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Scout
Radio can be heard at www.scoutradio.
com. Click on "listen" on the station's homepage. Also
try www.
indiepopradio.
com, another Portland-based station.
Live365
(www.
live365.com) maintains a variety of charts, search mechanisms
and recommendations to help listeners sort through its channels.
A recent top 25 list included IndiaFM Bollywood Hits Y2K,
Quebek Radio avec
DJ-Osi! and LiveIreland.com.
KNRK's
DJ Jaime hosts a show devoted to "new and local music" at
9 pm on Saturdays.
In other
radio news, advocates of the low-power FM license class
recently approved by the FCC are in full-blown battle to
stop a congressional jihad against low-power. Andrea Vargas
of the Portland-based Microradio Implementation Project
(www.
micro-radio.org) recently described the fight against
the combined lobbying power of NPR and the National Association
of Broadcasters as "war." Exciting!
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David Yeager runs his sector of the Total Revolution
from a closet in the corner of his apartment, which is right
by Burgerville on Hawthorne. You wouldn't expect the Total
Revolution to go down in such a locale, but that is the
nature of these fascinating times in which we live.
Yeager, with help from a couple of friends, runs Scout
Radio, an Internet radio station that broadcasts all
Portland music, all the time. The station runs on a Compaq
he bought at Home Depot, streaming songs by everyone from
Sleater-Kinney to Systemwide over a DSL line.
He controls the playlist from the closet, but uses the free
webcasting services of Live365.com, a site that champions
"the radio revolution" by hosting more than 18,000 Internet
stations. In a given day, Scout probably lavishes more love
on homegrown sound than the local commerical stations, all
puppets to the great corporate Leviathan, spare in a year.
Yeager used to play in the now-defunct band State Flowers,
which only heightened his all-too-common frustration with
the famine of quality on the FM dial. So when the Flowers
went the way of all bands, he decided to damn well do something
about it.
"I didn't really feel like starting another band," he says.
"And as I was checking out Indiepopradio.com [another
Portland I-radio station] and some other stations, I realized
that this was something that was not supercomplex, but was
very doable. I like the music scene here quite a bit, but
there's almost nowhere you can listen to local music on
the radio here, except for a few shows on KBOO and KPSU.
I wanted to create a place where, if you wanted to listen
to local music, you could do it any time you wanted, not
have to plan your day around it."
He soon found that he couldn't afford enough bandwidth
to make a station feasible on his own--but he also found
Live365, one of the many dot-coms that's literally giving
itself away in hopes of cornering a particular market before
the Mother Lode comes in. Yeager sends Scout's signal (and
a back-up signal) to L365, and the consortium site duplicates
it for as many listeners who want it, within reason.
"They have a limit of 365, and I think they chose that
number for branding reasons more than anything else," he
says. "I've never come anywhere close, though." The huge
site's top stations typically pull in 100 or so listeners
at any one time.
L365 offers a number of options for webcasting. On the
simplest level, users can sign up for a free account, choose
a station name and start uploading MP3s (provided they meet
some technical specs) that Live365 streams itself on automatic
shuffle. Provided you have your MP3s ready to roll, that
process takes about 10 minutes to start. Yeager opts to
control his play list in his own closet, a slightly more
complicated process, but one he thinks any reasonably computer-savvy
person could master.
Yeager says it's rare to have more than a handful of listeners
tuned in at once. Still, with wireless connections (and,
possibly, cranial transmitter implants--who knows?) on the
way in the very near future, he hopes the station will continue
to improve as a resource for those rare listeners not exactly
eager to suck down the same comm-radio swill served cold
in every 'burg in the country.
"I don't know of anywhere else where you can listen to
the breadth and depth of music from Portland than Scout
Radio, and I don't know where else you can listen to the
breadth and depth of music in one genre than some place
like Indiepopradio," he says. "The great thing about Internet
radio is that it allows you to go for those little niches
that mainstream, broadcast radio will never touch."
Yeager, who sometimes doubles as a [cue sinister music]
lawyer, notes that his station makes use of no illegally
obtained song files. "I get a lot of local CDs," he says.
"I don't use Napster, Gnutella or any of the other file-sharing
programs to put the playlists together. As a musician, I
was really concerned going in about making sure this was
above board." Live365, he notes, has agreements with the
music publishing giants ASCAP and BMI and monitors its stations'
compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
So will David Yeager one day rule the airwaves from his
closet at the edge of Ladd's Addition? Well, it's unlikely--but
then again, that's hardly the point. The choice is between
a dozen or so very dull stations and thousands of streams
of the strange, terrible, great, stupid, daring and sometimes
brilliant. Hardly a tough choice, I'd say.
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