Digital radio days.

• Author: PETERSON, ERIC

A COUPLE OF BOULDER-BASED INTERNET RADIO STATIONS RIDE THE LATEST SONIC WAVE.

On a crisp winter afternoon, two disc jockyes readied for a shift change in the Eclectic Radio Co. studio above Boulder's Pearl Street. DJ Slackgood (a.k.a. Dave Blackwood) casually spoke into a microphone as El Fugitivo (the mild-mannered Claude Frank) shuffled through a stack of compact discs. "We're a little discombobulated here," Slackgood explained to his remote audience. "There's like 18 people in here."

"Kind of crazy," interjected El Fugitivo. "We do have a pile of good music, though."

Slackgood continued, reeling off the names of the songs that had just been broadcast -- a list populated by the work of acts that aren't quite household names. "You're listening to Music for Cubicles on GoGaGa-brand radio. I'm DJ Slackgood--I'm outta here," he concluded, handing the show's reins over to El Fugitivo.

Outside of the musical selections -- including a wide array of psychedelic, punk and experimental rock -- the scene resembled any commercial radio broadcast.

GoGaGa, however, breaks from radio transmission tradition. Its music travels not through the airwaves, but via the World Wide Web and streaming audio files -- the server has replaced the transmitter.

As one of the Boulder-based Eclectic Radio Co.'s network of eight online stations, the free-form GoGaGa is part of an evolving trend toward digital radio.

Eclectic Radio founder and General Manager Joe Pezzillo explained that the company's operations are very similar to that of a traditional broadcaster. But there are a few key differences. "With a standard transmitter, you have a geographic limitation of the reach of your signal," he said. "In Internet radio, we don't have a geographic limitation. Instead there's a bandwidth limitation."

Nor has the digital trend been lost on traditional broadcasters. Several Colorado FM stations -- including KTCL in Denver and KILO in Colorado Springs, both youth driven FM rock -- feature online broadcasts from their websites. These broadcasts are more for show than anything -- their core audience still tunes in the old-fashioned way.

Due to their potentially global audience, Eclectic Radio's stations focus on genres that don't usually garner much airplay on traditional FM, such as rockabilly, reggae and techno. "We're able to find a more targeted listenership, wherever they may be, instead of having to reach the lowest common denominator audience with a single transmitter in...