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Abstract
This article establishes the historical framework of net-radio and traditional radio in the context of emerging technologies, programming ideologies and government regulations in North America and Australia. It illustrates how the unregulated nature of net-only radio relaxes the structural constraints associated with traditional radio.
Keywords: Traditional radio - internet - net radio - radio online - net only radio - regulation - music copyright
Introduction
Traditional radio, the oldest of the broadcast media structures, is used to competing with emergent technologies like net-radio. Television posed the biggest threat to traditional radio when it was introduced in the 1950s. Traditional radio refocused its attention away from formats taken by television and strengthened its alliances with the music industry. Traditional radio has always had a history of adaptation, ensuring its survival to present times. As Marshall McLuhan (1964: 259-268) argued, because of radio's speed and portable reception, it commanded a particular mobile attention of listeners, which other media did not. In the late 1960s David Sarnoff, a visionary employee of the first radio company (Marconi), acknowledged that traditional radio's survival would be severely tested amidst the arrival of new structures like the personal computer and internet technology:
The computer will become the hub of a vast network of remote data stations and information banks feeding into the machine at a transmission rate of a billion or more bits of information a second ... Eventually, a global communications network handling voice, data and facsimile will instantly link man to machine - or machine to machine - by land, air, underwater, and space circuits. The computer will affect man's ways of thinking, his means of education, his relationship to his physical and social environment, and it will alter his ways of living. (Sarnoff 1964, no page)
Today the competitive threat of other new media technologies has become more serious as traditional radio faces an increasingly crowded media market place. While other digital radio platforms (iPods, satellite radio, HD Radio) have taken charge, none has managed to garner the global audience that net-radio has. Net-radio, which is audio streaming over the internet, began as an emergent technology in the early 1990s when the internet descended from the military domain into the commercial realm to become the World...