Those people in the podcasting community have suggested for 3 years now that the death of radio is imminent. I’m here to tell you that you are wrong.

Local radio is NOT dead but certainly emerging. The traditional model for music distribution is not dead and there will be some level of co-existence with podcasting for a long time.

Internet radio is nothing more or less than the delivery of radio programms via TCP/IP. That delivery can be either live or on-demand. I listen to Virgin Music via Shoutcast live on my Treo phone and that’s Internet radio. I listen to downloaded Podcasts via iTunes and that’s Internet radio. I listen to my radio station live via a private consultant stream when I am travelling with Windows Media Player and that’s Internet radio.

In copyright terms, what’s different about how I listen is not the Internet versus free-to-air delivery, or the live versus on-demand aspect. It’s the packetized streaming versus download aspect. Once ‘radio’ content is downloaded, any notion of being able to collect royalties on the basis of number of ‘listeners’ is lost. With this loss of control, copyright owners are naturally reticent to release music for download. And in many cases, they have confused packetized streaming with genuine downloads.

Podcasting creates a commons for the exchange of music and content between producers and listeners. Radio is not dead, it is being reborn in a new distribution environment. And this distribution environment is vastly richer than the staid traditional one, with tremendous potential for personal, educational and even corporate broadcasting.