Why save internet radio?

Bruce Hagen writes in the Petaluma Argus-Courier:

The power of Internet Radio did for music and news what eBay did for retail commerce: it lowered the barrier for entry. Musicians out on “the long tail” didn’t have meet Clear Channel or Wal-Mart popularity thresholds to get a world-wide audience (long tail is a term for what you see when you plot the volume of music sales by artist. U2 is on the peak at the upper left; Toast Machine is out at the lower right, on the “long tail”). Combine this global reach with the search and collaborative filtering power of “Web 2.0”, and the radio business is revolutionized.

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