THE RADIO WAVES OF THE FUTURE: Internet Stations Give Listeners a New
Way to Tune In
Frank Ahrens
* 01/21/99
The Washington Post
Copyright 1999, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
Everyone knows where radio came from. Radio was tinny Top 40
blaring from cheap AM transistors, pressed to the ear. It was the
electric whistle of baseball announcers calling the World Series or
breathless newsmen describing Pearl Harbor burning. It was FM's early
days, the static-free sound of entire King Crimson albums playing deep
into the night. The events and music have changed through the decades,
but radio has not.
Until now.
No longer do radio listeners have to passively accept the
couple of dozen stations they can tune in at home or at work, slaves
to the corporate formula that dictates repetitive, hit-oriented
playlists. Right now, almost any standard computer can cheaply become
the ultimate radio, tuning in stations from Miami and San Francisco,
from Moscow and Singapore. For free.
Don't want to click around? Then build your own radio station,
one that plays only country or classical or punk. Even all-Hawaiian,
all the time. This, too, is free.
Sick of finding a tolerable station on your car radio, only to
drive out of range in half an hour? Soon, there's a good chance you'll
drive coast to coast and listen to the same station that plays your
favorite songs, or if you get tired of that, choose from 99 other
stations.
Commercial radio broadcasting -- a $14 billion a year business
in the United States -- is shaking off three decades of technological
stagnation. The next few years could revolutionize everything about
radio, from how to make money at it to how it sounds.
Something like this has happened before: the cable TV
revolution. The radio revolution is happening faster.
Remember when cable TV was just for getting a better picture?
Suddenly, those late-'70s sitcoms came in a lot clearer. But there
were all these other channels, most of which seemed to consider a city
council meeting compelling TV. Other channels broadcast snow.
But soon, hundreds of niche channels rushed into the vacuum.
The Big Three networks rightfully scoffed in the early days -- most
cable programming was terrible. But they stopped laughing soon. Even
though the networks still rule the ratings, cable TV channels have
become the arbiters of style (MTV) and sports (ESPN), and raised the
TV movie to Hollywood heights (HBO). Every network has established a
cable presence, either by buying cable companies or creating cable
networks, like CNBC.
Now it's radio's turn.
THE NO-NICHE NICHE
Jeff McEwan never considered himself a revolutionary. Turns out,
he is.
Frustrated, foiled and fed up, McEwan had had it with local
radio. Every Washington-area pop station sounded the same, and none of
their formats included the music he wanted to hear.
Then, while driving through Upstate New York about eight months
ago, his car radio scanner stopped on WBER, an alternative rock
station that instantly sounded like home. The tunes were eclectic,
unpredictable, edgy. The deejays didn't sound like they'd learned
their voices in broadcasting school. Then McEwan heard something else
he liked even better:
"We're the first station in Rochester on the Internet!"
Back in Alexandria a few days later, in his one-man computer
sales and consulting office, he flipped on his computer and went
looking. Shortly, he found it: wber.monroe.edu, the station's Web
site.
"Listen to WBER live on your computer," read the underlined
words on the station's home page.
Two mouse clicks and 30 seconds later, McEwan was listening to
a piece of radio's future, joining the estimated 6 percent of
Americans who've listened to a radio station online, according to a
recent study by the Arbitron radio ratings company.
"Once I came across Internet radio, it changed the way I listen
to radio," says McEwan, 32. "It even changed what I listen to in the
car. I don't listen to 'HFS or any other commercial stations
anymore."
In the car, he listens to news or public radio. He waits until
he gets to his office -- where he can choose from hundreds of radio
stations broadcast over the World Wide Web -- to listen to music
radio.
At about the same time, in a Bethesda office, Ben Smith was
tuning in to the future, too.
Smith, 32, is the photo editor at Education Week, a trade
publication. His work can get tedious -- scanning in photographs,
retouching them, and so on. Music would make a nice distraction, he
thought, so he lugged an old tuner and turntable into his office
(spinning vinyl!). But he wanted more -- he wanted live radio with
diversity. He started fooling around with an unused PC in his office
and stumbled onto a Web site called www.gogaga.com.
Gogaga.com is an Internet-only radio station. Like an
over-the-air station, it has programs and deejays. Unlike an
over-the-air station, it plays stuff you'd never hear elsewhere, much
less on one station. Obscure jazz, spoken-word, pop, electronica, a
non-format format that would baffle a program director. "What market
demographic are we aiming for?" the PD would wonder. "What niche?" The
answer is: the 17 percent of listeners Arbitron says are dissatisfied
with over-the-air radio.
