21st Century Pirates

Anyone living in a big city will have had the experience: you’re bumbling around on the radio waves trying to find your ramalama, when suddenly you come across a sixty year-old rastadaddy playing ganjaphonic beats and croaking out cryptic mamma-jive over his furry muff. Happens to me all the time.

Despite the various laws stamped down to outlaw such sinister activity (including the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967 – bye bye Radio Caroline), pirate radio has remained prolific in the UK. The main difference is that broadcasters have grown ever more cunning, hiding their transmitters far from the studio locations and cloaking their identities like hunchbacked Dickensian FREAKS.

Still, all is not lost. The arrival of internet radio stations has opened up the radio waves for any complete idiot to broadcast themselves, and indeed a quick scan through its menu reveals a strange variety of options: Radio Free Cannabis, Music For Lovers Through The Night and Death Fucking Metal UK are amongst the never-to-be award winning stations lurking behind one click of the mouse.

If the feeling takes you, the means to create your own internet radio station can be downloaded quickly and easily online. Don’t presume that you’re safe from the steel claw of the law just yet though: every time you play a piece of music (even if you’re just streaming it) you should, officially, be paying music copyright fees to the artist. In 2007, one station known as Hitz Radio became so massively successful (woo!) that Offcom noticed it (ahhhh) and held them to account for a hardcore bill of backdated fees (oowww).

Podcasts are also bound by similar rules, which is why the vast majority of them feature people chatting bollocks to each other, as opposed to say, playing some decent music.

Still, who needs some geek in a bedroom telling you what to listen to when you can rely on your own inherent geekiness? Apparently the internet is all about you, you, you not them, them, them (or so various annoying channel 4 documentaries keep telling me) and in the digital world, nobody’s trying to sell you anything, you tit! It’s you that’s for sale, obviously.

Hence music streaming programmes like Spotify and Last FM are able to hand you the reigns of your own personal radio show without demanding monthly fees or subscriptions. Every time you create a playlist, its contents are scanned by third party advertisers, and used to generate personalised advertising right up your very arse.

The main trade off when you loose the DJ is that you also loose an independent guide to new music. This is where Last FM’s policy of ‘Like This? Try This!’ comes into play – each artist is given a similarity score out of ten to indicate just how much they resemble your favourite. So, Dolly Parton fans, I can now exclusively reveal that Emmylou Harris has a SUPER SIMILARITY to your heroine, while Tammy Wynette only has a VERY HIGH SIMILARITY. She must, therefore, be shit.

Of course, this encourages the listener to take only cautious baby steps out of their comfort zone, and offers little chance for them to experience the shock of the new that a crazed-DJ might offer.
The answer? Find a decent pirate radio station, or become a pirate listener yourself by listening to the BBC stations online – without paying your license fee! Take that, government bum sniffers! That’ll teach you for sinking Radio Caroline! Woo hoo haa haa hee hee!