Radio Paradise

I just learned about Radio Paradise – eclectic online rock radio from Fred Wilson’s post while quickly scanning through my RSS feeds. It is a listener supported internet radio. They call themselves anti-commercial and they follow a donation based model. I completely agree with this vision. I could not see how the licensing works though and what they did to be able to stream the songs that they stream. It is definitely not independent music. I am now listening to the 192k MP3 stream and it sounds awesome. However, I have to come clean and say that I could not perfectly get what aspect of Radio Paradise internet radio “does not get better than that” as Fred Wilson commented. My quess is that it is because Radio Paradise wraps the music streaming with some social interaction by enabling ratings and comments on the playlist and each individual song and makes it easy to buy any song that is playing or has played on the station. There is also a forum and a way for people to make journal posts.

It will be interesting to see how this concept of listener supported radio will work out. Because, I think this may be a good model for podcasts as well. I know Jason at Insomnia Radio was tinkering about a donation based model for his podcast as well. As far as I understand, the business model side of this type of efforts is still an open problem.

Technorati Tags: radio paradise, internet radio, podcast
[tags]music, internet radio[/tags]