"Washington has no real good independent radio stations," says
Smith. Most stations "have a pretty heavy playlist. You hear one song
you know and here it is 20 minutes later, exactly the same song."
There's a reason why commercial radio is so hit-dependent.
During peak morning and evening drive times, about 35 percent of all
radio listening occurs in the car, according to Arbitron. Most car
trips last about 25 minutes. People flip up and down the dial,
listening for a familiar tune, stopping on the station that plays it.
And over-the-air radio satisfies most people, according to Arbitron.
For now.
Arbitron recently conducted a study on radio and the Internet.
Perhaps the most compelling finding is that Internet use eats directly
into radio listening time -- online Americans spend nearly three fewer
hours per week listening to the radio than people who don't use the
Internet.
How, then, to gain back those three hours? One answer: Pump
your radio station into the computer, so folks can listen while
they're on the Web. How crucial is it for stations to broadcast on the
Internet? Jim Farley, WTOP's vice president of news and programming,
says this: "Get online, or get out."
CUE THE TALENT
Phil Zachary is the general manager of WHFS (99.1), the local
music radio station most likely to be hurt by Internet radio. WHFS's
format is "alternative," meaning it's aimed at 18- to 34-year-old,
well-educated students and professionals -- pretty much your average
Internet user. Almost every Internet radio listener contacted for this
article, for instance, named WHFS as the station they abandoned for
the Internet.
Zachary understands this. Even though commercial radio is
enjoying "mind-boggling credibility" with advertisers, he says, he
knows that the first Hondas and Toyotas started appearing in the
United States just when Detroit was feeling best about itself.
Zachary calls the workplace the "real battlefield" for future
radio listenership. The best way inside is via the Internet, he says,
because it's hard to hear over-the-air radio in many office buildings.
The Internet, he says, would let WHFS "bust through that concrete."
Only a handful of stations in the area can be heard on the
Internet, and WHFS is not among them. Though it is relatively easy for
a talk or news station to broadcast on the Internet, it takes more
money and better technology to pump good-sounding music through a
computer. WHFS is exploring the option of adding its live broadcast --
called "streaming audio" -- to its Web site, hoping its corporate
parent, CBS, will provide the money.
The cost, however, depends on how many Internet listeners the
station seeks. There is no volume discount; more listeners often means
a higher cost. Richard Rieman, vice president of Radio Data Group in
Vienna, Va., which provides WTOP's Internet broadcast, says he could
guarantee WHFS the ability to handle 500 simultaneous Internet
listeners for $1,000 a month. Five hundred is a good Internet start --
WTOP's online listenership topped out at about 800 simultaneous
listeners during the House impeachment hearings.
Zachary, like the rest of his industry, hopes over-the-air
radio can maintain its two trump cards over Internet radio: localism
-- as in local traffic, weather and local school closings -- and
personalities.
Local stations gain much of their identity from local star
deejays, like the Greaseman, and national giants, like Rush Limbaugh,
who appear on local stations via syndication. They are the ratings
slam dunks: If a station can afford to pick up, say, Dr. Laura via
syndication, a ratings boost is guaranteed.
But Web radio means that every station that's on the Internet
suddenly becomes a national station for a small but growing audience.
Every deejay becomes a national deejay; every ad is heard nationally.
Will this chip away at the hegemony of superstars like Howard Stern
and Limbaugh?
Zachary has fretted over this. He invokes the cable TV
analogy.
"I think what it comes down to is commercial radio has to do
what free TV has had to do -- it has to keep those big events that the
masses want to see, like the Super Bowl and `60 Minutes.' We're going
to have to do the same thing in radio," he says, meaning over-the-air
radio must hold on to Stern, Limbaugh and other ratings colossi. "We
can't allow another medium to get a leg up on us on personalities.
Anybody can beat us song-for-song. If that's what we're hanging our
hats on, we're in trouble. ButI don't think we are."
ESCHEW THE TALENT
But some listeners are tuning out deejays altogether. Listening
to over-the-air and Internet-only radio stations on the computer is
only part of the future. There are other Web sites that allow you to
program your own radio station. In some ways, it's perfect radio: You
know which artists your station is going to play, but not the songs,
so it still has one of the magical components of radio -- the surprise
of hearing your favorite song when you don't expect it.
