Last week AT&T announced that new smartphone customers will no longer be eligible for the unlimited data plans that current customers enjoy. Instead, two somewhat less expensive plans will be available. For $15 new customers may download 200 MB of data per month, with a charge of $15 for every additional 200 GB over the limit. 2 GB per month will cost $25, plus another $10 for each 1 GB after that. Current data plan customers pay $30 for unlimited data. For its part AT&T says that either of these new plans provides enough data to satisfy 98% of their customers.

While it may be true that the vast majority of AT&T customers use less than 2 GB of data in a month, I would argue that’s because data-hungry mobile streaming media is just starting to take off. But the these new caps threaten to stunt that growth just as mobile internet radio is gaining steam.

The 200 MB of data offered by the least expensive plan covers only about 200 minutes of streaming stereo music at the common bitrate of 128kbps. And that’s without any other data usage for email, web browsing or anything else. Even listening to a lower-quality mono talk station at 32 kbps will only stretch listening to 800 minutes, or 13 hours.

The 2 GB plan will cover about 34 hours of stereo music and as much as 136 hours of low-bitrate mono talk. At first blush that seems like a fair amount of listening time, but how does it measure up against real-world radio listening? Someone whose commute lasts about an hour each way will easily listen to over 40 hours of radio in a month. If that commuter wants to use her iPhone or Blackberry to listen to Pandora, last.fm or another streaming music station she’ll be over her limit by the last week of the month.

Without access to hard statistics on how many hours the average mobile Pandora or last.fm user listens it’s hard to say for sure how many new AT&T customers are likely to be affected. However, I do think it’s fair to say that these limits will make many smartphone users cautious about how much time they’ll spend listening to internet radio on the go, especially in order to avoid overage fees.

Of course, AT&T is not the only wireless data carrier in the US. As long as you don’t have your heart set on an iPhone there are lots of other carriers to choose from who still offer unlimited data plans. But for how much longer? Computerworld quotes several analysts who predict that Verizon, the nation’s second largest carrier, will set caps in as soon as six months. While there may be some pricing competition on these plans, I’m guessing they’ll offer pretty similar amounts of data for prices that only vary by a few dollars a month.

With a cost between 75 cents and $4.50 and hour, listening to mobile internet radio on an AT&T smartphone starts to look pretty uncompetitive compared to traditional broadcast, which is free, or satellite radio which offers unlimited listening for $10 – $20 a month. While it may be inevitable that the days of unlimited data plans will come to an end, I hope that the metered pricing quickly becomes more reasonable, permitting a reasonable amount of streaming radio listening. If not, this vibrant new way of listening to radio might be stunted before it has a chance to blossom.

Slacker radio's auto refreshing feature

The Slacker mobile radio service unveiled BlackBerry 3.0 and Android 2.0 from Research In Motion today. The upgraded operating systems allow users to update their favorite stations via a “Cache Station” menu within the app. Or they can use an “auto refresh” feature that wakes the mobile up overnight and updates station content.

“Cached stations are stored on the memory card of the BlackBerry smartphone and can be played on subways, planes and all destinations in between with no network drop-outs and minimal battery usage,” the release Slacker sent us boasts. “Along with station-storing capabilities, Slacker Radio Plus features ad-free listening, song lyrics, unlimited song skipping, unlimited song requests and more.”

Ditto for the Android, that is, if the user has a Slacker Radio Plus subscription. If you’ve got Slacker Basic Radio you can try the new features out on either Android or BlackBerry for free for fourteen days.

Here are the features Slacker lists for BlackBerry 3.0 basic and Radio Plus:

Slacker Radio 3.0 for BlackBerry smartphones:
• Updated interface
• Faster application startup time
• Significantly smaller application size
• Improved touch interface for BlackBerry Storm
• Greatly improved battery life
• New settings menu options
• Tabbed info view for lyrics, reviews and biographies
• Context Aware – click a highlighted artist name in a text message or email to enable direct launch of a related Slacker station
• Create custom stations based on artists or songs
• View album art and photos
• Rate songs as favorites
• Ban the songs and artists you don’t like

Slacker Radio 3.0 with Slacker Radio Plus:
• Wireless station caching – listen to Slacker Radio without a Wi-Fi or mobile network connection
• Greatly improved battery life on cached station playback
• Auto Station Refresh – effortlessly updates cached stations overnight
• Unlimited song skipping
• Ad-free listening
• Complete song lyrics*
• Unlimited song requests for creating stations

And for Slacker 2.0 basic and Radio Plus for the Android:

