MISCmedia for 3/14/00
They Might Be Broadcasters

IT'LL BE A WHILE before fully open wireless Net access is widely available, so Net radio's strictly for non-portable applications (homes, workplaces).

Within that restriction, you can get hundreds of rebroadcast broadcast stations from across the world, plus thousands more Net-only programming formats. It'd take a fully-staffed, updated-daily review site just to discuss them.

(RealNetworks' own RealGuide site only reviews sites using that company's products, and even then it can't discuss more than a portion of all the sites out there.)

This means it helps to be found by Net-ites if your station or program has a potential audience that might already be looking for it--such as the fans of an established musical act.

Even--or perhaps especially--if it's an act that was dropped by its last label and hasn't had an album of new material in three and a half years, such as They Might Be Giants.

After the beloved quirky-pop duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh was dropped by Elektra Records, they started a program of reissuing their old and/or unreleased material (plus new live recordings of the songs from their Elektra CDs) through the indy label Restless. They've got enough of this material to launch their own Net-radio station, which they have done.

"Radio They Might Be Giants," with its almost all-TMBG format (they've mixed in a handful of what they call "Cool Songs By Other People"), shows off the vast breadth and professionalism of the group's ouvre, belying their old MTV reputation as a mere novelty act.

It also encourages past casual fans of the band to not just get reacquainted but to become born-again collectors. If this happens to you, the group's got plenty of pay-per-download MP3 recordings to sell you.

(One of these packages contains all previously-unreleased stuff, including a wonderfully poignant ballad called "Operators Are Standing By" ("...Smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee....").)

I was about to write at this point that there aren't many bands that had enough (or enough diverse) material to program a single-act Net-radio channel. But then I got to thinking of all the hundreds, yea thousands, of rock, pop, hiphop, alt-country, and other indie and quasi-indie acts still touring and/or recording after 10 years or more.

It's way-easy to imagine a Radio Pere Ubu, a Radio Built to Spill, a Radio Michelle Shocked, or a Radio Diamanda Galas. (I already know of Net-stations devoted to Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, and the Beatles, natch.)

Yet the question remains, can these tools help "break" an unknown act as well as they can help revitalize an established act? Countless unsigned acts on the Net are trying. (Some of them are very trying.)

TOMORROW: The channel formerly known as the Nashville Network.

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