Station to Station.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: The Internet radio revolution

The real future of Internet radio

If you spend much time on the Web, you've probably stumbled on some radio stations there - if not one of the unusual operations that broadcast only over the Net, then a traditional AM or FM outlet's site, dedicated to simulcasting the station's signal around the globe. You may also have heard that in just a few years the Internet will be wireless, and we will be able to listen to thousands of such stations on cheap, portable receivers.

There are complications to Net radio, though, that most press accounts ignore, notably the medium's traffic problem. There's a finite number of people who can tune to any audio stream at once; if you top that number - which could be as low as 50 - no one else will be able to hear you. The techies are working on a solution to this, called multicasting. If and when it's in place, Internet broadcasting will be ready to bloom. Until then, though, it will be too bottlenecked to be competitive.

Once multicasting is ready, the Web won't be just a different way to deliver radio shows. Netcasting will converge with at least two other technologies, creating something very different from traditional radio. One of those technologies is the MP3 file, and all the other means of digitally storing music and transferring it over the Net. The second is the sophisticated software that radio stations use to plan their playlists.

It's impossible to predict all the ways this new, hybrid medium will evolve. But by allowing listeners to invent their own personalized radio formats, it's sure to undermine - perhaps fatally - the consultant class that currently decides what gets played on the radio.

Very few radio stations let their disc jockeys choose which songs they'll play; jocks today are paid for their voices, not their musical taste. It wasn't always thus. In the '40s and '50s, the first wave of great R&B and rock 'n' roll DJs didn't just pick their own records; they made radio an improvisatory art form, putting similar songs together, fiddling with the levers and dials in front of them, spinning yarns, making up rhymes, interacting with the music as it played.

This was counterbalanced, in the late '50s, by the rise of Top 40 and the earliest, crudest forms of audience research. Compared with modern pop radio, early Top 40 was spontaneous and far from formulaic. Nonetheless, the transfer of power from jocks to program directors sparked some resistance, and in 1959 several DJs formed the National...