It’s not that I don’t believe in free-form radio. I love it. But, it’s truly a format for music nerds (like me). This type of community-based radio — as admirable is it may purport to be — never really succeeds in spreading the gospel of appreciating un-recognized and unheard artists to a mainstream audience. Would that it would. But it won’t.

One of the undisputed tenets of the Internet is that it has a fantastically long tail. If you look way down toward the end of that long tail — squint and I assure you that you will see it — you will find the other people out there like you who care about 70′s Nigerian funk and Screamo bands that are based in the greater Michigan area. This fundamental change to how people consume media is a god-send to those who feel a need to be connected to others who want to share the same passions. Guess where all the zine makers of the 90s ended up? You can bet your ass they’re all members of an online community or two.

This fundamental fact of the future that exists today means that any radio station that does not embrace the Internet as a broadcasting and community-building medium will fail. KUSF failed. Maybe not because of the Internet, but partly because it didn’t really have any Internet plan. As an arbiter of avant-garde taste, it felt to me as a listener that KUSF was too long asleep at the wheel. They were spinning records in a radio bunker for a few thousand people in San Francisco instead of growing their potential online community. They eventually managed to put up an Internet feed, but their website was hardly ever updated and there wasn’t any real public direction or way for people to participate except to pick up the phone and call in a request. I loved doing that at times, especially when DJ Schmeejay or Irwin were spinning records on their weekly morning shows, but all too often I had to wonder: What, exactly, and who, exactly, was driving the station?

College kids. Inspired, hip, try-shit-out college kids were making this Jesuit-school college station defiantly different. College kids who are presumably there to learn something innovative about how to broadcast music to people.

I won’t trot out the old “crisis is opportunity” Chinese wisdom bullshit, but the Save KUSF contingent might want to at least consider embracing the idea that building up something new is more valuable than desperately trying to save something already lost. Don’t know how to set up that Internet radio station for your university? Go down the hall and grab those nerdy dudes in the computer science class. Need some promotional materials? USF has an art program with people who desperately want to become edgy graphic designers, doesn’t it? No money? Ask the administration to funnel just a smidgeon of the direct marketing effort they put into contacting alumni members with life insurance and USF-branded credit card offers into your new Internet-only radio station (and promise them a custom-made PSA thanking every alumnus who pledges 100 dollars or more for the station).

Need someone to help get the word out about your new Internet-only radio station? I’m ready. I bet there’s a whole community of people who are, too — even if they don’t know it yet. In fact, they won’t know it until you get a group of people together and raise your voices to broadcast something new, which is, as the old Chinese proverb goes, harder to do than trying to tear something down.

If the Internet has taught us radio nerds nothing about radio, it’s that it doesn’t take a radio tower to broadcast. What does it take?

Write more. This is easy. I can do this. As with so many things, you write better by writing more. Pretty simple fact, whether you’re talking about writing or playing guitar. I include blogging in this resolution, but it also should include more creative writing. I’ve got some chops, but I need to be writing every day to make any kind of legitimate progress.

Learn CSS. No, really. I have some design skills, but I get tripped up on CSS because I’ve never taken the time to learn it from the ground up. Instead, I just keep hacking away and not ever using the full power of CSS. I owe it to myself (and my employer) to be able to do more than just dive in and troubleshoot CSS issues in a hacky way. I’ll probably also learn more about WordPress in tandem with this resolution. I suppose if there were a test at the end of the year, designing a theme would be the perfect coda for this type of self-taught enterprise.

Consume less. I eat too much. Drink too much. Flat-out consume too much. It’s about time I cut that out. Like my “write more” resolution, this is one I began in the past but need to make larger gains toward. One strategy that keeps me on this path is taking a “small batch” approach to consumables. It’s been years since I bought anything at a Costco-style business, and I’ve moved progressively toward quality over quantity with this approach. I will move further in this direction. I admittedly pay more with this strategy, but I consume less. (I’m not any fatter with this strategy, that’s for sure.)

Simplify even more. I’ve been excellent at this. I have much less physical stuff in my life than anyone I know, but I can go even further with this one. The hard part about this resolution is that the further you go with this, the more your home tends to look like you don’t have, when I suppose the point is to show that you don’t want.

Get friendlier. I’m an only child who loves solitude, but I probably went too far in the direction of solo quietude this past year. Time for me to get out more and show my friends that I love them by spending more time with them.

Plenty of more possibilities for my next year, but these are all doable — just like the resolutions I set for myself in 2011 that I realized:

• Sleep more: I’m now the king of afternoon naps and have a set bedtime on weeknights. I still have insomnia issues, but I get more sleep. (P.s., I’m typing this at 5 a.m. after not sleeping as well as I had hoped.)
• Eliminate all debt: It’s amazing that a piddling student loan from college can take well over 15 years to pay off. It’s equally amazing that I’ve paid that off, as well as every other monetary debt I’ve owed.
• More mindful spending: When you must purchase something, don’t cheap out and choose the short-term winner. It’s all about value.
• Share more music: I shared 20-25 new songs every month in 2011 with a group of friends. It kept me searching for new sounds and hopefully filled a few ears that wanted to hear something new.

