Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Busines. Having ceded the file based music opportunity (mp3s and drm’d file formats) to Apple, the recorded labels are now getting hip to the much bigger opportunity, streaming music. Yes, it’s true that listeners will still want to own files for a few more years. There are places and devices that can’t get high bandwidth wireless Internet access, like my macbook pro which I am writing this on the plane ride home to NYC.
I am listening to mp3s (no drm for me) in iTunes all the way home. But over the next five years, the number of places and devices where you can’t get a speedy wireless connection is going to dwindle to maybe the car. And you’ve always got radio in the car which is going to get better and better because it has to in order to survive. Like everything that has happened in digital music, the rights holders have been once again been forced into dealing with an emerging technology. I think of these web services as the new radio stations. Here’s what we need. On the Media's The X Factor. BROOKE GLADSTONE:This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. BOB GARFIELD:And I'm Bob Garfield. For half of the 20th century, beginning in the early '30s, radio in the United States faced some of its fiercest competition from high-powered stations operating just south of the border. Known as "border blasters," or "X stations," they offered refuge for renegade broadcasters looking to evade regulation and, sometimes, the cops.
Capitalizing on Mexico's willingness to look the other way, some of the strangest characters ever to grace the airwaves drew millions of fans from the American heartland and around the world. They also changed the shape of American broadcasting. We have people who heard them on ships in the South Pacific, people who heard them in Scandinavia. Brinkley opened the world's most powerful station to what his patients wanted to hear, performers from vaudeville, carnivals or old-time medicine shows. For On the Media, I'm Jamie York.