The Ongoing History of New Music, Episode 750: A History of Streaming Music

After a couple of weeks off–spring break, you know?–the show is back with a brand new episode. This time, we’re going to talk about the history of streaming music.

Streaming is where we’re headed. Of course, there’s always going to be a place for owning music–CDs, digital files, vinyl and the like–but when it comes to mass consumption, the sampling of music and music discovery, streaming is the future. (Physical sales in Canada are down more than 20% from this time last year. Digital sales are even worse.)

So how did we get here? How did we make the transition from lining up at record stores to buy new CDs to being able to listen to any one of 35 million songs in seconds on our smartphones? The story is pretty, pretty cool.

Songs heard in this show:

1. Nirvana, Come As You Are
2. Green Day, Boulevard of Broken Dreams
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Under the Bridge
4. Linkin Park, New Divide
5. 69 Tribe, Bikers
6. David Bowie, Lazarus
7. Ricky Eat Acid, Beautiful Gurrls
8. Vampire Weekend, Diane Young
9. Le Tigre, TKO

The Ongoing History of New Music can be heard on the following stations:

• 102.1 The Edge/Toronto – Sunday night at 7, Monday night at 11 with archives show Tuesday and Wednesday at midnight.
• Live 88-5/Ottawa
• 107.5 Dave-FM/Kitchener
• FM96/London – Sunday night at 7, Monday night at 11
• The Drive/Kingston
• 98.1 The Bridge/Lethbridge – Saturday night at 6, Sunday morning at 10am
• Rock 97.7/Grand Prairie – Sunday nights at 6.
• 92X/Calgary
• Sonic 102.9/Edmonton
• The Zone/Victoria
• The Fox/Vancouver
• Live 105/Halifax

We’re still looking for more affiliates in Kamloops, Kelowna, Regina, Saskatoon, Brandon, Windsor,  Montreal, Charlottetown, Moncton, Fredericton, and St John’s and anywhere else with a transmitter. If you’re in any of those markets and you want the show, lemme know and I’ll see what I can do.

If you’re in the US and you want to stream the show, I wish I could help. A performing rights organization called SESAC has made threatening noises about suing non-American radio stations who dare stream into the US without paying crazy fees. Most Canadian broadcasters had no choice but to geo-block their streams. But hey, if you know of an American station that would like to take the show, contact me and we’ll make it a priority.

Oh, and good news: The show will start running on OneFM in Singapore in May. From there. we’re hoping to go deeper into Asia and the make a run at Australia and New Zealand.

Anyone else? Love to hear from you. Just email me at [email protected].