I was listening to my favorite Internet radio station, Radio Paradise, the other day and when they finally got around to interrupting the music for a station promo, a somewhat rare occurrence, Bill mentioned that this is their 20th anniversary. Wow, I know I’ve been listening to the station for quite a while, but I didn’t think it had been a whole twenty years.
I used to rip the stream and then put the MP3s on a CD to play in the Miata. I had a CD changer in the trunk so I could load 10 discs, each holding around a 165 tracks (650 Meg limit), and listen for days before I had to burn more music. Sometimes it would be months, because, let’s be realistic, after listening to around 1,700 songs, would you realize when you were starting over?
I still have a little over 40 of these CDs, so I went and looked at the first couple and they are from April of 2003. So I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but I have been a listener for almost 17 years now. The station is listener supported and I been a supporter for around 15 of those years. At first it was sporadically, whenever I had some money left over in PayPal at the end of a month, but after a couple years I just signed up for a reoccurring donation and gave them a charge card number.
While the mix of songs is almost always perfect for my listening pleasure while driving around in a car, sometimes the harder edges rock, blues, world songs wouldn’t fit my mood on a quiet Sunday morning or later in evenings. Bill and Rebecca have even met those needs, there is now a dedicated Mellow Mix stream available. They have also added a Rock Mix and a World/Etc Mix to go along with the original Main Mix. Something for most anybody. You can also get smartphone apps and TV apps that play the main mix and add a slideshow of listener photos that are matched thematically with the music. Go check them out – Listening Options