jersey Shore stations that I hear on a regular basis here. On AMs, it actually erred a little bit in the other direction with some stations that I can pull in, but wouldn't consider listenable.

The application did list most of the HD-2s that went with the New York stations although, in reality, few of them actually travel as far as Somerville. It listed our local WAWZ's HD-2 station, but not its HD-3.

Overall, I would have preferred that RadioTime had erred a little on listing some of the stations that rimshot my location. After all, the reason I might use the application instead of my desktop radio is for one of the Philly stations that just miss coming in here.

That said, most of the radio station streams that I clicked through to from RadioTime.com did launch quickly. In that regard, it rivals the fastest way I've found to punch back and forth across a given market, RadioSherpa.com. (And the latter only works with three markets so far.)

(BTW, there's no connection between us and RadioTime. The quotes were used by permission and came from this year's Infinite Dial study in partnership with Arbitron on AM/FM listening levels.)

You may not have heard much about legendary programmer Ron Jacobs since his much publicized salvos toward Randy Michaels in the early '00s. But for the last four months, he's been back in action as the programmer/host of what he describes as "my newest and final project," WhodaguyHawaii.com--a site/stream devoted to the "full spectrum of Hawaiian music from the turn of the 20th century to today."

As Jacobs notes, "Gazillions of people have honeymooned, served in military, attended school, vacationed, etc., here." And beyond those looking for an audio souvenir as the mainland weather gets colder, he also has an eye on all those HD-2 channels that broadcasters are looking to find content for.

At home, Hawaiian music has splintered into at least three formats since it first came to prominence on the FM dial nearly 20 years ago. The top-rated Hawaiian station, KINE, is No. 3 in the market (sometimes higher) and the younger leaning KCCN is No. 5. By comparison, the first of the market's Rhythmic Top 40s is No. 8 in the market.

The Hawaiian music I heard in my two stretches of Whoadguy listening tended toward the mellower, more traditional side. There's clearly a market for that; (if you stop at the airport gift shop looking for Hawaiian music to take home, it tends toward the traditional side, too, and it's also the music that has proven irresistable to TV music supervisors in recent years). I actually found myself wishing Jacobs would launch a second, more contemporary stream along the lines of the more rhythmic/reggae-flavored music that emerged in the '90s. But Jacobs' ambitions of being Hawaiian music HQ for a long-tail world certainly makes sense.

There was a side benefit of checking out Whodaguy this week. Jacobs links to the site of veteran TV comedy writer/broadcaster/play-by-play voice Ken Levine (aka "Beaver Cleaver" to '70s radio junkies). Levine's very funny account of the WGA picket line can be found here.

New York's freeform legend WFMU thinks it is the first station to crack the iPhone streaming nut, and are now offering podcasts and a live radio stream over WiFi and AT&T's EDGE. I tried both the 128k stream on my WiFi network and the 32k EDGE stream (which isn't gonna pass for "radio" in my book for a while, but is better for talk formats).

In any case, it worked as advertised. It's good to know that later this week, as I travel to exotic Dubai, that I will be able to listen to WFMU wherever I am. For 10 bucks a second, anyway. WFMU used a solution from TVersity to get it done, and it is a neat little hack. If you are streaming and want (if nothing else) to monitor your station via your iPhone or iPod Touch, it might be worth a go.

A month ago, I wrote about attempting to stream Triple-A KGSR Austin, Texas, and the elaborate sign-up that listeners were forced to go through -- providing 10 pieces of personal information -- before being allowed to listen to the station.

So it was nice to get this e-mail yesterday from KGSR market manager Scott Gillmore:

"I thought I'd let you know that we have freed the stream (as we have with our other Austin streaming signals). We had been experimenting on [N/T sister] KLBJ-AM's stream to see what the impact of no registration would be on our streaming numbers and on our database numbers. We were satisfied that we can more effectively grow both now by seperating them and offering seperate incentives for joining the database. Your blog made good points and factored in our decision too."

You can enjoy the newly liberated KGSR stream here.

I've heard it at least twice in the last week. A jockless station has one of those jaunty Jack-like stagers going into the stopset to announce that the station is going to play commercials and will be back soon. The only problem is that there are no actual commercials there. In the first case, the station was too new and the stager was followed by various times that morning by another song or a "now back to music" stager. In the second, the "more music next" stager was followed by another song (which, as it turned out, was the Internet stream fill song, which became clear when it was cut off halfway through a minute later by a PSA).

