Difference Between Day and Night (Mar 13, 2007)

San Diego radio has been notoriously derelect in their duty to present a wide variety of new music and genres, sticking with mostly old music I've heard enough in my lifetime. Back in 1997, most every station in San Diego and Los Angeles, thanks to radio consolidation, slowly began to turn unlistenable, playing more hip hop, slow pop, grunge, and tired old classic rock instead of playing electronica, dementia, rare oldies, and classic new wave, genres I wanted to hear more and more of.

Back in 1997, 91X started to sound like crap, The Flash 92.5 fired Bryan Jones who was doing a good job and replaced him with a programer that, like 91X, lost listeners to repetetive Star 100.7, Z90 and Channel 933 were still grooving with dance flavored R&B, but that was fading in favor of unlistenable rap and contemporary R&B, Magic just launched playing old R&B hits, KGB sounded as bad in 1997 as they do today, Sets 105 moved to 102.1 while Rock moved to 105.3 in a complex station swap, making Sets hard to get and Rock too hard for my ears, Q106 didn't know how to sound, KJOY was a bore on 102.9, The Eagle 94.1 and Rock Mix 103.7 tried to be KGB and bombed, KYXY was too soft, and KSON was too contemporary. Only other interesting radio to listen to was Radio Disney then on 710 from Lala land before that station got too monotonous a few years later.

When I started listening to Internet radio in 1997, I began tuning in all kinds of streaming stations, mostly the independents, noncommercial, or otherwise not controlled by Jacor to hear and to learn about the kinds of music that local radio very much eschewed back in 1997.

Before there was satellite radio and before somebody figured out a way to create a music file, some radio stations began streaming their signals over the Internet. A few friends on the Internet showed me where to tune in to listen to music that wasn't being heard in San Diego, and listening to Internet radio became part of my life.

From traditional jazz to folk to bluegrass to comedy to dance to comedy talk to dementia to experimental punk to techno to AAA, I was tuning in many stations, most of which are gone or switched formats, to get my fill of the likes of whatever odd music the people in the college run radio stations were playing without any interference from some idiot music director a couple of thousand miles away. A few friends managed to tape the Internet streams of Dr. Demento (illegally) and post them on a few defunct download websites where I could download the Real Audio (MP3 wasn't invented yet) files, listen to the shows, and learn about the new funny music that was being played in cities finer than San Diego.

While San Diego radio's local music shows continue to churn out no-name bland music acts that I can't relate to, Internet radio stations such as kpig.com, ipartyradio.com, kozt.com, dementiaradio.org, and countless others I listened to over the past 10 years, gave the music I was looking for the exposure it needed so I could go to amazon or other independent music websites and purchase a hard copy of the music, most of which I could never find at Tower or Wherehouse.

Bob and Tom's funny morning radio show can be heard live on some stations, or downloaded to your ipod for a fee from bobandtom.com so you can get a dose of great morning radio while they're still rocking.

With Dr. Demento's production company forcing radio stations to take his show off of the Internet feeds, longtime stations such as KOZT, The Loop in Chicago, KY, WKIT could no longer stream his radio show by their own action, though the stations could still stream other programming. That doesn't stop some pirates (a necessary evil) from posting the mp3 files of the shows on the USENET binary music newsgroups.

Who needs Dr. Demento when there are a few dozen streaming radio stations playing comedy and dementia music?

In 2007, local terrestrial radio leaves me wanting for quality music in San Diego where it's been night for over ten years because most of the music playlists are controlled by non-music programmers who don't know a bad or boring song when they hear it. Monkeys can do a better job programming Channel 933 and Star 94.1 than whoever's monkeying around with the music. A real monkey should be programming Jack-FM instead of some cartoon monkey who keeps selecting the same old songs that have no meaning today.

HD radio is still a hype. I'd like to see a digital radio station with 50 mp3 streams like some company is testing in Mexico, with each stream being programmed independently of the owner of the radio station. Whatever that kind of broadcasting would be called, it would seriously challenge mobile Internet radio if that ever gets off the ground.

But for now, Internet radio is where the music is at. Who listens to the radio for music anymore?

A day without Internet radio is a day without sunshine. In San Diego, that's well over 3,750 days of darkness in a row!