MY FAVORITE NET RADIO STATION (other than my own MISCmedia Radio, of course) is dying this weekend. Or maybe not.
If the planned reincarnation of Luxuria Music as a pay site works out, it could be a catalyst toward finally establishing a viable business plan for Web-based content.
If it flops, a grand experiment in devising a radio station specifically for online listening (as opposed to the mere web-streaming of existing broadcast stations) will become just another memory of the dot-com crash.
Luxuria (named for a Roman goddess of lust) started up in LA a little over a year ago.(Yes, somethinig from LA that I actually like.) Its core staff included The Millionaire, cofounder of the once-smashing "cocktail nation" revival band Combustible Edison.
As you might guess from his involvement, its playlist was heavy on exotica, lounge, soft-surf, orchestral-pop instrumentals, and torch tunes.
But the station went further out from its core format-niche than most broadcast commercial stations nowadays. Any given hour might find it playing spy-movie themes, the poppier side of techno (cf. Pizzicato Five), rockabilly, French cabaret tunes, serious bebop jazz, odd early synth covers of Beatles hits, and awful Bill Cosby anti-drug children's songs.
During most parts of the day, this music was curated and mixed by live DJs, who communicated with listeners via a chat room and a studio webcam. Some of these, such as Eric Bonerz (son of the Bob Newhart Show dentist) and performance artist Val Myers, turned their shifts into bizarre sketch-comedy schticks that also had music. Others produced long interviews (with musical highlights) of legends musical and otherwise, ranging from Beach Boy/tortured genius Brian Wilson to Tony the Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft.
But in the profitability-challenged web content industry, quality wasn't enough. The station's financial backer, a company developing turnkey technologies for Net radio, sold all its assets (including Luxuria) to Clear Channel Communications, one of the three or four mega-giants that have been consolidating and ruining broadcast radio all over America (Clear Channel alone owns some 1,200 stations!).
Clear Channel wanted to apply this company's technologies toward the streaming versions of its broadcast properties (streams that are now offline, as part of a dispute with announcers' unions). Clear Channel had no interest in maintaining Net-only stations like Luxuria, and announced in early April that it was shutting down the station as of April 30.
Luxuria's been in death-watch mode ever since.
As DJs left or got laid off one by one, their time slots were taken over by an automated playlist system (nicknamed Luxotron 5000). In the site's chat room and message boards, listeners and station personnel openly discussed how Luxuria might be saved, at a time when available investment capital for web content is essentially nil.
Finally, this week some of the station's remaining live DJs hinted that, starting next Tuesday, you'll be able to continue hearing those lush Lux sounds after all--if you cough up a $10-per-month subscription. They announced an email address where you could request further details as they become available.
I dunno if a subscription scheme will work for Lux. Such schemes haven't worked on the web yet, except of course for porn, sports-betting info, and stock-market-betting info. And $10 a month (some cable systems charge less than that for HBO) might be a little steep.
But I hope it works, or leads to another plan that works.
For those not yet ready to shell out for Lux's lush and luscious sounds, there are alternatives for the adventurous listener. One of the best is Seattle-based Antenna Internet Radio and its Friendly Persuasion show, an hour or two (always up, replaced weekly with new episodes) of oddities and delights from the editors of Cool and Strange Music magazine. Another is Swank Radio, an automated stream of '50s orchestral pop (mostly instrumentals).
NEXT: A partial defense of fast food.
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