The Spirit of Radio: Satellite Radio, MP3s and Podcasts
By Rik Ferrell
Martha and the Vandellas had it right in 1964 when they sang, "Summer's here and the time is right for dancing in the street." Indeed, the sunshine and heat seem to warm our souls and get everyone in the mood for a little dancing. And oftentimes, to get to that dancing destination, we're driving. Summer also beckons road trip traveling. And both--dancing and traveling--are made much merrier thanks to Italian Guglielmo Marconi, credited with commercializing the radio. Radio is the earmark of music enjoyment, be it in the dancehall or in the car. It's a wireless device that's been a significant part of our lives for nearly a century.
Radio has always been there for the listening audience, with our favorite songs, sporting events, traffic reports, and talk show hosts just a button click away.
But recent technology releases have begun to invade broadcast radio’s personal space, and poach its fan base. As radio’s massive ownership groups continue to favor condensed playlists, slick packaging, and maximized profits, the American public looks elsewhere for viable alternatives that might better suit its ever-changing needs. Sure, there’s still a handful of quality independent radio stations here in the Free State that remain true to radio’s roots, like WRNR in Annapolis, and Chestertown’s WCTR, but they’re the exception to the rule. Don’t get me wrong— broadcast radio still generally delivers a reliable, entertaining product for the masses; it’s just no longer the only game in town.
Traditional radio has seen its listening landscape get mighty crowded over the past 10 years, with the meteoric rise of Internet usage and the many new gizmos and gadgets now available. By and large, many millions of Americans now get their news and entertainment in different ways than they did in the late ’90s. We’re now listening to music on our cell phones, watching full-length films on our laptops, and lunging for our computers when disaster strikes to learn the latest. We’ve become a nation of immediacy; we want what we want when we want it—our favorite songs, today’s news, tonight’s sports scores, tomorrow’s weather—right now. In fact, traditional media outlets in general have been having an increasingly tough time trying to hang onto listeners, viewers, and readers inundated by ever-hectic lives, and enticed by the lure of new technology.
What new technology, you ask? Well, here’s a brief look at some of the new kids on the block, why they’re so appealing, and how much you can expect to pay for the latest in creature comforts.
Satellite Radio
Satellite radio has been steadily building a faithful audience since its inception a decade ago, although today’s national subscriber base still barely equals the total number of broadcast radio listeners in just the New York City market alone.
Sirius and XM are the players, and both offer a wide variety of genre-specific music channels from which to choose: modern country and old-school country/western, traditional and smooth jazz, show tunes, symphony, swing, techno, bluegrass, reggae, religious, disco, hit parade, roots/folk, new age, Latin, children’s, contemporary pop, dance, and every flavor and era of rock ‘n roll known to man. Sirius even offers artist-specific choices that exclusively feature a performer’s entire catalog, such as the all-Elvis, all-Rolling Stones, all-Bruce Springsteen, and all-Grateful Dead channels. Both XM and Sirius also serve up a heaping plateful of comedy, sports, hot talk, and news offerings as well. XM has the satellite exclusive on Major League Baseball and National Hockey League broadcasts from around the country, while Sirius is where you’ll find the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and NASCAR. Sirius is also the exclusive, uncensored home of the Howard Stern Show, which is highly entertaining once again, now that he’s at least temporarily out from under the thumb of the FCC. And now with the approved mega-merger between these two entities, it looks like things will get even better for subscribers.
XM currently has a higher number of channels, while Sirius is a bit user-friendlier. If you need access to major league baseball game broadcasts besides those of your home team, XM is all you. But if you want 24/7 access to Howard Stern, and are more of a football and racing fan, Sirius is your best bet. If you’re just looking for loads of quality, targeted music options, you can’t go wrong with either.
Broadcasting veteran and morning man of Chestertown’s WCTR AM, Keith Thompson doesn’t consider the rise of satellite radio to be an immediate threat, since his station remains so locally focused. “Until satellite can offer local traffic updates, weather, news, and school closings, stations like ours aren’t in jeopardy. If cable TV and local networks can co-exist, then so can we.”
