On Its Way Back...
Anyone who listens to the radio knows that commercial music radio, with very few exceptions, is the "vast wasteland" of Newton Minow's immortal phrase. If you want something out of the ordinary, or even if your tastes just differ from the homogenized focus-group dreck that the large media companies know is best for you, the place to go is to webcasting...and one of the very best webcasters was Luxuria Music.
Luxuria Music featured a wild and varied blend of music. They encouraged feedback, and actually played requests (like the old days!). Alas, in April 2001 it went away, but...if you go to the LM web site today, you'll find that it's coming back on March 1, 2003. This is good news indeed. Until then, you can listen to recordings of old LM shows on a live365.com stream. Check it out.
Update from after their relaunch--they've gone over to making people listen to three minutes of ads before they get to hear the music, and have chosen a Windows Media Player/Internet Explorer-only setup for doing that... and when I tried it on a Windows box, I got the "this page is trying to run a DirectX plugin, but your security settings aren't letting it run, so this web page may not work," and sure enough, it didn't--after letting it sit there for five minutes or so claiming to be loading something, I killed it. So it seems that Luxuria has succumbed to the Great Satan, and doesn't care to use open standards for its stream. I urge people interested in good music to check out BeOS Radio.