Slacker Radio 2.0 for Android:
• Music library featuring millions of songs
• High-quality stereo playback
• Over 120 professionally programmed genre stations
• Create custom stations based on artists or songs
• View artist biographies and photos
• View album art and reviews
• “Peek Ahead” artist and album preview
• Pause and skip songs
• Rate songs as favorites
• Ban the songs and artists you don’t like

Slacker Radio 2.0 with Slacker Radio Plus:
• Wireless station caching – listen to Slacker Radio without a Wi-Fi or mobile network connection
• Greatly improved battery life on cached station playback
• Auto Station Refresh – effortlessly updates cached stations overnight
• Unlimited song skipping
• Ad-free listening
• Complete song lyrics*
• Unlimited song requests for creating stations

Is the iPad good for mobile internet radio?

Already some of us have been listening to live streaming internet radio on our mobile devices, like iPhones and Blackberries. But, as I argued last month, the experience still doesn’t quite add up to true mobile internet radio, especially because when you’re using cell data like 3G it saps the heck out of your battery. My experience streaming live radio on my iPhone gives me a little more than an hour before I’m nearly out of juice. The new Apple iPad looks to be a great mashup of an iPhone and netbook, which are both decent devices for listening to internet radio on the go, but also have their drawbacks.

The fact that some iPad models offer 3G wireless data connectivity out-of-the box, for a very reasonable $30 a month without any contracts make it a great candidate for mobile internet radio listening. It won’t necessarily be any better for the car than an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone. But in other mobile circumstances it shows distinct promise.

So the question is, will the iPad bring us one step closer to truly mobile internet radio? Based on early specs, and having never touched it myself, the answer is a distinct maybe.

The first important factor is battery life. If the battery poops out after only an hour, then it’s only good for short trips. But if you have a longer train or bus commute, or are outside away from a wi-fi connection you probably want at least two good hours. While Apple specifies that you get 10 hours of active wi-fi use on a charge, no 3G batterly life specs are published. With a much bigger battery than an iPhone one would expect that constant 3G use would go longer, but we’ll have to wait until the first longer-term reviews come out.

The next big issue is sound quality. I currently use my iPhone, netbook or MacBook Pro to stream audio in a variety of circumstances, including home and when away in hotels. They’re all fine for using with headphones or external speakers, though the iPhone is the clear winner for fidelity. But I don’t always want to use headphones or lug around speakers. In a pinch the iPhone’s speaker is better than nothing at all (sounding like a pocket radio), and the netbook is barely any better. My MacBook’s speakers are the best in this category, but at the same time it seems wasteful overkill to use this powerful laptop computer just to listen to radio. My hope is that it will sound at least as good as a MacBook Pro, which itself is on par with a portable radio the size of a paperback book. We’ll have to see how the iPad’s speakers measure up against these competitors.

The final big factor is multitasking, and on this measure we already know the answer: there is no multi-tasking on the iPad. This is important because all of the streaming radio apps are not made by Apple, and you can only run one non-Apple app at a time. So you want to listen to a live feed of a Cubs game while Tweeting? No can do. Catch a live feed of the State of the Union while reading the New York Times online? Also a big no. So, unless Apple decides to add the ability to listen to live streams to the iPad’s iPod app–which is allowed to multitask with other apps–this is probably the biggest count against the radio capabilities of the iPad.

At least as far as mobile internet radio is concerned, the iPad looks like a tiny step forward. If the 3G battery life and sound quality are up to snuff, then it’s a bigger step. But without multitasking where you can listen to a live stream while using other apps, the iPad is not the next big thing in mobile internet radio.

Getting NPR's Fresh Air on your Android

Android users will now be able to access the full range of National Public Radio programming thanks to a new app – “NPR News.”  The feature for the open source smart phone was built for NPR by Google developer and public radio fan Michael Fredrick. In addition, NPR has launched a new site for mobile listeners to access: www.m.npr.org.

“We’ve seen a nearly ten-fold increase in our mobile traffic since the launch of our iPhone app earlier this year,” declared Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager, NPR Digital Media in a press release. “With the redesign of our mobile web site and the launch of the Android app we’re now able to bring that superior experience to a much wider audience.”

Doesn’t look like either of these services is actually available yet. NPR says the Android app will be downloadable “later this month.” We’re getting a 504 link to the mobile site on our BlackBerry at this point. But it all looks like it will be good stuff when up and running.

Here’s the list of features for both offerings, starting with the mobile site (source: NPR):

“New Station Search Feature. The site will allow users to search for stations by zip code, call letters, or city/state. Users will also be able to “favorite” or bookmark multiple stations.