Gui Boratto is a Brazilian DJ/architect/designer/insert-creative-label-here who started out in the advertising world. I guess he’s proof that not all people who go into advertising end up as soulless husks of their idealistic selves.

I have no idea how much that former advertising career means to Senhor Boratto, but his roots in advertising make sense to me. His music feels like the perfect soundtrack to that comfortably cliched and classic type of luxury-car commercial filmed at night on a rain-soaked, switch-back mountainside. His elliptic, hypnotic music has wound its way up and down my mind’s dark landscape a few times lately.

Why not take Gui for a drive right now?

It seems like electronic dance music has been on a roll for years now. As a trend, I had thought it would start to wane, but it keeps pumping along, even after LCD Soundsystem hung up their headphones. I get kind of burned out on this sound, but once in a while I hear a tune that really gets my toes a tappin’.

Beatnik Jr. is a four-piece from Los Angeles who appear to be just getting going. They offer this song for free as a Soundcloud download (click the download arrow and make it yours). It’s full of chunky bass that should make your booty shake.

We’ve all probably been asked, usually at a dinner party, in which era of the past would we have most liked to live. I’ve always felt like — if given such a dangerous choice — I would choose the 1920s. I don’t want the gangsters. Or the flappers. Or the Communist haters and the Ku Klux Klan. God forbid I would have to live through Prohibition.

My 1920s obsession has been growing over the years. At first, I was pulled in by the music. My ongoing quest to dig up new music kept me going further back and further back until I finally realized that the history of recorded sound does have an ending: Thomas Edison. Once I saw that coda in the distance, I began to slow down a bit until I found a measure where I wanted to rest, the pinpoint in time where I think music found its killer app: radio. That’s when everyone who loved music — and that’s nearly everyone — was finally able to get it and own it and make it a rich part of their life, nearly on demand.

Choosing to give up today for those-were-the-days sounds like kind of a bad deal because we know everything that’s ever been until now — and we can look most of it up on the Internet. Just like today’s 5 o’ clock news, too much of the past is depressing, but nostalgia is the antidote. It encourages us to take an iron to the crumpled map of history. Erase a few of the cruder lines, redraw the borders, frame it, seal it under glass. Buff antiquity for posterity. Surely they would have wanted it that way, knowing what we know now.

Step back in time with me, courtesy of radio. To Paris in the 20s. In the rain.

As a music snob, I eschew the term “world music.” That well-meaning phrase was appropriated by record-label executives in the 1980s and has become a deliberately inclusive, catch-all term for a motley of inoffensive songs and artists from around the world rolled up in recycled cardboard and processed for your listening pleasure. You’ve probably run into these collections by labels like Putamayo; they tailor make soundtracks for Starbucks.

Avoid those. If you’re out on the Internet looking for more worldly music, move away from the term “world music” and start by seeking out songs by nationality. You might as well dig down into the specific because a truly high world view of the staggering amount of music that exists and is being created every day is too hard to grasp. All those lines that divide countries on world maps are sad reminders that we can’t all just get along, but they are very useful when you’re digging through the differences of culture. For me, these days, much of that digging goes on in French and African locales.

One of my favorite Internet radio stations that combines a lot of complementary cultures into a very successful and hip blend of music that’s very informed by French and African sounds is Groovalizacion. They broadcast a polyglot of styles and sounds you might hear on a trip from Brazil through the Caribbean, with a stopover in Paris before settling in Africa and the Middle East.

What’s superb:

• Options and visibility: Multiple streaming choices. Listings in iTunes and a number of popular iPhone apps. Stream is reliable.
• Their DJs are top-notch, and they highlight them appropriately as the music experts they are.
• The Web site is one of the best I’ve seen (nothing can top KEXP’s site, but this comes close).
• While it can be hard to find out exactly what’s playing or to look back at a playlist because of translation issues, they do offer quite a bit of their site in English (and other languages). Not all of it, but it’s admirable to see they’ve tried to be language inclusive.

What’s less superb:

• They don’t offer true podcasting options through iTunes or a formal format. I appreciate that they put up mp3 files of the individual shows, but I would listen even more — and I imagine they would get an even more worldy listenership — if I could get these shows as iTunes podcasts.
• Occasionally, the playlist strays into that cowbell-pounding Latin beat that frankly drives me batty and compels me to turn the station. But, I come back.
• I have no idea how they are organized. How do they make money to survive? How might I help them do such a thing? I think almost all Internet radio stations are doomed to fail if they don’t clearly articulate their business model. Just playing cool tunes won’t cut it.

@Kibird turned me onto this station, and I highly recommend tuning in once in awhile when you feel like the soundtrack of your life needs some foreign improvement.

Listen to my favorite show on the station, Radio Mukambo, hosted by Benjamin Tollet.

Listen now to the general stream using iTunes:

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