SuitWatchFriday, November 2, 2001 —
In the last newsletter I told the unhappy story of AM Stereo, a technology that never quite made it (even though you can still get it, unlike, say, R15 refrigerant).
This time I'll tell a happy radio story. Or two. Or three, if we throw in the open source technology that might just turn the Web into the Great Radio Medium it truly ought to be -- while perhaps also restoring humanity and taste to the broadcast bands, where they've been withering for decades.
Like UNIX, our fist story starts in that Golden Age for so many things: the Sixties. That was when Top Forty radio reached its peak exactly as the FM alternative became an alternative venue for extremely creative programming. Successful radio in those days was about talent, originality, inventiveness, and a high level of fun. Disc Jockeys were stars whose upbeat banter were perfect accompaniment to music that might have cost anything from nothing to many thousands of dollars to produce and promote. Talk radio, challenging investigative reporting and listener-supported (later we called it "public") broadcasting all got their starts on FM in the Sixties.
Early in that decade a literate, cantankerous and determined young polio survivor named Lorenzo Milan gave birth to the first radio station of the type later called "free form." That station was KRAB, a station of modest size at the top of the FM band in Seattle. Later the "KRAB Nebula" grew to include a loose group of stations no less playfully named. There was KBOO in Portland, KCHU (my favorite) in Dallas and KTAO in Los Gatos (San Jose, basically). All those stations were noncommercial. The first commercial station in the same wacky tradition was KFAT in Gilroy, California, which radiated from the top of Loma Prieta Mountain (under which the familiar quake by the same name took place), reaching pretty much everything from San Francisco to Salinas.
KFAT was nominally a country music station, but mostly it was just folks with country-flavored tastes having a good time with all kinds of music and listeners who loved weighing in with their own ideas and requests. After KFAT's signal was sold to a big-time broadcaster, the crew migrated down to KHIP in Hollister and then to KPIG/107-oink-5 in the appropriately named town of Freedom, California.
Unlike its predecessors, KPIG is still on the air, to say the least. It succeeds in the all-important ratings (#1 in the coveted Adults 25-54 bracket) while boasting the most loyal listenership any radio station has ever enjoyed anywhere, ever. KPIG has live disc jockeys on the air 24/7, and the jocks still choose the music -- a practice that disappeared from mainstream radio between two and three decades ago. Advertisements are a mix of the usual stuff and very funny fake announcements for the likes of Pocket Pool Playoffs.
The station has what may be the worst commercial signal in its market (Salinas/Monterey/Santa Cruz), with no hope of improvement. But at the same time it has what may be the best signal of any kind on the Internet, where it streams in 128kb MP3 as well as narrower forms coded for Real and Hiwire (Windows Media) clients. In fact, KPIG was the first commercial station to broadcast on the Web, and perhaps the only one that wasn't knocked off the air a few months back when AFTRA dumbly insisted that talent be paid up to 300% extra for commercials going out over the Net, causing thousands of ordinary commercial stations shut off their streams. Being resourceful folks, the KPIGgies just hacked around the problem. When the national ads come on, webstream listeners get pleasing filler (such as the sound of hogs grunting idly in the mud).
The KPIG Web site is an ideal example of station/listener involvement. A few seconds ago, Neil Young's Harvest Moon came on, and the browser automatically updated a listing of the last four songs played. Much of the site's other content is fresh as a country breakfast, just like everything on the air.
Everything you see and hear of KPIG on the Web is generated by scripts, databases and other technology -- all open source, all running on Linux. Also there for the taking, once the station's hacker-in-chief, "Wild Bill" Goldsmith, finishes getting it into a shape where he'll welcome the involvement of other open source developers.
Which brings us to the second story in this short series. Or the second station. That's Wild Bill's own Radio Paradise, a station that also streams MP3s at 128kb for the Web alone. I got interested in what Bill was up to when people from various parts of the country suddenly started telling me what a great station Radio Paradise was. All these correspondents are old colleagues from my own long-gone days in radio. Like me they've all moved on to other things, but retain some hope that Great Radio might once again emerge in the Wide Open Ranges of the Web. With Radio Paradise, it has.
You'll find a similar Web interface not just to Radio Paradise and KPIG, but also to SmoothJazz.com. Here is what Bill says he's up to: "What I'm doing with the stations I'm working with is gradually evolving towards a complete open source package for programming, managing and scheduling a radio station, with an integrated Web site to go along with it. Basically everything that makes it possible to do what you see on the screen there at KPIG.com is all done with open source stuff. There is not one lick of proprietary software in there anywhere."
Here are Bill's means to the ends you see on the Web site: "Basically what builds the page is Apache running on a Linux box. It pulls a lot of stuff dynamically out of an SQL database in Postgres. And it also pulls in a lot of bits and pieces -- little snippets of HTML that are built by scripts. An example of that is the Now Playing box. What you see there is a snippet of code that is actually written by the automation system that the DJs are using to choose and play back the music. Which is another Linux server running the same kind of software. The DJ is looking at a private Web page, by which they control what goes out on the stream."
It's sophisticated stuff. It's not for somebody who wants to webcast for a hobby. Instead it's really about our third story: inventing radio again from the ground up, on the Web. And whatever business might grow around that. Bill calls it "serious next-generation radio." How serious? "I think there is a nice small-scale business for one person who has a wide-ranging skill set -- or for a small group of people If it's done right, an online radio station at this point in time could probably support a staff of two or three people working full-time," Bill says.
The revenue model is the same as public radio, but far more direct and efficient. No begging required. At Radio Paradise, Bill has a PayPal tip jar, and it produces thousands of dollars every month. The donation system actually lets the user pay on a voluntary basis for using the station. It's the market at work.
"It's much more applicable to this situation than the commercial radio model, which any number of people have tried to come in and make work online and failed at," Bill says. "As long as there is commercial-free competition, there is no reason anyone will want to listen to something that has advertising in it, unless it was spectacularly better than the alternative. And nobody's coming in and doing things that are spectacularly better."
I agree that there's the makings of a serious business here -- one that proves what Linux is really about is letting technology work as open business infrastructure, rather than a lock-in "platform" for everything else.
Sounds pretty darn good, too.