I’m having trouble getting worked up about the imminent death of net radio. I’m a pretty huge music fan. I own around 1000 CDs, about as many vinyl LPs and 12″s, and I currently have over 50 GB of music in my iTunes. And of course I’m an obsessively heavy net user. But my cumulative lifetime total time spent listening to streaming net radio is probably under 2 hours. If it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t notice and I wouldn’t care.

Why is this? Part of it is I like to choose my own playlists. But I love broadcast radio. In high school I was a big fan of WREK and Album 88, and in college I was a DJ at KZSU. I like some commercial radio too, especially in places like Atlanta and Oakland where you can still hear sick DJing between the annoying commercials. But part of the appeal of broadcast radio is the local flavor, something lost completely in the move to the net. Net radio is the worst of both worlds: the impersonality that comes with global reach plus the loss of choice over what to listen to next inherent to the radio format.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t dig net music. Most of that 50 GB mentioned above has been harvested from MP3 blogs, which have morphed over the last few years from fanboys posting hot singles to an incredibly diverse array of musical flavor. MP3 blogs provide me with everything from super-eclectic mixes to worldwide beat culture to obscure and forgotten experiments to out jazz to hip hop tapes. As far as I’m concerned, the state of music on the net has never been better.

So farewell net radio, I hardly knew ye.