Some of today’s most successful non-commercial radio stations owe much of their success to making good use of internet platforms to reach new audiences and provide ever-improving service to their own listeners. Younger listeners tend not to differentiate between a terrestrial broadcast signal and an online one, while plugged-in listeners of all ages increasingly want […]
Archive | Internet radio
Six awesome SoundCloud dance radio stations
SoundCloud is five years old as of last month. There are two kinds of radio on the application. You can access established radio networks that archive their shows on SoundCloud. For example, you can listen to BBC World Service Radio, which is a mix of BBC public affairs shows, including my favorite: World Have Your Say. But you […]
Open letter asks AOL to hand off Winamp to new stewards
It’s two weeks into the campaign to rescue the beloved but doomed media player Winamp, and the Save Winamp petition has over 41,000 signatures. Unfortunately, there’s been not a peep out of corporate parent AOL, nor any other news about a rumored purchase of Winamp and Shoutcast by Microsoft. The team behind Save Winamp are […]
Amazon’s $179 Cyber-Monday Kindle Fire HDX deal makes a great internet radio
For today, Cyber-Monday, Amazon has its high-end 7″ tablet, the Kindle Fire HDX, on sale for a very low $179. As portable, multi-function devices, tablets make great internet radios, as Matthew explained when he received his first generation Kindle fire. Tablets are well suited for both listening and producing podcasts, too. Amazon also happens to […]
Dropping by Soundrop: Spotify’s chat room feature
I spent some of this weekend up to my nose in Soundrop, a Spotify chat room application. Soundrop has been available for about two years. I wouldn’t call the feature competition for plug.dj or its predecessor, Turntable.fm, but it is around and worth knowing about if you are a Spotify fan. To access Soundrop you […]
There’s already a petition to save Winamp, but what about Shoutcast?
The fates of the veteran media player app Winamp and its related Shoutcast streaming platform remain in limbo after AOL’s announcement last week that it would shut down Nullsoft and end support of these products. Although there have been reports that Microsoft is in talks to buy both Winamp and Shoutcast, neither company has commented […]
What Turntable.fm accomplished
Turntable.fm‘s latest blog post reached my inbox on Friday. It focused on Turntable Live, a new feature in which Turntable room participants interact on a real time basis with bands. Then came this last distressing paragraph: “As much as we all love turntable.fm, we have decided to shut it down to fully concentrate on the […]
Losing Winamp and Shoutcast is bad for internet radio
The news last night that AOL is shutting down its Nullsoft division, which makes the venerable Winamp music app, hit me like a ton of bricks. Now, I haven’t used Winamp regularly in at least 7 years, so the loss of this software won’t have an immediate effect on my daily life. But what’s not […]
Farewell to Psychic, Radio and Television Personality Sylvia Browne
I was saddened to hear the news that celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne died yesterday in a San Jose hospital at the age of 77. A mainstay of numerous television shows and the host of her own Internet radio show, Browne was a master of broadcast media. I remember seeing her regularly on the San Francisco-based […]
Using Soma.fm as your life soundtrack
I’ve been listening to Soma.fm a lot these days. The listener supported service reminds me that radio at its best functions as a sort of accompaniment to one’s daily life. You’ve picked a station because the signal musically or narratively reflects in some positive way the world as you experience it. Thus the venue validates […]