Radio Renaissance
The world came home to America like never before during the 1930s and '40s as throughout the nation listeners turned to Radio for daily doses of entertainment and news, culture and kitsch, triumph and tragedy. Radio brought into American parlors and living rooms the calm authority of the President's voice and the unsettling rumble of war. To bars and back rooms it brought the roar of the World Series and the murmur of live-broadcast mysteries and serials. Jesus and jazz rode the airwaves, and the furthest ends of the earth were arrayed along the AM band.
In the 1950s, Television again shrunk the world, but in a way radio never could; and while Radio has remained a viable medium into the dawn of the 21st century, by the time Uncle Miltie hit the airwaves, the "Golden Age" of TV was underway and Radio's heyday had come and gone.
But now, more than a half century after it was relegated to second-class status by its flashier sibling, Radio seems poised to make a comeback. Piggybacking on the current cascade of advances in Internet technology, Internet Radio is resurrecting sound and rushing to the rescue of a sidelined media, spearheading a Radio Renaissance. Riding the crest of this renaissance are an estimated 4,000 Internet Radio sites. Dokk, a Net jock who spins digital ditties at www.albumside.com, calls it "a tremendous movement" and says it's sweeping along into something even bigger.
Log On, Tune In, Drop Sound
Instead of turning on a radio and tuning the dial, Internet Radio audiences log onto websites to hear webcasts. And like AM/FM radio, there's no fee for doing so. "Go to www.webmasterlive.com and on the left menu there are four feeds to choose from: 10K, 28K, 56K, and 64K," explains Internet Radio pioneer and entrepreneur Dokk. "The first two are mono; the second two are stereo feeds. Click on the link you want. This automatically launches your Windows or Media Player and contacts one of our relay stations and it starts streaming the audio right to you.
"You've also got to have a set of speakers or headphones, and enough of an Internet connection in order to be able to hook up and listen," he continues. "Then you need a little cable, a 3.5 stereo sub-mini to dual RCA, with a little plug on one end you can plug into the back of your computer. It comes out to two standard RCA stereo cables that plug in to the back of your stereo; run it to your stereo input and play it over your home stereo."
Or in lieu of external stereo speakers, Dokk says, e-radio can be heard via a computer with sound capacity. "You'd be able to hear it remarkably well and the quality would surprise you," he says. "The sound quality of Internet Radio can be superior to broadcast radio. You don't have the problems of multi-path interference, distortion, sun spots, electric lines, all those things that plague traditional radio. Internet Radio is radio without the static."
Boundaries and Borders
While the new medium's format, which features lots of music and talk, largely resembles that of its over-the-air cousin, the webcasts themselves are typically ad-free, and the proceedings decidedly less corporate.
"Some shows are absolutely whacked out," Dokk laughs. "There's one guy who has a program called The Budweiser Weed Station. He spends the entire night doing interviews with himself in different voices and taking hits from a bong."
The freer formatting with which Internet Radio has come to be associated - programs often share more in common with pirate radio, e-zines, or guerrilla theater than Top 40 station fare - stems in large part from the comparatively minuscule cost of broadcasting in cyberspace. Just as low-cost MiniDV cameras are revolutionizing the Web and indie filmmaking, Internet Radio, with inexpensive and simple technology, makes it possible for the average person to webcast. As KSEX Radio's Vito Benneducci puts it, "anybody can have an Internet Radio station."
This leveling has important societal and cultural implications, says media critic and www.mediachannel.org editor Danny Schecter. Schecter, a former documentary producer whose work has appeared on ABC News, 20/20 and PBS, says the trend toward media-mogul hegemony in traditional broadcast arenas has created a dire need for the sort of independent voices Internet Radio carries. "Radio concentration in America is getting so intense, with the same companies owning as many as eight stations per market, any new outlets that help offer diversity of viewpoint is desirable," he says. "Also, through the Web, you can easily listen to broadcasts from other countries and get exposed to a global diet, whereas radio has generally been local. But with the Internet you can go beyond boundaries and borders. I'm excited about the prospects."