"Creating a stopset where none exists" has been a problem for stations for a long time--usually for stations that are too new to have a lot of commercials, or on their last legs. DJs in the '80s and '90s would dutifully end the 10-in-a-row sweep to go into the weather jingle and back to more music. But it becomes a different problem in an era of jockless stations and stations that use production to do what the jocks used to do. And it became exacerbated a few years ago when Bob- and Jack-FMs began calling attention to the stopsets in an effort to be cheeky and anti-radio.

As stations become better about replacing Internet stopsets with actual songs (as opposed to the same handful of endlessly repeated PSAs), we probably need to rethink what the stopset is and how to go into it. If as much of a fith of the audience is going to keep hearing music, why tell them that they're not? And in a PPM world where stations are (for better and worse) going for being unobtrusive, the stopset hardly seems to be the right place to break that policy. Beyond that, the whole calculated roguishness of calling attention to the stopset has become enough of a cliche over the last 3-4 years that it no longer establishes you as different.

For all the attention that goes to the terrestrial vs. satellite battle, I was reminded anew of satellite's other rival this morning when I had occasion to check out Soft AC WJZQ (the Breeze) Traverse City, Mich., this morning. WJZQ streams through Live 365 and before my stream started, I heard a promo that asked something on the order of, "Why listen to a few hundred stations on satellite radio when Live 365's VIP service offers more than 10,000 stations with no commercials?"

The promo was a reminder that radio--satellite and terrestrial--is still competing not only with Internet radio, but subscription Internet radio services like Live 365 and Yahoo Radio that offer paid premium tiers of service. Whether it was Sirius and XM's intent to go after some of that business, or just establish their place on the forthcoming Infinite Dial of the wireless broadband era, their (relatively) recent emphasis on Internet listening has clearly been a shot across the bow, occasioning a shot back like this one.

The call came from somebody outside the business who had found an old Ross On Radio column about the former WRLL (Real Oldies 1690) Chicago and its pre-Beatles format. When the 1690 frequency became the new home of News/Talk WVON, the old format remained on-line and he continued to listen. But now, he said, even that stream was starting to filter in some music from the mid-to-late '60s. What about all those other stations I wrote about at the time, back in 2003-'04 when many in the industry were hoping that pre-Beatles Oldies would allow every Adult Standards station in America to update?

Sorry, many of those stations are gone as well: no more WWKB Buffalo, N.Y., WSAI Cincinnati, WCOL Columbus, Ohio, or WKAP Allentown, Pa. Of those stations, only WKAP got significant ratings traction for a while. Others, like WOKY Milwaukee, quickly settled in a mix of eras not that different from the FM stations they replaced. (I just checked out WOKY and it was playing "Lyin' Eyes.")

WRLL's Web stream, by the way, still plays a lot of pre-Beatles music. When I flipped them on, they were going from Little Willie John to Eddie Cochran to the Flamingos. But there was also "Michelle" by the Beatles and "Sunny Afternoon" by the Kinks. And even on new Oldies AMs like WMTR Morristown, N.J., and CKWW (AM580) Detroit that play some pre-Beatles songs that you don't usually hear elsewhere, you're still going to hear late '60s and even early '70s. Only the '50s channels on Sirius and XM continue to concentrate primarily on pre-Beatles and, remember, even they are adding a little early '60s to their original '50s emphasis.

A lot of the pre-Beatles Oldies AMs were claimed by the rise of Air America and liberal talk. And when the rush to blow up Oldies FMs slowed down a little this year, there wasn't the same sense of opportunity that had existed a few years ago. My favorite station for obscure oldies, WNYH Long Island, N.Y., plays a broad mix that ranges from standards to '70s with a lot of deep pre-Beatles in between. But they don't stream yet.

So it's hard if you're a purist. But here are some stations that might be worth checking out:

* KXKL (Kool 105) Denver's "Kool 105 Classics" HD-2 channel: Kool 105 has made the same era move into the '70s as most of its counterparts. But their HD-2 station has picked up the slack; it went from the Flamingos into the Ronettes into Paul Anka when I turned it on this morning.

