The radical ways in which the Internet has changed all traditional media, not least radio, challenged consumption models so that any and all media can now be accessed by anyone and anywhere in the world instantly. Changes in society so powerful that even reluctant media empires would eventually be forced to adapt and meet the new ways in which their consumers wanted to access their entertainment choices.” A Brief History of Internet Radio by Jamie Ashbrook https://radio.co/blog/a-brief- history-of-internet-radio
Since 2000 I have been involved in Internet radio. I was a pioneer in the talk format on Internet radio. I started with Don Rojas on his extremely popular The Black World Today Website. I helped start a Black talk channel on his platform. The Internet was rapidly changing, and we, along with several others, were part of that change, using it to entertain and inform Black folks; but we soon discovered we were broadcasting to the world.
Don Rojas was the founder of The Black World Today, he lived in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. At first, the Internet was mainly text, but as the technology evolved, Don began streaming music. He had about twenty channels of varying music genres: Jazz, Blues, R&B, Afrobeat, Reggae, etc. Unbeknownst to me, they were posting my Column Positively Black, which at that time was being syndicated by the National Newspaper Publishing Association (NNPA) to two hundred Black newspapers around the country on the Website.
Don’s main production guy was Randy Watson, who lived in Philadelphia. I worked with Roger Williams, Randy’s brother-in-law, who told me about TBWT. He shared with me that he had seen my column on the Website. I contacted Randy, and he was a little nervous at first; I think they thought I was going to sue them or ask them for money. I just wanted them to have direct access to what I was writing. Randy informed me they were working on starting a talk channel. At the time, I had a show on WHAT 1340 AM on Sunday evening, so I invited Randy to come to the station and see how talk radio worked, not knowing Internet radio would be much different than “terrestrial radio.” Instead of doing a live program like I was doing on WHAT, I would do the interview via telephone, record it, then have to encode it (change it to a usable format for streaming) then upload it to Randy and Don.
The Internet blew up in the 1990’s it started out as mostly text, with very little graphics and no audio or visuals. By 2000 audio streaming and some video were available. But by 2001, the Dot.com Wall Street pump and dump-bubble burst, and TBWT went out of business. TBWT exited, but the Internet expanded, and opportunities multiplied for stations and content.
One of the problems for early Internet radio was a lack of monetization opportunities, and that remains an issue today. One of its benefits is that streaming allows portability, mobility, and even wider access than what the transistor did for terrestrial radio back in the 1960s, which allowed you to carry a radio with you everywhere you went. With Internet radio, we are no longer tied to the desktop. We can carry and stream on our digital devices anywhere!
When TBWT went belly up, I migrated to Neil Blake’s Blake Radio Network’s Rainbow Soul talk station. Neil started around the same time as Don Rojas, but he had a video channel too, …
Thank you for reading Junious Ricardo Stanton article on scoopnewsusa.com. For more on “Log on you might learn something new“, please subscribe to SCOOP USA Media. Print subscriptions are $75 and online subscriptions (Print, Digital, and VIZION) are $90. (52 weeks / 1 year).