Jim Pinkerton, a Fox News contributor and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, sees the new medium and the current proliferation of new media technologies as a potential antidote to the sort of univox megamedium many fear in this age of high-profile corporate commingling. "People who argued about the Time-Warner-AOL merger are fighting the last war," he says. "But who cares? With all the new media, including Internet Radio, there's more profusion of content pipelines than ever. So what if there are media mergers? I have more choice in media access than I ever had before, and I'll have more tomorrow," Pinkerton insists.
The result is a world in which, as the New York Times reported, "that maverick digital frontier known as the Internet has given voice to a variety of iconoclasts who are not under the regulatory thumb of the Federal Communications Commission or the screws of big business."
So what are webcasters doing with all that freedom?
Yada eYada.com
They're talkin' dirty, of course, and a few of them are making big money at it. Adult-themed stations dot cyberspace, and even mainstream Internet Radio sites like www.eyada.com are cashing in on the comparative freedom of Internet Radio.
Unlike traditional air-wave broadcasts, webcasts aren't subject to FCC restrictions, says eYada CEO Bob Meyrowitz, and the result is talk which combines big-name celeb presences like Hugh Hefner, Sharon Stone, Chuck D and Donald Trump with the freedom to say all seven of George Carlin's words-you-can't-say-on-TV plus a term or two that would make even George blush. "We can do and say anything. We are doing it specifically for the Internet, so what you're hearing is not like anything else you hear on traditional radio," Meyrowitz says.
That freedom has played an important part in eYada's rapid growth. Its multi-channel webcasts carry more than 19 programs and 200 hours of live programming from East and West Coast studios which in its various guises covers entertainment, sports, and health & fitness, and claims a million-plus international users monthly. What's more, unlike most Internet Radio endeavors, eYada has been well-funded since going on the air in August 1999, and has hired relatively well-known jocks, including Bob Berkowitz, whose program, Sex Bytes, is about, well, sex. And with a reported $25 million in investor capital, eYada expects to grow even more.
But for all the mainstream opportunities offered by Internet Radio, the most obvious applications for the medium have to do with that old dotcom standby, the adult-oriented and stridently sexual. One of the biggest adult-themed webcasters in the field is KSEXradio.
"KSEXradio talks about sex 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's the only station of its kind in the world on AM, FM, or Internet Radio that has an all-sex talk format," says station manager Vito Benneducci.
Serving its listeners a mix of porn news and personality peeks, sex talk and bits of lower-chakra humor by such comedy giants as Andrew Dice Clay, Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, KSEX exploits fully the freedom of the Internet radio format for fun and profit, says Benneducci. "KSEX gets raunchy, because on the Internet there are no FCC limitations or restrictions on language. Internet Radio is uncensored, so we can say 'fuck' as many times as we want to and so can the callers."
A broadcast radio veteran who jocked FM music and talk shows in Miami and Honolulu, Benneducci says it was the relative freedom of webcasting which drew him to Net Radio. "Regular radio is very boring. All the broadcast radio stations have the same generic formats and are owned by these big companies with very strict rules that restrict wild ideas," he says. "So I got out of radio for a while. But I returned because I thought the Internet was a chance to do something crazy, to push the envelope." KSEX has given him the chance to do that, he says, and the public seems to be responding.
KSEX has a studio in San Diego and began webcasting at in June of 2000. Benneducci says that by August, www.ksexradio.com already had 30,000 hits a day.
Among the attractions drawing all those hits are outrageous Net-only possibilities as KSEX's recent adult-themed riff on the hit CBS Survivor series - October's Sexual Survivor event, in which ten woman prostitutes and five amateur men were "stranded" on an island off of the state of Washington. Then there was KSEX's infamous "Long Schlong" contest, which also attracted considerable interest on the parts of listeners and advertisers alike - among these latter are X-video, sex toy and e-porn companies, which have problems placing ads in mainstream media. Non-adult sponsors are welcome, too, and although KSEX had no takers as of this writing, Benneducci says the future is exceedingly bright for KSEX and the medium as a whole: "I think Internet Radio will become more and more popular every year; there'll be more formats and the quality will get better and better, and we'll all profit because of it."