General Manager Ken Collins echoes that sentiment, “It’s the local information that our listeners really want, and they can’t get that from satellite.”
Why Buy Satellite Radio?
Satellite’s signal coverage means that you can drive coast to coast without ever having to change the station, making it a big fave with the long haul truckers. And my non-trucker friends who own satellite swear by it, too. It offers subscribers countless more options than traditional radio (and even more now with the merger) with few or no commercial interruptions. And unless you’re solely a diehard fan of something like Iranian Beatnik Love Polkas, you’ll be able to find something you’ll enjoy.
Satellite receivers continue to become more affordable, with prices now starting all the way down in the $30 range, and monthly subscriptions as low as $6.99. And if you poke around on the Internet, you may be able to find something for even less.
Internet Radio
Online radio is quite prolific these days. In addition to the multitude of choices that search engines like AOL and Yahoo readily provide, there’s also thousands of traditional radio stations around the world that can also be heard online, such as NPR. The act of broadcast radio stations also transmitting online is called “streaming.” Thompson and Collins say that more and more traditional stations are now making that an option, in order to allow listeners another point of access. Take a moment to Google “online radio” and you’ll be loaded up to your ears with heaps of viable options from all directions.
But personally, my favorite Internet radio stations are the ones I create myself.
Log onto
Slacker.com or
Pandora.com and you can actually make your own radio stations. Slacker is super-easy to use and allows you to quickly custom-build a station by entering a list of artists that you want to hear. You can be as diverse and numerous as you desire, and you’ll hear nothing but the music of your chosen artists on the stations you create, both their big hits and B-sides, in any genre from disco to death metal. It’s all there—I checked.
Pandora, on the other hand, is actually an ongoing beta test website that uses Star Wars-worthy technology dubbed Music Genomes that create a station for you based on your input. For example, if you say you like The Beatles, Pandora will instantly build you a station that includes not only Beatle music, but also songs by other artists that incorporate some of the attributes, or “genes”, of Beatle music. The Music Genome Project was hatched back in 2000 by a group of mad, music-loving scientists from Planet Vulcan and it’s all brain-achingly complicated, but trust me, it’s very cool, and it works. Plus, both Slacker and Pandora also offer numerous pre-made station choices too, in the event that you’re feeling lazy or uncreative that day.
Internet radio is the perfect choice for anyone who wants hours of non-stop, targeted music while they’re on their computer: office workers looking for quality entertainment in their cubicles, students doing homework projects, etc. Just make sure that your PC has speakers first, or it’s likely that you won’t hear much of anything. (Guess who found that out the hard way?)
While some online offerings do require a membership fee, the vast majority, including Slacker and Pandora, are free. Try them both; they’re fun. Just use an alternative e-mail address when you sign up if you don’t want to be spammed with thousands of lovely Internet offers.
iPod & Podcasts
MP3 players, like Apple’s wildly successful iPod, are becoming personalized radio stations for the general public. Sony was the first to bring portable recorded music to the masses with the cassette Walkman, and then the Discman. These were great for their time, but I can remember running around my college campus with a backpack full of CDs and my schoolbooks in my arms.
No longer.
Today, MP3 players allow you to port around several radio stations worth of songs in a device that’s small enough to fit in your shirt pocket. Consider this: Apple’s largest iPod, the 160 GB, can hold up to forty thousand songs, yet weighs less than six ounces. Try to name 40,000 songs right now. Go ahead—I’ll wait. And not only that, but many MP3 players can download and play full-length movies, and TV episodes, too. They’re fantastic for keeping the kids busy during long car trips, drowning out crying babies on airline flights, and for tuning out the boss during those laborious sales meetings.
Another cool feature of the MP3 player is podcasting. Podcasts are subscription-based programs on just about any subject matter you can think of, from politics to parakeets, delivered right to your device when you connect to your computer. Sports, music, news, cooking, pets, religion, travel, entertainment, gardening, home improvement, decorating—it’s all there and loads more. And many of today’s media favorites also offer podcasted material, like Oprah, Larry King, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Andy Rooney, Paul Harvey, and local favorite Mike O’Meara, just to name a handful.
