Do You Remember Rock N' Roll Radio? (part 1 of 2)

Sometimes You Just Need Radio
I know, I know... there are several of you shaking your heads, content in your iPod or CD-cocooned worlds. Need radio? Pshaw! I know you're saying this, because I was one of you. I've been completely off of commercial radio for, damn, I'm not sure how long.... six or seven years.

But here's the secret -- when you've been off of it for a long while, you start to miss radio. You start to miss someone else ordering the songs for you. You start to miss not having to think about what you're listening to. Sometimes you just want music that's in the background... period. You want something that's not going to piss you off, but yet, not grab your attention either. But most importantly, I've realized that sometimes you just missing knowing that somewhere, somewhere, there's a human being in a little sound-proof closet playing music for you. Sometimes you need to hear that man or woman's voice as well as their musical choices. Sometimes radio is about pretending you're with someone, even when you're not.

So today and tomorrow I'm going to outline a few of the strategies I've tried and either kept or abandoned to get my radio fix. Today I'm going to tell you about satellite radio and how I gave up on it, and tomorrow I'm going to outline all my techie tips and tricks for local and Internet radio and iPod tunage.

Flirting with Satellites
So, XM Radio. Sirius. They're about the same. Yes, XM Radio has more channels, and they've got Tom Petty and Bob Dylan as disc jockeys, but yet, Sirius seems to have more live music options, including the broadcast from the IBMA music awards and others. XM has Merlefest too, though, so I chose to check it out. (I'll admit those Petty and Dylan radio shows sounded pretty interesting.)

I didn't want to fork out the money to actually buy a receiver until I'd made up my mind if I wanted to sign up or not, but thankfully the XM website has a nifty trial feature. You can sign up for a limited time, I think it's a week, and you can listen online from their website. The sound quality isn't the best, and yes you have to use your precious bandwidth to get the stream, but hey, it's free. The other bad thing is that you only get a subset of their total channel line-up, but it was still like one hundred channels, plenty enough to get my feet wet.

Commercial Free Music
XM is interesting, and maybe Sirius does this too, in that although it's a commercial free radio station, they do have human disc jockeys occasionally speak between songs. They talk just long enough for you to feel there's a real human out there somewhere, and then they shut up. The biggest problem with commercial radio today isn't the blaring advertisements, the insipid music, or the annoying disc jockeys, it's that taken altogether those components add up to one big insult to my intelligence. I don't understand the business logic here. How does treating me like an idiot make me buy stuff from your advertisers? But XM does not do that. No commercials, no insulting disc jockeys.

But something was still missing. I played around with several of the Americana and Country channels, especially the Bluegrass and Insurgent Country ones. I spent a lot of time on the Indie Rock and old school alternative rock stations. And although they didn't have a Celtic station, I did stumble across a really nice four-hour Celtic program on one of their eclectic program-based channels. (This was last November, so maybe they have a Celtic station now, no clue.)

Four Strikes, You're OUT!
But still something wasn't right. Something felt funny. It took me a bit, but I figured it out. Here's what I don't like about satellite radio.

1) You have to pay for it. Yes, I know I'm really paying for "free" radio by listening to commercials, but I don't feel that in my checkbook. Also, you can do commercials in a sane, intelligent way that makes me think favorably on the products or companies involved. For example, I'm a devout NPR listener, and if I hear something advertised on NPR, I can't help myself -- I tend to think much higher of that company. (Yes, I know this is a marketing cliche, but I can't help myself.) I really like the way those commercials are done. They're subtle, very brief, very "under the top." Other radio programs have similar commercials, like WDVX, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

2) I don't like paying for things when I'm not using them. This was a big reason that I finally was able to break away from cable television. Don't make me pay for 300+ channels when I can only listen to one at a time. Do not make me pay for 250 channels that I'll never in a million years listen to. Do not, under any circumstances, ask me to pay the same this month, in which I listen day and night, 24 hours a day, as I paid last month, in which I never turned the radio on. I just don't like it.

3) It's not local. Maybe I'm just being picky, but although I'm glad to know there's a human being in a soundbooth somewhere "spinning records" for me, I still don't like them being somewhere unknown to me, maybe on a different continent. I don't like that there's no local flavor. I don't like that I don't get local news, or the local weather. Traffic reports? Nope.

4) The hardware sucks, and it's expensive. Being a user interface snob (that's what I do as a dayjob), and a believer that good product design is incredibly important, I was not very fond of the XM satellite receivers. I also didn't like that they're only now creating portable receivers that can dock into your car and home stereo. This mobility is important to me as I listen to music all the damn time. Maybe I wouldn't mind buying multiple receivers if they weren't so freaking expensive. I mean, I have a radio downstairs, two upstairs, one in my truck, and one handheld one. Radios are cheap. Satellite radios are crazy expensive. Oh, and you have to pay a monthly fee for each additional receiver, whether you use them or not. What? Didn't they read reason #2?

So anyway, at the end of the week, I let the free trial die, and I haven't looked back. I would like to listen to those Tom Petty and Bob Dylan shows, though. Oh well... sometimes I miss The Daily Show too.