Radio daze

I met a guy named Radio Mike last week, and we've hung out a couple of times with my roommate. Mike just moved to Austin from New York City, where he was doing a streaming radio show over the internet. He rips some tracks from his CD collection into an audio recording program, records his voice on a separate track from the music, mixes it down into a one-hour wav file, compresses that into an mp3, and then uploads it to his host for anybody to download and listen to. It's do-it-yourself broadcasting for the digital set.

The newest Entertainment Weekly has an article on the decline of the album as a musical form due to both legal and illegal mp3 downloading. The evolving mindset we have as a nation is that we can have any song/tv show/movie that we want whenever we want it, thanks to Tivo, Kazaa, iPods, and all the rest. Green Day's fantastic American Idiot is pointed to as the current exception that points out the rarity of concept albums these days, since people will listen to the songs in whatever order they like, and whatever meaning the order had to the story will be lost. Radio Mike's show gives the lie to the idea that concept albums can't be released digitally, however, since a band could release a file containing the whole album, with no track separation and therefore no skipping. You could always fast forward through, but that's always been true anyway. Convenience is the key here.

I think shows like Radio Mike's could have an opportunity for much broader exposure if satellite radio catches on. It's not a big leap from receiving the satellite data signal and decoding it to play over car speakers to receiving an mp3 file via wireless streaming download. Many new car stereos will play mp3 files already. It's only a matter of time before innovation makes the consolidation of these elements possible, and if the audience is there, a whole new world could be opening up for longform music with a point of view.