Radio is Dead, Long Live Radio!

Some time back I bought a Bose music box for my iPod

Touch. Not that I needed it, but it looked great and the buy made me feel good.

I set it up in the kitchen and I could listen to the music on my iPod. My problem was that I have a need.

I have a need to listen to news. In the past I would have bought a radio, had to pay listening taxes (a remnant of Jurassic thought) and had only limited choice of radio channels. Even though the taxes are now payed through generic taxes payments, the fact remains that public radio is financed through taxes. And beware of the pirate stations, they steal bandwidth!

These days I have an Internet enabled generic device, like an iPod, I go to a site like shoutcast or download the shoutcast app on my iPod Touch. Instantly I have access to thousands of radio stations for free.

Schoutcast posts nice stats. They list that the last 30 days, lets say approx Feb 2009, total

TTLS was 340 million. Now TTLS stands for Total Time Spent Listening and is measured in hours. This equals to nearly 1 million people listening for 1 hour every day of the year. But then this time was only spent on the last 30 days...

Before I forget to mention, the monthly growth rate is approx 7%.

Interestingly, the "official" radio stations (like national Radio 1) are not (yet?) online. So basically I pay taxes to keep up the museum called Hilversum or "Publieke Bestel".

Just for you to know.