* The "Real Oldies" format at the Clear Channel Format Lab: It was created by the same people who gave us WRLL, WSAI, and many of the others. But it now contains mid-to-late '60s as well.

* WMID Atlantic City: Again, I heard Mitch Ryder's "Sock It To Me! Baby," which is never a problem for me, but I also heard the Angels into Johnny Mathis' little-heard "Small World." And they bill themselves as "broadcasting from the doo-wop capital of the world."

* WMTR - As previously mentioned, they've moved into the late '60s and early '70s now--not nearly as deep as they were a year ago when it was possible to hear a Royal Teens song other than "Short Shorts." But there's still a lot of pre-Beatles music on there. And it's still the station I go to when I have an urge to hear "Killer Joe" by the Rocky-Fellers.

* Suburban Detroit's WPON, which bills itself as "talk and rare Oldies."

* WSAI's successor, WDJO, which has some of the same staffers and plays a 50/50 mix of pre- and post-Beatles.

For what it's worth, I miss the pre-Beatles AMs, too. I started listening to pop music in 1967, so a lot of the late '50s and early '60s are lost on me--particularly the Connie Francis/Neil Sedaka/Paul Anka ballads. But WSAI--the best of the category, I thought--was a well-produced, well-executed radio station, the kind that could make me sit through a song I didn't like. (Besides, they were all two-minute songs!) There are doubtlessly Internet-only stations specializing in pre-Beatles. But I'd rather hear them in the context of a full-service radio station.

But please chime in with your suggestions on pre-Beatles Oldies and where to hear them by clicking the comments tab above.

Just for fun, I decided to see what you get when you enter certain search terms, as a consumer perhaps might do when looking for something to listen to, into Google.

So first I just typed in "Great Radio". The first link is the truly distinctive KEXP-FM in Seattle -- the University of Washington eclectic station. I had some real fun listening to that.

Then, I tried "Great Rock Radio." The first link was ChristianRock.net, not my taste, and they didn't make listening on line too easy by making me pick from an endless list of players, many of which required "plug-ins"...which sounds scary. The second link was RockRadioFM from the UK, which wouldn't let me get their stream...I assume because of my American IP address. The third link was for K-Rock in New York. The fourth station was Planet Rock, another digital station from the UK, which I could stream with no problem.

Next up: "Great Country Radio". Interestingly, the first link there was CMT's surprisingly robust radio offerings page. WYCD, CBS's station in Detroit, came second.

Lastly tonight I tried "Great Hip-Hop Radio." That took me the HipHop Express Radio Show , a podcast featuring "Mad Exclusives from Some of Today's Hottest Underground & Independent Artist (sic) in the Business."

I listened at least a little bit to everything I found (that would let me). Tons of fun. A great way to spend some time online. Traveling along the Infinite Dial is the modern equivalent of lying in bed in the early 1970s and listening to AM radio stations from around the country. But now the excitement is listening to "Great" radio, not simply being wowed by the fact that you could hear stations from New Orleans or Montreal.

Okay, it's hardly news that many Rock radio Websites offer extensive displays of female pulchritude. But even by Active Rock standards, KYRK (the New 104.1) New Orleans Website stands out, not just for the sheer amount of the real estate given over to the babes, but also by the positioning statement that flashes across the animated header bar: "Hot Chicks, Rock Music." Pay particular attention to the order there. And if the new way of thinking is truly that the Website is the franchise that just happens to have a terrestrial radio station attached to it, does the format then become Maxim with music?

Well, it's hard to imagine how that would play out on the radio in this era of relative caution. So far, KYRK on-air is very mainstream. Musically, it's working the border between Active and Modern, like many Clear Channel rockers. And despite the raunchiness of the site (the "now playing..." display reads "...with ourselves" when the station is in spots), there wasn't any reflection of that content in the 45 minute or so stretch that I heard. In fact, the one crossplug for the Website that I heard was to stream the new Foo Fighters album.

