Hello.  I would like to start off today by saying thank you for tuning in and getting in touch and making this enterprise such a joy for me.  This little hobby began over 10 years ago -- I wanted to put together a radio station that I wanted to listen to.  I had not heard one of those since Nirvana and Green Day sound-alikes all but obliterated alternative rock radio in the early 1990s.  

Once my CD collection was digitized and we had a few listeners, we started getting submissions of new releases.  First from bands.  Then from bands and labels.  Then from bands and labels and promo companies.  Fast-forward (do you even know what that term means?!) ten years and we had three consecutive weeks of filtering through 80+ albums worth of songs each week.  The steep rise in the amount of submissions greatly altered the station, taking it from being a mostly backward-looking tour through my previously amassed music collection and changing it into a place where bands were sending in hand-written, home-burned CDs recorded in their living rooms to have them heard more widely.

Encouraging listeners to buy the music of the bands they like, and buy tickets to their shows, and buy their t-shirts, and do whatever else they can afford to do to help support artists has always been a no-brainer.  Supporting the artists means helping them to make more of this great art that we love!  More recently that list of things has grown to included encouraging people to sign up for subscription music services.  The payouts to artists are still pretty small, but they are growing, and they are farbetter than the nonexistent payouts from the file sharing sites to which a generation of music fans turned when the recorded music industry bungled the transition to digital and now online music

I bring this up because there has been a lot in the press lately about how bad Pandora is for artists, and how small Spotify payments are, and while most get part of the story right, one thing that is almost invariably left out is: at least artists are earning some money from these latest innovations, from sources of income that didn't exist before.  I would beg those who criticize music subscription services (hello David Byrne, David Lowery, Damon Krukowski, to name a few) to come up with a workable idea or two about how what would be better before biting the hand that streams.  Also, they should stop using misleading numbers which just muddy the waters and end up making everyone look bad.

Anyway, thanks again for listening, and for helping BAGeL Radio to support the thousands or artists we've fallen in love with over the years. 

Today's  480 Minutes show (every Friday 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. Eastern Time) will debut new songs by Arcade Fire (Montreal, Canada). The Black Hollies (Jersey City, NJ),  Cults (New York, NY), Ducktails (New Jersey),  Eula (Brooklyn, NY and not new but new to us), Gesaffelstein (Paris, France),  Gross Ghost (Raleigh, NC), House of Blondes (Brooklyn, NY),  King Krule (London, England),  Moonface (Montreal, Canada), and  Wooden Shjips (San Francisco, CA).

http://somafm.com/bagel/

e-mail: ted(at)somafm.com