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Tuesday June 22, 2004

The next radio wave.

I'm not always somebody who'll adopt a new technology right away. I tend to like to see if it'll be useful first. This has definitely been true with the way I listen to music while I'm working.
For a long time I just listened to CD's. Always through head phones so that I don't inflict my tastes in music on other people accidentally. But after a while, it gets boring. You're listening to the same music over and over.
A couple of years ago a co-worker pointed me at live365, a portal to a collection of internet radio stations. That was fun for a while but they deluge you with ads. They're trying to get you to pay money to get a non-ad subscription. Okay, I can understand this. They are there trying to make money after all. It's not what I want though.

Then a random email on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to mentioned Radio Paradise. This was much better. It's a single internet radio station, but they have an eclectic assortment of music, no adverts and only the occasional grovel for money to support them.

Then very recently I bought an iBook, and that has ITunes, a digital jukebox application for handling your music. One of the options is Radio, which then brings up a list of the different radio stations available. I was in pig heaven. So many new ones to choose from, right in front on my face without me having to go search for them. And so easy to just try them out and if I don't like one, another is just a double click away. Lots of them with no ads at all. One of my favorite at the moment is Radio KAOS which is user driven.