If you listened to Toastie Radio, I thank you for listening and hope you enjoyed it. I’m sorry it will no longer be available for you, but there weren’t that many of you, and I wasn’t spending anytime on it. With all of the music services out there that enable you to create a personalized playlist without even owning the music, there’s little need to tune in to conventional streaming radio.

I just started doing this back in the winter of 2002 because I wanted to listen to my MP3s at work without having to load them in multiple places. I discovered that, by broadcasting my playlist out to the internet, others would tune in as well. At times over the past 6 1/2 years, there have been 30 or 40 listeners actually listening concurrently, not just stream-ripping. There was some gratification in that, fleeting as it was.

The fact is, there’s only a tiny segment of people who actually like the music that I like, and, of those, very few would have ever thought to look for a Shoutcast radio stream.

Toastie Radio has been an expense. For quite awhile, it’s been an expense with no return on the investment. I don’t mean monetary gratification; it simply hasn’t given me any sense of fulfillment beyond the two or three remaining loyal listeners I might have had.

It is not easy to come to this decision. Toastie Radio was a big part of my life for awhile. I never gave it enough attention. Most of my plans for it were never realized. And so it was failure for me. And so it goes.

Toastie Radio is part of who I am, so it’s not going away. I just don’t update it as much as I wish I did.

And I did cut down from 40 max slots down to 25, to save some cash. I never have 25 concurrent listeners anymore, anyway.

A couple of people have emailed or left a comment to let me know they still listen. The broadcast still exists in Second Life, apparently. But most of the listeners I used to have didn’t follow me when I got a new stream URL a few weeks ago. I suspect most of the listeners were just bots, ripping streams.

Average # of listeners:
March 2007: 20.7
September 2007: 14.5
March 2008: 14.3
April 2008: 5.1

For the record, I was never a big Delilah fan. I don’t gravitate to everything that is sappy, not even half of it. However, in the early 90s, I’d listen to a request show out of Philadelphia. I forget the guy’s name (Dan something?)but Christopher Knight (had to Google this, glad to see he’s still doing radio…for SoJO…South Jersey’s OWN 104.9…I didn’t know South Jersey had its own anything), he’d say, “You’re listening to Between The Sheets, on Star 104.5″. I had a couple of pathetic dedications go on the air. And then I’d be terrified to go to school the next day, even thought the odds of anyone in the school having hear the dedication, let alone the object of the ridiculous dedication, were about the same as Mike Gravel winning the North Carolina Democratic Primary.

Anyway…that was certainly an occupational aspiration, to host a dedication show on the radio. Like Casey Kasem? No. I’ll admit, some of the “long distance dedications” Casey would read during his weekly Top 40 shows were wonderfully weepy, but I didn’t aspire to read those. No, I wanted to host that Between the Sheets show. Like Christopher Knight.

I’ve digressed from my original intent, but, then again, now I’m right smack in the heart of the actual original intent of my blogging, which, as I’ve said a million times now, was actually to do the same journaling I was doing way back when…like back in 1990 when I’d write about how I needed to call up Between the Sheets and dedicate a song. If the internet were around back then (I’m not counting Prodigy), I’d be spilling my mind to the internet. I had no desire to keep my thoughts stuck in a stale notepad for the rest of eternity.

Ok, let me turn this ship back around to whence it came. So Toastie Radio…it’s been the main thing to fill up the imaginary “hobby box” for six years, and the fact is that it’s not much of anything. Regardless of one’s opinion of the music I was playing, at least I could say once upon a time that I damn good at collecting all the music. I haven’t bothered broadening my horizons (the playlist) within the last couple of years.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this…I’m just lamenting that a hobby that I hoped to be more than a hobby has ultimately been a bust.

Now Playing Corey Hart - Never Surrender

(the old one will cease to function shortly)

For six years now, I’ve asked listeners what they want to hear, but I think I may be through, at least for now, with any attempt to appeal to greater numbers. Toastie Radio will be just whatever I want it to be. I want to be able to tell someone that the music I like is what can be found on Toastie Radio and not have any outliers that I keep on the playlist for the benefit of someone else. I do not mean to disregard listeners. The ratings will still matter, as far as weight in the playlist. I just may be adding more music that I know few people care for.

I’ll have a new stream URL soon, which I’ll post whenever it’s available.

I’ll be playing the Top 10 as a series from time to time this month.

I could decrease the bitrate to discourage stream-ripping, but then the few who actually listen, like myself from time to time, would have to suffer with lousy quality.

I just don’t know if I care enough to keep it going.