CBS Radio president/CEO Dan Mason's remarks at Friday's R&R luncheon have been covered elsewhere since then, but they still rated a quick mention. After three days that didn't often make one feel good about the radio business, it was a nice and much needed gracenote to leave with some unabashed enthusiasm about programming. More important, after walking away from the session, "The Bedroom Project" without the answer I wanted--did young listeners jump or were they pushed?--it was nice to hear somebody say outright, "Like it or not, we've been out of the 12-to-24 business for 30 years . . . so why should the industry be so shocked now?" Any resurgence in younger listening, Mason noted, would likely be on a different platform, e.g., younger listeners who will listen to all-news stations on the Web, but not on AM.

If you are a Mac user, you are gonna want this: Radioshift: Radio on your schedule. I have been a fan of Rogue Amoeba's products for some time now (Audio Hijack is indispensable, and NiceCast is about the slickest way to stream audio from your client I have used to date). Radioshift, though, is a software-only solution to listen to whatever radio you want, whenever you want it. With a very comprehensive programming database of 50,000 programs and stations and an immediately intuitive interface, RA has another hit on their hands. If you don't have a Mac--go get one! This is the closest thing I've seen yet to approximate TiVo for radio.

I clicked on "listen live" and was startled to see that in order to listen to KGSR one must join its frequent listener club, and give them ALL of the following information: First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Phone Number ( ! ), Street Address, City, State, Zipcode, Date of Birth, and Gender! Yes, in order to listen one MUST give 10 pieces of personal information -- and wince through the possibility of getting phone calls at home etc.

I suppose one could lie about all these things, but at minimum you have to put in your correct email address, because in order to listen one must THEN wait to get a confirming email with a password, and then go BACK to KGSR's site, enter that information, and then FINALLY have your opportunity to listen.

Now KGSR is a truly great radio station. But who is going to give them so much information for the privelege? It is as if they are trying to inhibit listening. And perhaps that is indeed the goal.

By comparison, one can go to Kurt Hanson's Accuradio, click on your station of choice and immediately listen. Go to Pandora, type in the name of your favorite artist, and you immediately hear a song by that artist.

If 'terrestrial' radio hopes to have any chance at all to compete on the Internet, doesn't it have to be immediately available? You turn on a regular radio and hear a station INSTANTANEOUSLY. I'd love to see the stats on how many people click on "Listen Live" on the KGSR site, get asked for all that info, and then click away.

Radio -- take your stations out behind the bars of building "frequent listener clubs." Instead, let me listen to your station and then compel me to join the club through offers and benefits that can't be resisted.

I'd been meaning to check out WBEW (Vocalo 89.5) Michigan City, Ind., the new younger targeted, more diverse offering from Chicago Public Radio since its June 4 launch, but I'm getting around to it this afternoon as the result of a recent story in suburban Chicago's Daily Herald.

Targeted to "audiences that have not traditionally listened to public radio," in the words of a station spokesman, Vocalo is a mix of eclectic music and listener-generated content.

In the last half-hour or so, I've heard a mix of progressive hip-hop and R&B (Brother Ali's "Uncle Sam," Blackalicious' "Powers" and the maybe-not-so-progressive-anymore "Mighty O" by Outkast) and eclectic rock (The Replacements' "Take Me Down To The Hospital" and Bobby Conn's "[I'm Through With] My Ego"). Those have been interspersed with spoken-word bits from listeners on such topics as dreaming about Mr. Spock and watching a dog kill a squirrel. There's also been a break in which the host discussed the making of the Mr. Spock piece in a way meant to encourage listeners to submit their own pieces.

In intent, it's a next-generation NPR and there's no shortage of agreement on the need for such a thing. In practice, Vocalo alternately recalls a lot of things--the college radio of 30 years ago, the earliest days of progressive radio, and the almost-completely-lost-to-history black progressive radio of the '70s. It is also very reminiscent of the "Open Source Radio" experiment on CBS' KYOU San Francisco.

Check out Vocalo here, I would be interested in your thoughts.

WHTZ (Z100) New York has given a lot of on-air real estate to the Z-Zone, one of a number of new social networking sites built around its radio stations, but it recently turned gave the Z-Zone another interesting piece of real-estate: space on the station's Webstream player.

On Z100's website, as well as those of sisters WIHT (Hot 99.5) Washington, D.C., and WKQI (Channel 95-5) Detroit, the "listen live" link now instead reads "listen live and chat." Hot 99.5's player is actually branded to its "Hot Spot" social networking site--making it essentially a chat tool that just happens to stream a radio station.

