Station to Station

The real future of Internet radio.

Jesse Walker from the December 1999 issue

If you spend much time on the Web, you've probably stumbled on some radio stations there--if not one of the unusual operations that broadcast only over the Net, then a traditional AM or FM outlet's site, dedicated to simulcasting the station's signal around the globe. You may also have heard that in just a few years the Internet will be wireless, and we will be able to listen to thousands of such stations on cheap, portable receivers.

There are complications to Net radio, though, that most press accounts ignore, notably the medium's traffic problem. There's a finite number of people who can tune to any audio stream at once; if you top that number--which could be as low as 50--no one else will be able to hear you. The techies are working on a solution to this, called multicasting. If and when it's in place, Internet broadcasting will be ready to bloom. Until then, though, it will be too bottlenecked to be competitive.

Once multicasting is ready, the Web won't be just a different way to deliver radio shows. Netcasting will converge with at least two other technologies, creating something very different from traditional radio. One of those technologies is the MP3 file, and all the other means of digitally storing music and transferring it over the Net. The second is the sophisticated software that radio stations use to plan their playlists.

It's impossible to predict all the ways this new, hybrid medium will evolve. But by allowing listeners to invent their own personalized radio formats, it's sure to undermine--perhaps fatally--the consultant class that currently decides what gets played on the radio.

Very few radio stations let their disc jockeys choose which songs they'll play; jocks today are paid for their voices, not their musical taste. It wasn't always thus. In the '40s and '50s, the first wave of great R&B and rock 'n' roll DJs didn't just pick their own records; they made radio an improvisatory art form, putting similar songs together, fiddling with the levers and dials in front of them, spinning yarns, making up rhymes, interacting with the music as it played.

This was counterbalanced, in the late '50s, by the rise of Top 40 and the earliest, crudest forms of audience research. Compared with modern pop radio, early Top 40 was spontaneous and far from formulaic. Nonetheless, the transfer of power from jocks to program directors sparked some resistance, and in 1959 several DJs formed the National Disc Jockey Association to advance their interests and protect their privileges.

By the time the group held its first formal convention a year later, however, it was distracted by the first great uproar over payola--that is, record companies bribing jocks to play certain songs.

In that climate, the new DJ association devoted its energies to defending the profession's image, not extending its power. And within the stations, the threat of federal penalties was yet another excuse to revoke the jocks' right to pick their own records.

DJ freedom returned to vogue in the late '60s, as the first "freeform" and "underground" stations appeared on the FM band--staffed, in part, by refugees from the payola scandals. But as the '70s progressed, audience research made a comeback and freeform declined. Today, only a handful of commercial stations have open formats.

The consultants who killed freeform offered a lot of arguments for their approach. The most reasonable was that an audience clearly existed for more narrowly formatted radio, and that it made sense to exploit the new research techniques to find out what those listeners wanted to hear. But if freeform stations risked alienating audiences by tossing in records only a small coterie would enjoy, the formulaic, consultant-driven stations that replaced them overcompensated. Commercial radio today is less concerned with finding music that will draw listeners in than with eliminating music that might drive listeners out. The result is numbing repetition.

One might expect entrepreneurs to take advantage of the situation, by starting new stations willing to take the risks the established outlets won't. In some cases, that might mean a completely freeform approach: Some of us like being surprised by strange sounds we've never heard before.

In other cases, it might simply mean letting DJs examine the research themselves, combine it with their own knowledge of music, and choose the records they play without straying from their station's personality. This was the approach favored by Los Angeles' KMET in the late '70s, after it abandoned full-fledged freeform for a mainstream but still open-ended Real Rock Radio format. It evidently worked, since KMET quickly became the city's top-ranked station.

But under the current regulatory regime, the broadcast spectrum is artificially scarce. There's little room for new stations, and the price of the existing licenses is ridiculously high.

So what does this have to do with the Internet?

Increasingly, program directors are using computer programs to choose the records their stations will play. The most popular such program is called Selector. Once everything in the music library has been entered--not a terribly onerous task, since the typical station has a library of only 500 to 1,000 songs, the vast majority of which are rarely played--the director can give Selector a series of instructions and let the program produce a playlist. Those parameters might be broad genre restrictions ("no rap"), general patterns ("two upbeat songs, followed by one ballad, then repeat"), or more narrow rules ("no more than three songs with female vocalists per hour"). Selector then chooses which songs will be played, and in what order, for the next 24 hours, seven days, or however far a horizon the program director requests.