I didn’t ride the bus home from soccer practice with a transistor radio pressed against my ear just so bullies could make fun of me.
I loved music, and the medium that delivered it was part of the bargain.
The Beatles and Beach Boys ushered within the golden age of hooks and harmonies which was the AM Top 40 of my youth.
As soon as I learned to drive, FM progressive rock had me with the ear.
But since then, popular music has splintered in a spider web of niches and genres that no one station can satisfy. Local alternative stations serve some audiences, but not all of them all the time.
So listeners create personal playlists using iTunes and Ipods. This is how I’ve listened to music within the past decade.
I am a late adopter. I get a 13-year-old car with a cassette player i connect to my iPod using an adapter. I also hook my iPod approximately computer speakers around the house. It becomes an imperfect but perfectly functional solution.
While i realized I hadn’t enjoyed any new music in a while, I knew it was in part due to the fact I wasn’t hearing high of it on the radio.
Therefore i began to seek out the music I love – roots, blues, Americana and power pop – on online radio stations and Internet streaming services. I bookmarked them in my laptop but also began listening with a smartphone that is almost as old as my car.
The ultimate way to discover, access and organize these stations with a smartphone is through an app, like NPR Music, TuneIn Radio, vTuner Radio an internet-based Radio. They allow you to designate stations as favorites for straightforward access.
Many of them are free and, such as the Internet itself, the choices are endless.
(You can find links to these stations and services in my blog, The Dudek Abides: jsonline.com/blogs/dudek).
Much of what I am listening to is on public or listener-supported stations that broadcast within the air in their markets.
During Fat tuesday, WWOZ, a jazz and heritage station in New Orleans, had me hungry for the beignet. I settled for a paczki.
I fell in love with KUT in Austin, Texas, when they played “Cruisin’ (Lucy and Ramona and Sunset Sam)” by Michael Nesmith and “Night Life” by Ray Price, both Texas natives, within the same set. The station must be interesting to listen to during South by Southwest.
The Current is member-supported Minnesota Public Radio station KCMP-FM, whose eclectic playlist ranges from John Prine and Bob Dylan to Lana Del Ray, Bon Iver and the Roots, to artists I’ve never heard of but look forward to listening to.
Please remember the singer-songwriter format of WUWM2, a web based music service of Milwaukee NPR affiliate WUWM-FM (89.7).
What’s nice about streaming actual stations from other markets is the quirky regional insights they feature.
Free online music services for example Pandora and Spotify may have libraries of countless songs, but they also have an institutional quality. And if you do not pay for premium versions, they support audio or on-screen ads.
Once you type an artist or song into Pandora, celebrate a “radio station” of similar sounding music, that makes it hard to come across something unexpected.
Spotify does a similar thing but is more versatile and user-friendly. As an example, you can fast-forward through songs. On Spotify, I keyed in Bon Iver and songs by Iron and Wine, Elvis Perkins and Bright Eyes followed.
On Pandora, I keyed in Beatles and the Rolling Stones followed. Not exactly sound-alikes.
Both services also offer smartphone apps. I listened to the new Bruce Springsteen album in my laptop using a service called Mog, which has been so user-friendly there had to be a catch.
There was: a charge for the smartphone version of the service.
And there are, finally, online stations manufactured by frustrated music lovers that you can get nowhere but the Internet.
One too is Planet Pootwaddle an “oasis of ear candy,” whose music ranges from Western swing to classic rock.
Another such station is Wrecking Ball Radio, whose format of alt-country, folk, rock and blues is programmed by Jayson Tanner from his apartment within the Chapel Hill area of Nc.
“Some might call me a ‘Bedroom DJ,’ ” Tanner said, in the email. “I tend to call it webcasting, in fact it’s still broadcasting.”
He was obviously a DJ at country stations in Washington state and along the Gulf Coast before he chose to “create something like a regular radio station, only with a much larger playlist of new music.”
The station went online next year and is kept afloat by donations; Tanner doesn’t have other job. The payment he makes to his Hosting service also covers rights fees for your music.
Tanner uses an Apple Mac Mini personal computer and described programming music involved with it as “kind of like data entry,” which, he explained, “is true of regular FM/AM music radio these days, too”, writes tagza.