Bundling the chat and streaming features does a couple of interesting things. 1) It makes signing up easier and puts the Z-Zone, Hot Spot, and WKQI's "The Unit" in front of even those listeners who might not have had any use for MySpace, Facebook or other social networking sites; 2) It pushes anybody who's using the chat tool to actually listen to the radio station. Podcasting, social networking and other non-traditional applications are often thought of radio as following its listeners to their other media choices. So it's nice to think that the social network sites might be used for something as old-fashioned as driving listening.

With WiFi being a central feature of the new iPod Touch, Apple had an interesting choice to make--one with ramifications for everyone reading this. Some pundits speculated that this would finally bring open wifi radio to a portable device, akin to the Sansa Connect's integration with Yahoo Music. Of course, the Sansa is a closed-loop system--you can only listen to Yahoo Radio, and purchase songs via subscription to Yahoo Unlimited, but it still represents a start--turning the mp3 player from a sealed box into a portal.

Apple could have opened up the iPod to Internet radio--but they didn't. And why should they? With little money being made--yet--in internet radio, they had little incentive to hitch their wagon to one of the leading streaming players when they continue to sit on the biggest cash cow (in the true Boston Consulting Group usage of the term) in the music industry--the iTunes music store. So instead of listening to your station on an iPod, owners of the iPod Touch and the iPhone will be back on the iTunes music store, as usual, tightening Apple's grip on consumer music.

There is one exception--an integration with Starbucks that allows iPod users surfing the WiFi in a Starbucks store to automagically click a button and buy the song currently playing in the coffee shop. Earth's largest music store joining forces with Earth's largest retailer (in terms of number of locations--take that, Subway!). One of the most magical elements of the Apple brand is its ability to always look like the underdog--but with this move, they are Goliath, not David. I'm with Rick Rubin on this one--music is a commodity now, plain and simple. And Apple is Archer Daniels Midland--Supermarket to the World. If you are a music station, it is more important than EVER to have begun executing a web strategy to build community around music and music discovery, which still play vital transactional roles in the great music machine. Radio used to be the sole arbiters of musical taste over the air, but has ceded that role to the Internet, as our most recent research has shown. But "the Internet" doesn't have to be someone else's web site--it could (and should) be yours. Cede nothing.

Today's Radio Business Report has a story on a rumored deal for streaming royalties that hinged on webcasters accepting the inclusion of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology on any webcast streams. Whether this rumor is true or not, the inclusion of a DRM wrapper on your stream is more than a "trade-off" or compromise--it is the poison pill that might just sink your streaming efforts for good.

DRM is bad. When I buy a video on iTunes Music Store, and want to watch it on the larger, brighter screen of my Zune, I can't--because of DRM. The same is true if I download a song from my (legally paid-for) Yahoo Unlimited music subscription and want to listen to it on my iPhone. I can't--because of DRM.

But DRM is more than just an inconvenience--it represents a return to the client/server decisions of the late 90s that hamstrung so many webcasters. When I was a partner in Chrysalis Media's streaming radio venture in the UK back in 1999, there were still all kinds of client issues with webcasting--do we broadcast in Realaudio, Windows Media or Quicktime? Do we need three servers to stream all three formats? What do listeners need to download/install, and how do we help them through that process? What about Mac listeners?

These became financial decisions, not decisions based upon the needs and wants of our listeners. Thankfully, those days seem to be behind us. Webcast audio works best when it is format-agnostic, a generic MP3 audio stream that can be read by any player, presenting as few barriers between your listeners and their content as possible. DRM-wrapped audio, on the other hand, will require your listeners to use one client for your audio stream, but maybe another for other stations they listen to. That is a real step back, in my opinion, and your listeners shouldn't have to go through Real to get your station--they should be able to listen to it on iTunes, over their browser, through a flash-based player--whatever.

Consumers are becoming more and more aware of DRM--hence the recent deals announced by Real/Rhapsody, Wal-Mart, and (to a very limited extent) Apple to sell DRM-free music. Mainstream consumers are just now bumping into the hard edges of DRM, and are beginning to understand that what they buy, they don't seem to own--and many don't cotton to that. I know I don't.

