A common theme in indie/alternative/punk music is complaining about radio. Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio,” NOFX’s “Please Play This Song on the Radio” and Tom Petty’s “The Last DJ” are just a few examples of songs that take potshots at the status quo of radio. But dismissing radio comes with its own price.

Of course, radio wasn’t always this bad. Even growing up in Findlay, Ohio, which is just about as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get without being completely surrounded by corn fields, there were signs of life in the FM signals. A local radio station, WKXA, helped spawn an interest in musical exploration that has continued, in somewhat modified form, until this day.

When I was in middle school, WKXA was the only station reliably in range that would play songs from the burgeoning alternative movement, albeit only the mainstreamed alternative bands. Still, WKXA introduced me to some of my current favorite bands, like Oasis, Third Eye Blind, and Nirvana, some other important alternative and post-grunge bands like Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots, as well as some groups that didn’t quite make it (Primitive Radio Gods? Roscoe Martinez?). While it wasn’t a perfect introduction to the underground (I missed out on hearing bands like Smashing Pumpkins, The Pixies and My Bloody Valentine), it was a start. And WKXA was brave for the area to actually touch alternative music, when almost everyone else in the area was sticking to classic rock, country and adult contemporary formats.

Then the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and as almost everyone knows, radio turned into a homogenized hell of Clear Channels from sea to shining sea. I spent most of my high school days flipping through classic rock stations and the hit-or-miss college station we had. I discovered music by other means (downloading MP3s, word of mouth from friends, reading magazines and e-zines) and wrote radio off as a lost cause (except for CD101).

Fear not, Clear Channel haters: There’s still another way to discover new music, through Internet radio. Online radio stations, like WOXY or SomaFM, and personalized radio stations, like Musicmatch or the combination of audioscrobbler.com and last.fm, are simply brilliant.

Internet radio has developed from crappy Live365 and Shoutcast broadcasts to more sophisticated and high quality stations. I’ve gone from listening to CD101 online to tuning into Los Angeles’s Indie 103.1 to loading up Internet-only stations, which have incredible amounts of leeway in what they play.

Not surprisingly, big companies have attempted to make the best of this situation. We all know how Apple took advantage of MP3 culture by offering slick MP3 players and an online downloaded music store that was cheap and had a sweeping selection of music. More surprising is Clear Channel’s financial support of Indie 103; according to a March 2005 Wired magazine article, Clear Channel saw how (surprisingly) successful National Public Radio stations were, and how they could be used to bridge the gap from traditional radio stations to the future of radio: digital broadcasting, with multiple stations going across one signal.

With Audioscrobbler, your listening habits are compiled in a profile hosted on both audioscrobbler.com and last.fm. The site keeps track of your favorite songs and artists of the week and in general. Once I listened to a certain number of songs, Audioscrobbler compared my listening habits to other users and, via last.fm, let me listen to a radio station consisting of songs they listened to, with the option of skipping or blocking songs I didn’t like. Eventually, once I’ve got more songs in my library, last.fm will let me listen to a station of my songs, with a modest donation. There are also various groups there that have stations based on their members’ tastes. Quite frankly, this is a music fan’s dream. I love it.

Even as traditional radio begins to go the way of the buffalo, there will always be options like indie and personalized radio available for the adventurous.

Benjamin Nanamaker is a senior in English and journalism who is amazed he can remember songs on the radio from 10 years ago. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].