Internet Audio Wasn’t Better in the Olden Days

Where radio has had a huge leg up is that listening to online audio has generally stunk in the past. It sounded bad since bandwidth was expensive for the audio provider and listeners had slow modems, so the audio had to be greatly compressed. As bandwidth gets cheaper every year and listeners get better and faster internet connections as well as nicer PC speakers, these differences are starting to fade. Already, many online audio streams’ audio quality matches broadcast radio and exceeds the sound quality of satellite radio. With better and better codecs becoming accepted (like AAC (what iTunes uses), or my geek-favorite - Ogg) this only lets more online providers enter the marketplace on equal footing.

(A quick side note: in comparing internet audio to broadcast radio, I have left out satellite. That’s because satellite and terrestrial radio are similar enough to group together. They are both fixed, one-to-many communications methods – something I’ll get more into next week.)

Thankfully for radio, the music labels are helping us out by forcing the digital content world to use ridiculous DRM (digital rights management) – a scheme that has done little to nothing to prevent large scale piracy, but makes life annoying for listeners. Anyone who has enjoyed the feeling of not being able to access a music CD on your computer, or better yet have it install a rootkit for you will understand. At least DRM is making the world safe from music piracy and preventing people from sharing iTunes files. Oh, wait… nevermind.

So, presuming that online audio survives the DRM black hole (and it will – see the 3 links above) radio and internet-based audio seem, audio-wise, to be on somewhat equal footing over the last link – from the speakers into your ears. Since both can play music and talk that’s acceptable to most listeners’ ears, neither has a leg up in the most popular uses of audio.

Alright, so after one match up – it’s a tie. Next week, we move to second matchup of the series – delivery method. Maybe it’s just the geek in me, but it’s the most rapidly changing and thus, most exciting part of the Gathering Storm that is internet audio. If it’s not exciting to you, it’s at least the most important, because it’s the game-changer. See you next Website Wednesday.

As always, AllAccess has my “The Net Untangled Tip of the Day” each weekday and a column on Website Wednesdays. So check back and together we’ll get our websites focused on keeping radio strong in this world of increasing competition.

Do you agree with me? Or should I get another profession? If you have comments or any questions about radio websites – either general questions relating to the industry or the web or even specific (HTML, PHP, .NET, Javascript, etc.) questions, send me an email through http://Preppermint.net/contact. I’ll answer your question quickly and maybe even use it for a future column.