Accepting the poison pill of DRM is essentially treating their lack of a 21st century business model as your emergency. Your best hope is to spread your content as far and as wide as you can, without barriers and without making your listeners jump through hoops. Don't take the pill.

Kudos to the NAB for sending mock SoundExchange invoices to 13,000 member stations. I might have made those invoices even more explicit/specific to the stations that received them, but in any case this was a creative way to get this issue back on everyone's front burner where it belongs. (originally posted in Kurt Hanson's RAIN Newsletter)

It's pretty standard for Europe's major broadcasters to offer a suite of Web-only brand extensions these days. There's typically an all-'80s station, a lounge or chillout format, an R&B/hip-hop format of some sort, an indie rock channel, and a Top 40 channel that is younger or newer than the more adult mix that usually constitutes Top 40 in Europe.

But Frankfurt's heritage Hot AC FFH has something unusual in its tier of Web-channels, a format it's billing as "FFH Jack FM." While the first announced international Jack FM client in Oxford, U.K., gears up for its launch later this year, it's interesting to hear it with German liners (but no apparent attempt to re-create the tenor of Jack-FM voice Howard Cogan) and the English-language slogan, "We play what we want."

The website copy for FFH Jack FM promises, "The craziest radio station of all times! At FFH Jack FM, we're playing Eminem after Simon & Garfunkel and Nirvana before Elton John. No rules, just good music. Happy 'radio-anarchie' [their spelling] rules, because we play what we want."

The irony, of course, is that it wasn't that long ago that a lot of European radio sounded like Bob- or Jack-FM. And in a smaller market, it's still quite possible to hear Abba and Fort Minor on the same station. Here's FFH Jack FM on Monday afternoon:

R.E.M., "Drive"
Abba, "Thank You For The Music"
Seed, "Aufstehn" (bilingualreggae pop)
Rainbirds, "Blueprint"
Mario, "Let Me Love You" (not a song you'd hear on most U.S. versions of the format)
Church, "Under The Milky Way"
Fort Minor, "Believe Me"
Slade, "Far Far Away"
Billy Joel, "Leningrad"
Mika, "Grace Kelly"
Yes, "Owner Of A Lonely Heart"
Modjo, "Lady (Hear Me Tonight)"
Desireless, "Voyage Voyage" (bilingual Eurodisco)
Frank Zappa, "Bobby Brown" (early '80s Zappa song that became a hit in non-English speaking European countries where the R-rated lyrics weren't quite as widely understood)

It's N/T powerhouse New Jersey 101.5 now, but I was a fan of WKXW Trenton, N.J., in the early '80s when it was Kicks 101-1/2, an unusual Adult CHR starring Philadelphia radio veteran Hy Lit and programmed by his son, Sam Lit. A couple of things made Kicks unusual: its heavily dayparted music meant that you could hear Hy playing "Goody Goody" by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers at lunchtime and "Danger" by the Motels at night. Then there were almost eerily intense stagers that sound unique more than 25 years later.

Kicks 101-1/2 was never a chart reporter to the trades in that era and, despite its initial success in the market, remained more or less off the industry's radar, unlike rival WPST. But a year or so ago, a Philadelphia PD and I got to talking; turned out that he had grown up with Kicks and its unusual imaging as well.

So if you're interested in hearing what the Lit family is up to now, check out hylitradio.com, which began with an Oldies channel. Now there's a second stream, HyLitRhythm.com, which can best be described as Jammin' Oldies in terms of texture and a Bob- or Jack-FM in terms of scope. (A recent half hour stretch ranged from Al Green to Klymaxx to two Trammps songs, neither of which was "Disco Inferno.") Best of all, the stagers recall Sam's work on Kix 101-1/2 and are very much worth hearing, particularly if you never heard the original station.

I've always been a fan of CIDC (Z103.5), Toronto's unusual Top 40 station that combines the rhythmic (but not entirely so) lean of my American major-market CHRs with a healthy dose of new dance music. At this moment, for instance, Z103.5 is playing a Canadian techno dance version of the theme from "The Godfather."

And I know it's Canadian because Z103.5's "now playing" page helpfully tells me not only if a song is Canadian, but how exactly it qualifies under the convoluted "Can-Con" system to measure local contents. All four possible aspects of Danny D's "La Cosa Nostra (The Underworld)" qualify as Canadian--music, artist, production and lyrics (although in the case of this song, there are none, really). Finger Eleven's "Paralyzer," on the other hand, was apparently not produced in Canada and is only three parts "Can-Con."

