Beastie Boys label Grand Royal has launched an Internet radio station utilising the new Shoutcast streaming tool which allows users to send music and speech live to other listeners.
As well as the Beasties, Grand Royal in the US has a diverse range of artists from Bis to Atari Teenage Riot, all of whom have trouble getting played on mainstream radio.
Grand Royale Radio, online 24 hours a day, will carry live gigs and unique and unreleased material.
Their current playlist as of 10.50 GMT on Thursday 11 March 1999 is
Buffalo Daughter ‘SuperBlooper’
Butter 08 ‘9MM’
Shizuo ‘Sweat’
Liquid Liquid ‘Cavern’
Detour ‘Bis’
Moistboyz ‘Good Morning America’
Bis ‘Eurodisco’
Ben Lee ‘New Song’
Ben Lee ‘Cicadas’
Half Wit ‘Sukpatch’
Although web radio using Shoutcast is still in its infancy, several such web stations have sprung up, most notably Public Enemy‘s Bring The Noise. Shoutcast is made by Nullsoft who developed WinAmp, rapidly becoming the standard for desktop MP3 players. You can hear Shoutcast webcasts through WinAmp. It’s free for non commercial users, though at present only available for Windows and Unix users. Although there are a maximum of 30 listeners, fans can create mirror sites and ‘chains’ that will allow thousands of listeners worldwide to listen, making this a potentially massive global medium.
The Beasties have been at the forefront of using web technology to distribute their music and recently ran into problems with parent label Capitol when they put up CD quality MP3 files and were forced to replace them with Real Audio streams.