WCPE - Great Classical Music 24 Hours a Day

With local radio stations under largely deserved pressure to do something useful, an unfortunate outcome is that many marginal specialty stations are going under, or worse, changing format in the unlikely hope that having just one more top-40 broadcaster per square mile might make them slightly profitable again.

I can see myself soon totally weaned of the need for radio stations at all. Living now beyond the outskirts of much of anything the "scan" button on my radio has trouble finding a signal strong enough to stop at. Just the opposite of the problem I used to have where the stations were so close together it stopped at every single frequency (making it mostly indistinguishable from the up-down tuning buttons).

By some miracle though, I have a fast Internet connection, and various means of listening to "Internet Streaming Radio" (I'm not sure if there is an official term for this, so I made that up). I can listen directly, using one of several computers, but after I got used to this notion I wanted that music piped out of my moderately fancy stereo system as well, so I got an Apple Airtunes gadget and have been using it for coming up on two years I think. More recently I caught These Things on sale for $99 (well more, if you wanted the nicer display) and decided to try one (and then another). Being able to tune into an Internet radio station without the need to be sitting at a computer (as was the case with Airtunes) or even have a computer turned on, is really liberating. Having two going at once in different rooms is also nice, even if the sounds are a bit out of sync. More expensive devices can cure this problem too, but this one is good enough for my needs, namely being able to go from the living room to bedroom without losing continuity.

Now if I want to listen to my own music collection rather than someone else's, this devices connects (in a more user friendly way than Apple hardware) directly to my iTunes setup, and it will also connect to several other music server programs (including one that runs on Linux, a big bonus for me), but I haven't yet gotten over the convenience of having such a large selection of music (and with database search capability rather than that mere up-down tuning mode of an actual radio) so other than to prove it works, my local music collection is sitting idle for the time being.

Finally though, this is about revenge. Revenge for one thing against all those top-40 stations which seem to be coming and going monthly around here so that you can no longer keep the presets on your radio programmed properly for any length of time. Do you hear me top forties?! I'M NOT LISTENING! But this is also revenge against some of those marginal stations, that, rather than do more to leverage whatever specialty market they are in, and rather than do the graceful thing of just going out of business, instead embarrass themselves and their listeners by making sweeping death spiral changes to their programming switching from classical to religious, from religious to country, from country to talk, from talk to top-40 and then finally closing their doors after wearing out whatever audience they had.

Locally, here in the middle of nowhere, there was only one station that played classical music, a college station, and they did a fairly good job of it too, using two different frequencies, one of which I could receive in my concrete silo, the other I could only receive in the car. For some reason they decided that the farmers in this area do not include enough old-time Communist sympathizers, so they have switched one of the two stations to 24-hours of NPR programming. Guess which one? So at home, there is now no reception of classical music, and on the station that such reception used to exist there is a constant demand that I send them money. They are barking up the wrong tree. I spent my donation money on a new Internet radio and now I'll be listening to this:

theclassicalstation.org

among others. Maybe the connected world only needs a few of these, and I'll be sending them a check to let them know I appreciate their efforts. In the mean time, I wish the local stations were more imaginative. But they aren't. So there.