I don't know if Z103.5's Webmaster was intending to post "MAPL" information for every song they play. My guess is that it's yet another example of the "break notes" from a station's log showing on the station's Website or audio player because that's where the "now playing" information is linked from. And even if that's not Z103.5's issue, it remains an glitch for many stations that stream.

Since the early '00s, I've seen stations that helpfully share a lot of their behind-the-scenes information with anybody with a Web player. The most common one is the names of the sweepers that run in between records (e.g., "linker No. 4"). But occasionally, I've seen more detailed information on where to frontsell records or how to execute contests. And one day, I fully expect to see something that listeners really aren't meant to see--instructions to a jock to make sure there's a female contest winner, for example.

Whenever I've reached out to a PD buddy to let them know that I can see their breaknotes on line, the answer is usually, "Yeah, I know, I've asked them to do something about that." And I actually enjoy knowing MAPL info for Canadian hits, so I hope Z103.5 doesn't change. But for anybody else who doesn't want to share all their log information with every listener and perhaps the competition, this might be a good time to revisit this issue with your IT person or music software vendor.

Business week reported yesterday the decision that really isn't a decision--SoundExchange will not (yet) collect all those royalty fees tomorrow. This doesn't mean they aren't due, of course, but it does signal at least a willingness to engage webcasters on a more constructive level.

As I mentioned in the BusinessWeek article, there are plenty of webcasters (notably Live365, which may have the most to lose) that were going to keep broadcasting no matter what. After the events of yesterday, others may choose to hang in there as well (which is why I was saddened to read in Jaye Albright's blog that TwangTownUSA has decided to go dark--hang in there, Twangers!)

Still, despite SoundExchange's "commitment" (i.e., not an "agreement" or "legally binding decision") to allow webcasters to keep streaming during this process, significant uncertainty still remains (Kurt Hanson puts the SaveNetRadio.org 'countdown clock' at "2 days and holding.") For my part, as someone who has been involved with streaming audio since the late 90's, I would almost like to see this go to court--not the circuit courts or panels of copyright judges where this issue has primarily been contended, but a good ole' civil suit (potentially with a jury full of music lovers). That might be the most riveting trial on Court TV since O.J.

This would do more to promote illegal file sharing than anything the record industry has ever done, but maybe cooler heads have prevailed.

There is no more complete repository of news on the events of the day than Rusty Hodge’s blog. Hodge, who runs SomaFM, has a lot at stake in this issue--come to think of it, so do you!

Internet Radio Broadcasters Call for Day of Silence on June 26: "Internet radio broadcasters have called for a Day of Silence to make a statement and raise awareness against the royalty rate increase that could put several Internet radio broadcasters out of business. The planned silence is to show what the stations will really sound like if the rate increase goes through. This is planned to take place next Tuesday"

(Via DIGG.)

Attention. In more ways than one. Of course, the radio industry is buzzing about this deal, though I think it has as much to do with CBS needing a venue for banner/site advertising to 12-29 year olds as it does anything to do with CBS radio, per se.

But this deal will garner attention from other, more unwelcome quarters as well. Unlike Pandora, AccuRadio and some other prominent hybrid playlist/stream services, Last.FM operates outside the U.S., for the moment, and we assume that they have their own deals negotiated with the record labels. Except, as James Cridland points out, maybe they don't. And they certainly don't in the U.S.

All of which now makes them a very big target come July 15th. When SoundExchange begins its retail enforcement in earnest, I don't think their first stop will be Radio Paradise. While I do believe something less draconian will eventually come out of this, the hard fact is that online radio is starting to make some people some money, and the labels know it. There's no such thing as a free lunch. CBS insists they are not going to gunk up Last.FM and monkey with what is a very fragile ecosystem of users (remember how Napster V1 vanished overnight?) But when increased rates go into effect (and in some form they will go into effect) CBS is going to have to monetize Last.FM in other ways.

The odd thing about the SoundExchange controversy and the upcoming rate hike is that the labels have effectively chosen to subvert the entire system, and charge the wrong peo