The New York Times High-Tech Quirkiness Restores Radio's Magic
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"IT'S 3 a.m. on a bitter, blustery New York night, and from a bedside radio on which the volume is adjusted to a comforting murmur, the voice of an unfamiliar singer calls through my half-sleep, and I have the sensation of being transported to a land of sonic dreams I haven't visited in decades. Not since I was a teenager enthralled by the cries and moans of the Five Satins and the Moonglows on early rock 'n' roll radio -- sounds that Paul Simon once described as "deep forbidden music" -- has the mystique of pop radio been so seductive.

The source of these sounds is not a local radio station or a bland, faceless cable music service but a satellite pay radio channel. Music beamed by satellite has resurrected the thrill of musical discovery that has all but vanished on what is called terrestrial radio."

redux [10.28.03]
MSNBC Who needs radio anymore?

"With Apple's Internet downloading service, iTunes, now available for PC users, and Napster back up and running, there is a library of music available out in cyberspace, that has nothing to do with AM or FM or what you hear while channel surfing in your car. With a virtual jukebox of music at your fingertips why would anyone tune in to their local radio station, where a limited play list, abundance of commercials and cookie-cutter deejays flood the airwaves.

Well, with the exception of being stuck in your car, without a CD or cassette player, there doesn't seem to be much reason to tune in."

redux [04.24.03]
Forbes Internet radio takes off bit by bit

"Internet radio has found a niche. Lots of them, in fact."

"More than 100 million listeners have tried Web radio and the number of regular monthly listeners has tripled in the last three years, according to rating agency Arbitron (http://www.arbitron.com)."

""What consumers go online to listen to and what works best is content they can't listen to through traditional sources," says Bill Rose, general manager of Arbitron Internet Broadcast Services."

redux [11.20.02]
New Media Great surge in online radio listening

"A recent MeasureCast study shows that time spent listening to online radio has jumped 159 percent since last year.

Blame it on the demise of Napster, which means one less centralized location to download free music. Or chalk it up to improved broadband technology that makes streaming music sound almost like its traditional radio cousin. Whatever the reason, it's good news for some of the world's largest channels."

redux [10.01.02]
Salon Radio killed the radio star

"Radio execs share an almost palpable tenet that holds that radio is bulletproof. They see the medium as we see cockroaches and Twinkies: indestructible.

Jim Boyle, a Wall Street analyst for Wachovia Securities, moderated the panel at which Reese spoke. He comes from a family that's been in the radio business for 45 years, and he summed up this particular philosophy nicely when he told me: "Radio is 82 years young. It has survived a lot of new media, survived a lot of different options inside the car space: you've had CB radios, you've had cassettes, you've had eight-track cartridges, you've had six- and now 10-CD changers in the trunk. You've had satellite radio that's shown up ... so it does seem to be a situation where 10 years from now, 20 years from now, there's still gonna be radio."

In their "experiments," radio execs have starved their stations of manpower and research and music testing and polluted them with extra commercials and digital disc jockeys. They're betting it will all work out just fine."