According to my calculator, a device that holds 40,000 songs averaging four minutes in length could potentially play music for 111 straight days and never once repeat a tune. No radio station on the planet can even come close to making that claim. Plus, with the MP3 Player’s additional podcasting, TV episode, movie, and music video capabilities, you can become a multimedia mogul of your very own at the touch of a button.
I found several off-brand MP3 Players listed online for less than $20, but save your money for a real Apple iPod. They range from $79 for the Shuffle, to $349 for the big-daddy 160GB. Downloaded songs are $0.99 each on Apple’s iTunes website (which recently surpassed Walmart as the #1 grossing music retailer in the nation) and full albums are available. And as far as podcasts, many of the subscriptions are free, while others have nominal membership pricing. As in life, the more popular your choice, the more you’ll be expected to pay.
HD Radio
This is the secret weapon that traditional radio needed to fight back in the technology war. HD Radio is certainly the biggest breakthrough in broadcast radio since the advent of FM. It’s a real shot in the arm for the AM and FM dials, and the timing couldn’t be better.
For FM, HD digitally widens the sonic landscape for improved, true CD sound quality, and helps throw a blanket over the weak points in a station’s signal so that static becomes a thing of the past. But the improvement for AM is even more significant, as HD digitizes the signal, allowing AM radio to lose all of its annoying static, crackle, and fading, and gives it the same depth and sound quality as FM signals have right now. That’s right—music on AM that won’t sound like it’s coming out of a coffee can.
iBiquity Digital is the company behind HD technology. I took a tour of its research facility in Columbia, Maryland, and heard the difference with my own ears. I went in a skeptic, and came out a true believer.
The other improvement is that it allows broadcast stations to offer up multiple products at the same time. For example, a station like Baltimore’s WSMJ could continue to offer its current Smooth Jazz format on its main signal, while also featuring Classic Jazz on WSMJ-2, brand new jazz releases on WSMJ-3, all-traffic-and-weather on WSMJ-4, etc. Right now, many of the major players in the Baltimore/D.C. market are already broadcasting in HD.
But there’s always a catch. Just like HD television, you’ll need to purchase an HD radio to receive the HD signal. And while the prices have been dropping for the consumer, the technology that radio stations must purchase in order to broadcast in HD doesn’t come cheap.
Thompson definitely sees HD’s future potential for stations like WCTR, but takes it all with a grain of salt. “I think HD will help AM radio survive in the marketplace because of the vastly improved sound quality, but it’s also possible that a number of smaller stations will be forced to close up shop because they simply won’t be able to afford the upgrade,” he said.
“Once major automobile manufacturers like Ford, Toyota, and GM offer HD Radio as standard equipment, that’s when HD will start to take over,” added Collins. “Until then, it’s wait and see. But HD is certainly being pushed in every radio industry magazine I read!”
If you expect your radio to be served up free of charge, but want more choices and significantly better sound and signal quality, HD Radio was made for you. However, if you’re fine with radio exactly how it is, then save your money.
Expect to pay at least $100 for an HD home receiver and $130 and up for a decent, name-brand HD car stereo. After that, HD is 100 percent free.
Don’t fret— broadcast radio isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. According to Thompson and Collins, the industry is working tirelessly to protect its position and market share from the increasing competition in numerous ways, such as upgrading websites to be more interactive for their listeners, incorporating shorter length commercials and commercial breaks to get back to the music sooner, and by developing excellent new technology like HD Radio.
The real winners here are you and me. The more everyone continues to duke it out for our attention, the better everything gets.
It’s exciting. And I can’t wait to see what the next big thing will be.
Rik Ferrell is the Contributing Music Editor for What’s Up? Eastern Shore
and writes the monthly music column. Tune in with him on Thursdays at 1530 AM WCTR for “What’s Up? in Music”.
rik ferrell
dec 08
eastern shore
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