Radioland Revisited
When the flash and glitter of TV replaced the largely imagin-ation-driven medium of Radio, a precious forum for the theater of the mind went with it. With the advent of unregulated, basically free-form broadcasting over the 'Net, however, that forum may once again open to the listening public. And even if the Green Lantern or the starched crime-fighters of the great '30s and '40s copper dramas would scarcely recognize her content, one Netcaster in particular is leading the charge to retake the ears and erotic imaginations of netizens around the world.
Webmistress and author Oceania has for some time provided webmasters with spoken erotica on www.peacockblue.com/webmaster1.html and sex-themed CDs. Her new venture, which debuted in November 2000, is RadioactiveSex, which revisits Radioland's Golden Age with series that feature decidedly erotic plots.
Mainstream erotica has become synonymous through the years with ultra-explicit visual depictions of sexual caricatures bumpin' and grindin' through rounds of show-it-all coital congress. As a rule, nothing is left to the imagination. But, as Oceania points out, this approach can often leave the most important aspect of human eroticism out of the loop. "The biggest sex organ is between your ears," she says. "Everything I put my thumbprint on encourages people to think and break out of that ?K-Mart shopper' mode. I try to produce things that jog people's sexual imagination. Real eroticism engages all of the senses. It's like making love in the dark - it involves touch, smell, hearing, and taste, not just vision. That's the sensibility I try to bring to Internet Radio."
Oceania, who perhaps not coincidentally has a considerable sight-impaired following, says that although streaming video already has a place in Internet Radio, it is the access Radio allows to the unfettered, unaided imagination that is the key to its potential as an erotic forum. And from the look of things, www.radioactivesex.com has more than enough content to keep that forum continuously abuzz. RadioactiveSex boasts 19 programs, Oceania says. Among these are Lady Bolivia's Tantric Tales, by Stacey Baccaras, The Fifth Goddess, an ongoing soap opera with a whodunit theme and Tantric love rituals. Then there's Lady Jessica's Celia's Diary, a soap opera about a young woman who accidentally finds a diary detailing the secret sexual antics at a corporation.
Taking a deep breath, Oceania discusses her venture's start-up catalog. "Hypnotist Frank Anastacio's Redlight District Theatre Stories is along the line of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents - supernatural stories with sexual twists. And I do three shows, including Sex in the Bible Belt, with spoken selections from my anthology print and audio book, Sex, Corruption, and Voyeurism in the Bible Belt. And I'm continuing Escapades in Blue, about a woman who can switch from being a submissive to a domme. I'm also co-producing Masturbation Theatre, which features commentary by blow-up dolls on porn videos, since Internet Radio has the ability for video. Then we have psychic healer Jeffrey Oswell offers peaceful thoughts of the day, and E. Doyle Gillespie's Poetry on The Sexual Mind. Orgasmic Symphony is sounds at the moment of climax made into music, and the band Sonic Room contributes hip hop type music."
RadioactiveSex will be also marketed to pay sites as a radio-zine, pursue mainstream for ads, webcasts in streaming media, and plans live talk shows for the future.
From The Inside Out
So Internet Radio is exciting in its potential and intriguing in its implications. But how does it work as a business? There's nobody better to ask than Dokk. A pioneer who began his involvement with Internet Radio on Sharkey Live (now Webmaster Live) around 1996, Albumside.com's Dokk is now that Web station's deejay and CEO of two music and two talk sites. Webmaster Live (www.webmasterlive.com) is an all-talk site geared for webmasters, with an eclectic mix of show topics. In addition, Dokk plans to launch www.amstation.com soon, which will archive the live shows. And unlike most webcasters, he has managed to make money and to do so consistently. "We are extremely profitable and have been so since inception," he says.
