This is too sad: "Mounting debts, decreasing assets and exceedingly harsh industry conditions have forced the venerable Grand Royal label to close its doors. The announcement came today that the label could no longer operate at its current loss."

The Beasty Boys were probably the most influential band for me. Not only because of their own music, but also because the Grand Royal Magazine. Like all the good stuff, the two issues I had, have been "borrowed".

There is a thread on Metafilter which mentions Grand Royal's Rare Music Radio. They play exactly the stuff I like: 60's/70's Soul, Funk, Jazz, Brazil, Latin, Reggae, Dub and some Cheese. (Here is the directory with the record covers of the songs they play.) I wish I had known that link before.

verrrry nice link too!

this is certainly bad news.

is constantly playing while i'm at work. i don't know what i'm going to do.

How about our own channel? I think I have seen websites where you can make your own net radio. Some webloggers did this, but I don't remember the URL. Perhaps these sites are dead already, because of the lack of a business plan.

is the only one i know

i don't think it is worth the 20$ setup + 5$ each month. in the end it's just us and some friends of ours who listen.

it costs money now? thought it was supposed to be free.

i am trying to sort out a slot on interFACE for next weekend when I will be back in London, briefly... : )

I just set up a shoutcast server on my machine. I'm not sure if everything is working though. You can 'try' and connect to it at kwota.dyndns.org:8000

it's a mixed bag of music, rock, rap, house, techno, rare grooves, oldies, comedy, and lot's of other stuff..

almost 300 hours worth..

unfortunately 48kbps are to much for me, even though i have dsl. i suppose the congestion is between the states and europe. rare music radio works also only with 24 kbps for me.

The bitrate has been lowered to 24kbps. I'll do some more testing on it tomorrow when I can connect to it from a remote computer... I guess this is more of a test as it may not work very well and I might end up scrapping the idea, we'll see.

dyndns + shoutcast sounds like a good idea. these tools are new to me, because i got dsl last month and i can't do this private fun stuff at work. once i have a substitute for my 166MHz vintage mac i could actually be my own internet pirate radio. even though this is cool, i don't think anyone is really interested in streaming a randomized selection of my mp3s.

i agree.. i guess it's more of an experiment right now. i read about some software that allowed for user selectable selectable playlists.. jukebox style that could be accessed remotely. users would browse the index of songs and pick what they wanted to hear, once picked the songs would be placed in a queue to be played. i don't think it was commercial software and i'm having trouble locating it.. i'll keep my eye open. also, my bandwidth can only handle maybe 10 simultaneous connections so i'm trying to find a free relay service as well.. but again. this is just an experiment.

when i connect to rare radio they have between 20 and 30 listeners.

the thing you have to offer is personality. this makes the difference to websites (or stations). i think a carefully selected one hour playlist with some comments is much more interesting than a jukebox. you can loop the broadcast for one week. or you can ask more people to participate and every 24 hours the virtual server is passed to someone else.

I really like the idea of a collaborative effort. I wrote a bit about it on my site over here. It might work.

call it post blog attitute :)

the idea is, if you have 5 people involved you have at least 5 listeners and their friends.

it might work, or be at least fun enough that a few people enjoy doing it enough to make it worthwhile. modofo and i were talking about it a bit, trying to figure out ways to use the myplay service.. the commentary would definatly add to the experience.