I grew up listening to the radio, starting back in the 70's before big corporate control of the airwave, when DJ's played a wide variety of music.
Somewhere along the way since then, commercial radio lost me. I think I just couldn't stand the commercials, or the compression of the audio signal. So, I still enjoy public radio a great deal. That means classical music and NPR in most towns.
One notable exception is KUT radio, in Austin Texas. Not a student-run radio, but they also don't play some of the unlistenable experimental music that college students seem to think it is cool to inflict on people. Great DJ's, great music- just the thing if you live in Austin! They're online, too, at
http://www.kut.org/ unfortunately with a really low-fi stream.
Recently, I found another way to hear new music:
http://www.pandora.com/Apparently, it is hooked up to something they call the "Music Genome Project" which is this big database they've put together analyzing the qualities of various music. You create a "station" on Pandora by entering in song(s) or band(s)... the site then searches the database, and plays songs like these. Indefinitely. The fun thing is, the database is large enough, and the "likeness" of some songs to others is obscure enough, that it quite often plays things that you've never heard AND that you generally like. You can create up to 100 stations. I've got one that plays jazz fusion (like John McLauglin), one that plays Latin jazz (like Eddy Palmieri), and one that even manages to find things akin to the "Gypsy Punk" of Gogol Bordello.
The sound quality is decent. It is compressed to be sure, a 128Kbps stream. Could be worse.
Apparently, they have plans to put commercials in with the music if you are not a paying subscriber... but they haven't gotten around to setting that up yet.