One key to staying in the black has been strategic borrowing from broadcast radio, Dokk says, especially when it comes to promoting and winning sponsors. "We were the first in the adult webmaster community to introduce giveaways and promotions and commercials running in scheduled rotations 24/7," he says. "Webmasters can come on our show and win a DVD player or TV; your chances are better than winning the lottery. We have contests and even a karaoke night." His sponsors include Cybererotica (www.cybererotica.com), Web Overdrive (www.weboverdrive.com), RJB Telcom (www.rjbtelcom.com), Pornholio (www.pornholios.com) and others.
In addition to tactics borrowed from over-the-air radio operations, Dokk has also recognized unique opportunities for marketing Internet Radio as a marketing and advertising platform. "Webmasters have become jaded from overexposure to banners and ad hype on chat boards," he says. "This gives sponsors and listeners a chance to interact with each other in ways that, until now, all these sponsors were very unaccustomed to. Radio is a different world than banner advertising. You can lock in a webmaster's attention and hold him for possibly hours. It's a huge opportunity to promote a product or service. Name recognition is built in, too."
Getting Started
Okay, so if Internet Radio is so accessible and so egalitarian and potentially so profitable, how does the ordinary Netizen get in on it? Again, there's nobody better to ask than Dokk. "The best place for people who want to do their own radio stations is www.shoutcast.com, the site set up by the makers of WinAmp," he advises. "This is a directory of all of the shoutcasters who have WinAmp, probably one of the most popular media players. WinAmp.com's server software is essentially free. Lots of third party software has been written for WinAmp in the form of plug-ins. These include such things as remote control plug-ins and sophisticated digital sound processing plug-ins to control volume, compression and equalization. And since you can't webcast over a modem dial-up, you need ISDN or DSL, something that gives you enough signals for other people to hear you." Dokk says.
After visiting Shoutcast.com, Dokk says, the rest is comparatively easy. "Download some music from Napster, get a microphone and some cables, and a good, hot Internet connection, and you're on the air."
But who's gonna hear you? Potentially everybody, says Dokk, and what they're using to listen in doesn't necessarily matter. "Internet Radio is the same as broadcast radio, except instead of a 50,000 kilowatt transmitter, you use the Web to reach around the world," Dokk says. "We carry four live audio feeds, from 10 kilobits per second to 64 kilobits per second, for dual ISDN, DSL users, and others. By that, we avoid alienating a segment of our listening audience that may not be able to tune in. People with broadband connections in the U.S. can listen in full high fidelity, CD-quality, stereo. But people way on the other side of the earth, who may be on a dial-up modem at Survivor island, can't hear that. So we have a 10-kilobit per second feed, all the way down at the other end of the spectrum, that allows them to listen as well."
Freedom and License
So now you're webcasting. But don't all broadcasters have to have some sort of license to broadcast? Or pay royalties? Or basically operate under all the constraints regular media outlets do, in other words?
According to the insiders, the answer is... yes, no and maybe. "Nintey-nine percent of the stations out there do not operate legally, in terms of licensing, royalty payments and accounting," says Dokk, although he says his station does. "If you get serious, you'll pay for all your music, keeping lists and accounting of everything you play and know your average listener time. It took us over a year just to get approved by the U.S. government and receive our statutory broadcast license. There's a whole plethora of rules we have to operate under, which are even more strict than a regular radio station."
On the other hand, KSEX's Benneducci says the only license KSEX got is a business license. "The average guy, if you want to have a radio station, you can just be on the air. No license required. It's legal," Benneducci says.
Given the speed at which Internet Radio is expanding and the uncharted territory across which it's moving, it's not surprising that there's some confusion about this and other aspects of the nascent medium. And as is true of so many other questions regarding the 'Net, old notions about safe being better than sorry often get lost amid dizzying flurries of potential and possibility.
