Summer Road Trip: Web Radio Sings Along June 25th, 2009
Tom Amontree

Tired of repeatedly changing radio stations as you drive from one region to another?  This summer, web radio can transform your listening experience behind the wheel, offering an expansive play list for free, or at a nominal cost.

Here’s how it works: Simply use your latest Internet-connected smartphone from Blackberry or iPhone to stream Web radio through your car speakers using an inexpensive adapter.  Online music services from Pandora.com to Slacker.com offer extensive libraries of music to choose from—which can either be enjoyed for free with occasional advertisements, or for a small annual fee without the ads.  Pandora custom-designs a radio station based on a song or artist of your choosing, and allows you to express your opinions on its selections by voting thumbs up, down, or skipping the song entirely.  Slacker offers a similar, personalized web-radio option, or you can tune into one of the website’s existing 128 stations.  With Slacker’s 2 million or more songs, and Pandora’s 600,000-song catalog, hours of interesting and diverse music are at your fingertips.

As you may imagine, free or low-cost web music has sparked controversy between the recording industry and webcasters regarding royalties.  But thanks to dedicated discussions, it looks like a truce may soon be reached in which web radio sites pay a portion of their revenue to the recording industry interests.  A compromise that will ensure web radio continues to blossom and converge with sophisticated broadband-powered technologies that bring hours of listening pleasure to consumers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Benefits of Broadband. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.