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Pirate Radio Stations Explode on YouTube
A trick of YouTube's algorithms has led to the blossoming of hundreds of unlicensed, independent radio stations on the site, reminiscent of an age of underground broadcasts in the previous century.
Luke Pritchard and Jonny Laxton were 13 when they met at a boarding school in Crowthorne, England, in 2011. They bonded over a shared love of underground music and in 2014 started a YouTube channel, College Music, to promote the artists they liked.
At first, the channel grew slowly. Then, in the spring of 2016, Mr. Pritchard discovered 24/7 live-streaming, a feature that allows YouTube's users to broadcast a single video continuously. College Music had 794 subscribers in April 2015, a year before Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Laxton started streaming. A month after they began, they had more than 18,440. In April 2016, they had 98,110 subscribers and as of last month, with three active live streams, they have more than triple that amount, with 334,000. They make about $5,000 a month from the streams.
The boys stumbled upon a new strategy, one that, in the past two years, has helped a certain kind of YouTube channel achieve widespread popularity. Hundreds of independently run channels have begun to stream music nonstop, with videos that combine playlists with hundreds of songs and short, looped animations, often taken from anime films without copyright permission. Live streams come in many different genres. Two of College Music's streams are part of a family of channels that broadcast what the broadcasters call lofi (low-fidelity) hip-hop, mellow music that would sound familiar to fans of J. Dilla and Nujabes.
If you've ever clicked on a YouTube livestream entitled something like "lofi hip hop beats to relax/study/bang to", then you know what the article is talking about.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:19AM (6 children)
No, it hasn't.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:31AM (5 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_radio [wikipedia.org]
You're sounding just a lil bit old
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:23AM (4 children)
Words mean things [wikipedia.org].
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:08AM (3 children)
If the Internet radio is transmitted via Wi-Fi, most of your anal definition is satisfied.
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:19AM
Nah, too easy.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:21AM
Yes but his anal tone [nih.gov] is strong.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:11PM
Then the wifi transceivers at each end of that are radios, but the music stream still isn't. This isn't complicated.
See, you believe that since you hear music "on the radio" that anything that plays or broadcasts music in any form is therefore a "radio".
Actually, believe it or not, that's not the case.
And yeah, I understand that my belief--sparsely shared here!--that words mean things may mark me as an "old person."
I happen to be an old person who has been hassled by the cops just for transmitting music over a homebuilt unlicensed radio transmitter (that used a window screen whose dimensions made it a not-bad emitter for an antenna). On a college campus in the early 80's.
So these ahoy-matey piratical rebels today who say "gee! you can use online streaming to pretend you have a radio station!" don't impress me all that much, but even if they did, I would be able to answer a quiz on whether they were broadcasting the music on the radio or not.