BY RALPH SLEDGE
This week, I'm going to feature a site that doesn't necessarily have a lot going for it other than the fact that I listen to it a lot. It seemed important, however, to look at the site, to figure out a little bit more about why I keep coming back to it. There isn't anything fancy about the page itself. The music isn't stuff that I can't hear elsewhere. But for some reason, a popular Shoutcast site called Monkey Radio has been soothing my ears for some time now.

The station is fairly well described by its tagline: "What is Monkey Radio? Well, some call it 'Trip-Hop.' And some call it 'Acid Jazz.' Some call it 'Downtempo' or 'Abstrakt Beats.' Now take the intersection of all these. Stir in groove. Dust with sexiness. Simmer. Voila."

The mix of music the station features is indeed pretty easy to listen to. There are no abrupt switches of mood and tone. In fact, there might not be any changes of mood and tone at all. The station stays pretty level, and all in all, that's a nice thing.

As I said earlier, there's really not a whole lot to Monkey Radio -- and I suspect that might be why I keep going back. The homepage is simplicity.  Links to a high- and low-bandwidth stream are right at top.  The current song and the stats for the station (current listeners, peak listeners, and average listen time) are right below them.  A small news section is below that. 

On the side are some links to the rest of the site.  You can make a request.  There's a section for featured artists, and a section with skins for Winamp.  A link for the recent playlist (songs that have already been played) is there.  There's a section entitled "essential albums," if you find yourself getting into Monkey's music, and two links to information about the site and its DJ.

If my description if the site sounds a little dry, I don't mean it to be: I'm hoping that some of the appeal is apparent by what's not there: by what's in between the lines, so to speak.  All the useful information for the site is at your fingertips.  Nothing is buried in the site.  There are no flash graphics and no Java to distract you.  It's pleasant to use the site.

And the listen times should make most people take notice, too.  While it's hard to give a typical statistic (like ATH) on this station based on what they're reporting, as I'm listening to it, there are reportedly 226 total listeners, and the average time-spent-listening is five hours.   This isn't an accident: I've been a fairly regular listener to Monkey Radio for a while, and they always seem to hover around the top 10 in listenership of Shoutcast streams, as reported by the Shoutcast site.

Why is it so popular?  Well, the music selection is nice.  Sometimes it's a random playlist, and sometimes it's hand-picked, based on whether or not the station's maintainer is in or not.  The music itself doesn't stray too far from the most popular tracks for the Electronic/Techno format: fans of the genre will recognize names like DJ Krush and Kruder & Dorfmeister.  It's a kind of music that's easy to listen to for hours at a stretch, too.  And it probably somehow helps that the DJ is one of the three full-time programmers of Nullsofts' Winamp 3.

Despite that shared relationship, however, there's really nothing commercial about the site at all.  There are no advertisements in the stream, no banners on the site.  There is no DJ voice.  One of the reasons, then, that it might be easy to listen to the stream for so long, is that it rarely seems "interrupted." 

What all of this means, of course, is that Monkey Radio might not be a good template for people seeking to establish a commercial sites.  But it's still an interesting study to see how a site with a very minimalist approach can attract a rather large audience to listen for a long time.  I suspect larger sites might want to take note.

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Live365 has released a paper called "Internet Radio: The Future is Now." The piece, written by CEO Alex Sanford, describes the environment into which Internet radio has emerged, the challenges it faces, and some ideas on what might be necessary for the industry to thrive.

Of interest to RAIN readers is the argument Sanford makes on why Internet radio has a "sustainable competitive advantage" over satellite radio and even broadcast radio ("We believe Internet radio will begin to overtake traditional radio in this decade..."). There's also an excellent breakdown of the legal issues concerning webcasting and music on the Internet.

The paper describes some of Live365 achievements and reveals a few of the possible directions for the company in the future (ad-insertion, the development of wireless delivery, the radio "Dial of the Future," and plans for a new audio player).

Read the paper here (you'll need an Adobe Acrobat reader). We'd like to do some more in-depth analysis of what Sanford had to say, and we invite you to share your thoughts with us after you read the piece. You can e-mail us by clicking here.

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From ZDNet: I'm just back from my Neighborhood Watch meeting, where I proposed a new anti-crime strategy. It's called, 'If you can't beat 'em, Napster them,' and it's a two-point plan:

"First, members of my watch group are going to make a list of belongings we don't want stolen and post them in front of our homes. We will then trust the thieves to police themselves and not take anything on our lists. It's the honor-among-thieves way of doing things -- and I took the idea from last week's appeals court decision in the Napster copyright infringement case.

"Second, if that doesn't work, we'll negotiate with the criminals and see if we can reach some kind of accommodation, perhaps one in which we share the take from the loot they steal from our homes. This idea comes from Napster's $1 billion offer on Tuesday to the music industry.

Read the entire article here.

Would you like to share your opinion? Drop us a note! (Or, to use your own e-mail software, click here.)   Your e-mail address:   Your name (if not obvious from your e-mail address):     Kurt, this is deep background -- don't quote me!         Thanks!

From the press release: "MeasureCast, Inc. announced today that two North Carolina-based stations made the MeasureCast Top 25 list for the week of February 19-25. Taking the 19th spot was Greensboro, N.C.-based Batanga.com (a "RAIN: Internet Radio Site of the Week," here), an Internet-only broadcaster of Latin music. Wake Forest-based WCPE/89.7 FM, a non-commercial listener-supported station dedicated to classical music, won the 20th slot.

To see this week's MeasureCast Top 25 rankings, click here. You can view the latest Internet radio ratings from MeasureCast and Arbitron at any time by clicking the appropriate link on the left-hand menu of this page, under the "Metrics" heading.

February 26-28, 2001	Broadcasters Website Sales Conf. 2.0, Tempe, AZ