Left of the Dial

Peder Horner, a radiologist at Oregon Health & Science University, couldn't find a radio station that played the kind of jazz he liked. Mary Ann Naylor and her husband, Christopher Dylan Massey, were frustrated at the lack of women's voices on Portland radio. And Scott Sallay, a medical professor, just got tired of lugging his CD collection to work.

So they all started their own radio stations -- on the Internet.

In the last few years, dozens of Web-savvy Portlanders have begun programming and broadcasting their own radio stations, most of them armed with nothing more than a home computer and a passion to share their music. They may not have the ratings or the revenues of a KXL or even a KBOO, but many of them have a cadre of loyal listeners from around the world.

"I receive fan e-mail every day," says Horner, whose Dr. Horner's Classic Jazz Corner has a daily audience of more than 1,000 listeners. "They come from all over the world: the States, Japan, France, Italy. The most memorable was a handwritten letter from a man in Kentucky who enclosed a $100 check to support the broadcast."

Church of Girl Radio, the station and Web site run by Naylor and Massey, has received fan mail from people in six continents. It features 2,300 songs, broken down in hourly rotation by genre (hip-hop, country, punk). The only rule is that the bands have to be fronted by women.

Sallay's college-rock-heavy station, Left of the Dial, has an even simpler broadcast philosophy: It's music, he says, "that I really like." Web music

While satellite radio services such as Sirius and XM Radio get a lot of press, Internet radio has been around for more than a decade and continues to grow. The largest Web-radio conglomerate, Live365 (www.live365.com) has about 10,000 stations and 2.6 million listeners a month. Those stations provide a breadth of programming that even the most ambitious satellite service can't match and, in many cases, offer music to fans with sonic experiences far too "niche" for commercial radio.

On the AM/FM dials, for instance, listeners would be hard-pressed to find a single klezmer song; on Live365, several stations play the traditional Eastern European folk music, including "Radio Free Klezmer" -- all klezmer, all the time. Captain & Tennille fan? Muskrat love still keeps them together on 81 Live365 stations, from "Gen-Xers Hit Parade" and "Those Awful '70s" to "FAIRadio," the latter of which is the most popular Portland station on Live365.

"It started at my old job, when I was looking for hold music for callers," says DJ "Nick Carson" (actually Portland State University student Les French) of FAIRadio's blend of oldies, easy listening and New Age sounds. French spends one full weekend a month juggling about 4,000 songs on FAIRadio and its spinoff station, FAIRadio 2, which reach about 12,000 listeners a month. With such a broad audience, French has just incorporated FAIRadio as a nonprofit and is now seeking corporate grants to expand it further. "I looked at the Oregon Public Broadcasting business model, and I'm trying to do the same thing on a smaller scale," he says. Small potatoes, big business

Most living-room broadcasters might be small potatoes, but Internet radio is big business. A recent study by AccuStream iMedia Research, which analyzes and tracks online radio, says subscription-based Internet radio is anticipated to surpass $340 million in billings this year, up from $49 million in 2003. Arbitron, the company that monitors radio ratings, claims that 37 million Americans now tune in to Internet radio at least once a month -- including 19,566 Portlanders on Live365 alone, according to Betty Ray, the company's director of community.

Besides Live365, there are other companies in the market: Last.fm (www.last.fm) is a service that streams music based on your personal music collection, connecting members with others who have similar tastes. Pandora (www.pandora.com) is a wholly automated service that lets members give thumbs up or thumbs down to the music streaming through their computers.

But Live365, with its army of DIY disc jockeys, marries the modernity of the Internet with the old-fashioned notion of letting individuals, not sales charts, program the music. "People are making the stations," Ray says. "It's not collaborative, or anything a computer can do."

According to her, Live365's biggest stations are dedicated to smooth jazz, light rock and Christian music: "A lot of our audience is at work." On the more obscure side, she says, are ultra-niche stations such as Fluffertrax, which exclusively broadcasts background music from 1970s porn films.

Live365's most popular station of all, Whisperings, is a New Age solo-piano station originating from Springfield, Ore. Founder David Nivue, a pianist, clocks more than 1 million "listener-hours" a month and has built a fan base large enough to support Whisperings concerts around the U.S.

Looking to hear something uniquely Portland? Tune in to KISN on NetRadioLink, which streams vintage broadcasts from the oldies station (a recent tune-in found a 1970 traffic report, followed by an authentically scratchy 1972 New Year's show), or Portland Air Traffic Control, live from the tower at PDX, or First Presbyterian Church's broadcast of sermons and music.

"For decades, we have broadcast our service live on local radio, but the audience was limited to the local area," says First Presbyterian Pastor Dudley Weaver. "We wanted to be able to reach a wider audience and realized that Internet gave us worldwide access," He adds that reaching younger people and providing access to traveling parishioners were two other factors. Once, the church even broadcast a live funeral service so family members in New York could attend virtually. . . . And smaller rewards

Most Internet broadcasters aren't getting rich with this; Massey and Naylor estimate their station costs them about $30 a month, while Horner says he spends about $24 and makes $40 from optional subscriptions, "enough to buy me one new CD a month."

On the other hand, it doesn't take much to get started.

Sallay's radio setup is simple, consisting of two old iMac G3 computers and a broadband connection in the office of his Mount Tabor home. He spends about four hours a week on his station, adding and removing songs and answering e-mail from as far away as Europe and Japan. The cost to him, he says, is around $30 a month, of which he earns around $5 back from Live365 based on his listenership: "It's a hobby. You can't make much from doing it."

"My station is totally for me," Sallay adds. "But knowing somebody else is out there enjoying it, too? Cool."

Kevin Allman is a Portland freelance writer.