Radio

2022-02-08 Music Bob Ossler

Most radio stations suck

For years, I have bemoaned the fact that radio has become a corporate wasteland. There just aren’t enough independent radio stations. I suppose it’s financial; probably costs a lot of money to operate. I’m not going to waste time dwelling on my opinion…

Found something that excites me greatly

I was being a geek/nerd recently, and discovered a shell script (command line interface) that provided a menu to choose from a selection of lofi radio stations. I found this quite interesting and decided to dig deeper.

Internet radio stations have been around for quite a while, but I hadn’t paid much attention to them in years. The script I found was very simple and concise. I’m not going to go into the details, but examining it lead me down a new rabbit hole. I was interested in how the author chose the particular stations for his usage. I wanted to see if there were stations that catered to the types of music I like best. WOW! Did I chase the rabbit.

I found several sites on the web that list Internet radio stations. The one I found most useful is LIVERADIO. This site provided me with all the genres I was looking for, has easy navigation, and plenty of information about each station. I was hooked!!!

I specifically went looking for stations that had my primary interests of Blues, Rock, Classic Rock, Hard Rock, and Metal. I was also looking for stations that had old & new music. It’s hard to find metal music on over-the-air radio stations in my experience. Q-Rock 100.7 in the south suburbs of Chicago is an exception. I was able to curate a nice selection of stations to try out. Now, I am obsessed!!!

CGCM Radio out of Canada, was the first one I spent a great deal of time with. Great station and a very cool mix of tunes. They introduced me to a band I was unaware of, and unfortunately have disbanded. The Amorettes was a female rock band out of Scotland that has a really good sound. I checked out some of their albums on Apple Music and was quite impressed. CGCM Radio is definitely a station I will listen again.

The golden nugget I found is TheEL.US - America’s Rock Station. This station BLEW ME AWAY!. I have been listening for over 12 hours. The variety of music is astounding. They have various “themes” during the day, but their diversity is unmatched. Just in the last hour I have heard:

Robin Trower
Living Colour
Third Eye Blind
Patti Smith
Blue Oyster Cult
Dream Theater
Deep Purple
FFDP
Hellyeah
Iron Maiden
Yngwie MalmSteen
Chevelle
Disturbed
Exodus
Dio

This afternoon, I was raving about the music to a couple of my kids. The set at that time included:

Staind
AFI
Guns N’ Roses
Anthrax
Halestorm
Sinner
Default
Ace Frehley
Black Country Communion
Whitesnake
Alter Bridge
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Foo Fighters

Earler in the morning, it was a lighter mix which included Journey, Kansas, Sinnead O’Connor, Robben Ford, The Kinks, and Joe Jackson.

This is radio like it was meant to be. The MUSIC. There are no commercials, only occasional promo spots, and they play what they want, when they want. No corporate BS to get in the way.

DISCLAIMER I do maintain a subscription to SiriusXM because I love some of their stations, like Octane. It is nice to have access from pretty much anywhere. So, I’m not telling anyone to stop listening to corporate radio stations. I’m just pointing out that there are alternatives to the normal over-the-air crap that you find on your radio dial.