At a Web site called imagineradio.com, listeners can choose
from about 25 musical genres (e.g., hip-hop, classic country, smooth
jazz). They decide how often they want to hear songs from that genre's
50 to 75 artists. A few more clicks and, if you're, say, an indie '80s
fan, the Clash's "Clampdown" comes streaming out of your computer --
definitely not one of the three Clash hits you can catch on commercial
radio.
The service is free for now, says John Adams, program director
at imagineradio.com. The site -- launched last March -- sells banner
advertising and a click-through button that links listeners to CDNOW,
an Internet shopping service ( imagineradio.com does not make a
profit).
Adams, 32, along with about three dozen other employees, helps
run imagineradio.com out of an office in a suburb south of San
Francisco. He's a 16-year radio veteran who earns part of his living
telling traditional radio broadcasters how to survive the wave of
Internet radio services like imagineradio.com.
"A lot of people, when given the choice of listening to a CD or
radio, choose the radio," Adams says. "They like hearing their
favorite deejay telling the traffic on the way home -- he may be the
closest thing a local market has to a celebrity." He tells local
stations that they can never compete with imagineradio.com on a
song-for-song basis. Nor should they. Because imagineradio.com will
"never be able to send a deejay to Moosebreath, Minnesota, to kiss
babies and open a car wash."
It comes back to localism, he says. But the Internet is
twisting even that.
Consider Adam Hostetter, 22, a senior at George Mason
University and Web developer for AmerInd, a government computer
contractor in Alexandria.
About eight months ago, he began using www.broadcast.com, a
clearinghouse of Web broadcasts, to listen to his home-town stations
in Hartford, Conn. He's become so addicted to Internet radio, he muses
aloud: "Sometimes, in my car, I wish I had the Internet."
2 There are a couple of men who'd love to give him something they
think is even better.
SATELLITE DRIVE TIME
There are two long lists of radio formats on the wall, each a
yard wide and as high as the ceiling. Every time Lee Abrams swivels in
his chair and looks at them, he can't help but smile and think about
the old days.
Abrams, 45, is known as the father of album-oriented rock, the
format that established FM. He's gray now, and a little thick around
the middle, but he can't wait to pipe that seemingly endless list of
formats into car radios via satellite.
"It feels like the early days of FM radio again," he says.
Abrams is the program director of XM Satellite Radio, located
in the basement of a Dupont Circle office building. XM is locked in a
space race with CD Radio, a New York company. This year, each plans to
launch satellites. Within two years, each says, they will use those
satellites to beam 100 channels of radio into your car, for $10 a
month. The signals will be received by a palm-size satellite dish
affixed to a car window and played on a special radio.
At home, people have many entertainment options: TV, satellite
TV, VCR, DVD, radio and so on. The car, however, is limited to radio,
CD and cassette. That's why the automobile is considered, along with
the workplace, the second major battleground for the future of radio.
Abrams's wall list is only a working grid, but many of the
pieces are in place. There are several rock formats -- classic, heavy,
album-oriented. Heftel, a Spanish-language radio network, has
contracted to provide several Spanish channels. There are talk
* formats, a gossip format, a health format, several country music
stations, classical and so on. "Real radio stations, with living,
breathing deejays," Abrams says.
Abrams's boss, Hugh Panero, 42, helped build the cable TV
system in New York City in the 1980s. Everyone thought the same thing
then, he says: Who'd pay for something you get for free?
"When I was in Queens, we had a tremendous ethnic diversity
among neighborhoods," Panero says. "What we found is, for instance,
Japanese subscribers will buy lots of channels just to get the one
Japanese channel that gives them the news from back home."
Panero estimates he'll need 2.5 million customers to break
even. The actual hardware -- the radio that plays XM satellite
broadcasts and the satellite dish -- will probably cost between $200
and $500.
Abrams is a radio guy, Panero a cable guy. CD Radio Chairman
David Margolese, their competition in New York, is neither.
A 41-year-old Canadian, Margolese dropped out of college in the
late '70s to found a Canadian cellular phone network. The idea for
beaming satellite radio into cars hit him a decade ago, when he
learned of a guy pumping radio into homes via cable TV. He thought:
"It's the right idea but the wrong market. The radio is to the car
what the TV is to the home." Like XM, he'll offer 100 channels of
music and talk, Spanish and financial, country and celebrity news from
a studio at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. The race is on.
THE ULTIMATE PERSONAL RADIO
David Talmage, a 36-year-old software engineer from Alexandria,
was at home one evening recently, responding to an e-mail from a
reporter. Is there anyone out there, the reporter wondered, listening
to radio in a new way?
Talmage's e-mail reply reads like a postcard from the future:
"I'm doing that right now, as I type to you. I'm sitting in my
living room. My Sony PCG-505G laptop, Ricochet modem, and Sony
speakers are all together on the table. A few minutes ago, I listened
to WPFW-FM [in Washington]. After a little network congestion, the
signal came in steadily. Now, I'm listening to WWOZ-FM from New
Orleans, Louisiana, through www.broadcast.com."
Translation: Talmage was using his computer, Internet
connection and a wireless modem -- something like a cell phone -- to
listen to a radio station half a nation away. His set-up is clunky --
in a few years it's likely that all of his hardware will be compressed
into a gadget the size of a cell phone. It may, in fact, be a cell
phone. And a radio. And an Internet browser. This, optimists say, is
the real future of radio -- with the listener unencumbered by
broadcast range and phone lines.
One obstacle to that future, says Robert Unmacht -- publisher
of M Street Journal, a radio weekly in Nashville -- is a commercial
radio industry stuck in the past. People used to live in the cities,
so that's where the radio transmitters are. Now, they live in the
suburbs and drive to work in other suburbs, often outdistancing radio
signals.
"AM and FM are using ancient technologies allotted for the way
people lived years ago," Unmacht says. Right now, commercial stations
are moving toward broadcasting their signals digitally, which they
promise will make a song on the radio sound as clear as a song on a
CD. But even that's missing the point of the future, Unmacht says. He
compares it to "putting a new Porsche engine in an old Nova."
Instead, he says: Why not transmit your radio station on a
wireless digital system, like a cell phone signal, so your station can
be heard from coast to coast?
Heck, he says, in a few more years, everything -- radio, TV,
Internet, phone calls -- may come over one wireless digital signal,
into your TV set or pocket phone or car computer.
Here's where a guy like Unmacht gets delighted:
A traditional radio station is an expensive, equipment-heavy,
unwieldy thing. A digital station need not be. And that could create
the ultimate local radio -- the personal radio station that doesn't
have to compete for space and federal permission to be on a crowded AM
or FM band.
"You could have an office radio station and program your own
stuff," Unmacht says. "Or a neighborhood radio station. Schools could
broadcast school closings. Things can be small and local and big and
national, just like cable."
Yes, there are doubters. The technology is a ways off.
Corporate radio is a huge financial success. Four out of five
listeners are happy with what they get over their radios, anyway. And
now, people are asking you to buy satellite radios? To "get online or
get out"? To pay for radio?
Unmacht laughs. Again, it's hard to escape the cable TV
analogy.
"I remember," he says, "when they said HBO didn't stand a
chance."
TUNING IN RADIO'S FUTURE
RADIO ON THE NET
Getting started: To hear radio and music through your computer,
there are some minimum hardware requirements. (Warning: Geek-speak
ahead.) You'll need a 120MHz Intel Pentium processor or equivalent,
with 16MB of RAM and a 14.4Kbps modem. Also, you'll need a 16-bit
sound card and speakers, Windows 95 operating system, an Internet
connection and a Web browser.
Next: Go to www.real.com and download a free copy of RealPlayer
G2. This is the software that lets you hear sound. The instructions
are fairly easy to follow. It may take upward of 20 minutes.
Listen: Here are a few Web sites to try out -- by no means a
conclusive list -- and a brief description of each.
* www.radio-directory.com: A clearinghouse of Web radio
broadcasts. As good a place as any to start.
* www.broadcast.com: Dozens of radio stations, live sporting evets
and CDs. Another good starting point.
* www.imagineradio.com: A Web jukebox that lets you program your
own radio station to hear only the artists you want.
* www.spinner.com: Another jukebox -- you can't program it, but it
has several music genres.
* www.talkspot.com: Chat with hosts of news, politics, lifestyles
and adult comedy shows.
* www.sunsetradio.com: Music and talk from 26 countries, in
English and other languages.
* www.rferl.org: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasts in 24
languages.
* www.askjeeves.com: This is not a music site, but a search engine
that will find a particular station's Web site so you can see if you
can listen to the station via the Web.
XM Satellite Radio, headed by Hugh Panero, above right, and program
director Lee Abrams, plans to offer satellite radio programming by the
end of 2000. The Washington-based company will beam 100 channels --
* offering everything from gossip to country music -- to special car
radios, below.