· Higher quality audio experience. Users can stream the audio links on the site from within their device’s browser (rather than just “click to call”). The result is superior audio quality as well as availability in a wider range of audio formats: AAC, MP3, WMA, 3gp, and RM. Blackberry users can now play audio on the site within their browsers.

· More station audio. All the audio links available through the iPhone app will be available on the new NPR Mobile Web site: station live streams, podcasts, RSS feeds, and newscasts. A “device detect” feature will ensure that only audio links compatible with the particular device are displayed. Station logos will appear at the top of all screens that display station-specific content.

· Station newscasts. Station newscasts will continue to be available via the new NPR Mobile Web.

Highlights of the NPR News app for Android:

· Backgrounding. The NPR News app for Android allows backgrounding, so that users can click to listen to audio and then toggle between applications as the audio is playing. It also uses open source code, allowing developers to iterate and improve the app in the future.

· Listen and Read. Allows users to listen to programs and read news at the same time.

· Extensive Topics section. News section showcases NPR’s top 10-20 topics of the day ranging from Science to Books to World News.

· NPR station listening choices. Easy to find and bookmark more than 600 favorite NPR stations and hundreds of station on-demand streams. Live station streaming to launch in Spring 2010.

· Playlist. Bookmark favorite programs to play later.”

Pandora for Android

You can get it on the iPhone, you can get it on your Blackberry. Now you can get Pandora on Android. “I know this has been a really long time coming and I’d like to thank all of you for your patience. Hope you enjoy the app,” declared Pandora “tech and product guy” Tom Conrad on his blog today. This was the guy who once said he “needed Android like a hole in the head” (he apologized later).

Android is the open source/open platform Linux based smart phone backed by the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium that most famously includes Google. Open platform means that developers can add apps much more freely.

In his youtube explanation of the Android, co-founder Nick Sears explains that he helped create the open source phone because “it was too difficult to get new products out to consumers in a timely fashion.” This wasn’t example of timeliness, but better late than never.

Yes, I remember all that. But but what sticks with me most about that Ramones tune was that it got sort fatalistic and weird at the conclusion. “We need change, we need it fast,” the band warned. “Before rock’s just part of the past / ‘Cause lately it all sounds the same to me.” The last stanza declared that “It’s the end, the end of the 70s. It’s the end, the end of the century.”

In retrospect, Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio was a prophetic song. It foresaw the decline and fall of the rock/commercial radio alliance—a marriage so intimate it made both genres feel identical. When the album came out, Free Form FM was slowly being tamed by Format, a milquetoast substitute that to this day plays second fiddle to Talk Radio. The Rap to Hip Hop explosion was just beginning. And two years earlier Walkmans, stooped ancestor to the iPod, hit the market, allowing everyone to become their own DJ. The end of the century was still twenty years off. The last days of the rock and radio duopoly, however, were just off  the horizon.

But not quite yet. Back then the Rock Gods screamed their passion for AM and FM. They wrote songs that were literally shrines for the medium, none more so than Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner, released in 1976 and reinvented by Joan Jett a decade later. Rolling Stone ranks it the 269th greatest rock song of all time. It beautifully droned the experience of driving around soon to be post-industrial America with the “radio on” in your car.

“Radio On!
I got the AM
Radio On!
Got the car, got the AM
Radio On!
Got the AM sound, got the
Radio On!
Got the rockin’ modern neon sound
Radio On!
I got the car from Massachusetts, got the
Radio On!
I got the power of Massachusetts when it’s late at night
Radio On!
I got the modern sounds of modern Massachusetts
I’ve got the world, got the turnpike, got the
I’ve got the, got the power of the AM
Got the, late at night, rock & roll late at night
The factories and the auto signs got the power of modern sounds
All right!”

In his own exquisitely air headed way, Richman got radio exactly right: a combination movie soundtrack for your own personal landscape, and a half-human/half electronic device to keep you company.

“I’m in love with modern moonlight
128 when it’s dark outside
I’m in love with Massachusetts
I’m in love with the radio on
It helps me from being alone late at night
It helps me from being lonely late at night
I don’t feel so bad now in the car
Don’t feel so alone, got the radio on
Like the roadrunner
That’s right!”

No surprise that Jett grabbed the tune and moved it about 200 miles down the east coast. “Can’t you hear it here in Jersey now?” she meditated between stanzas. “New York City when it’s late at night. I’m on the West Side Highway heading up to the GW Bridge down by the power line. I see all the neon and it’s cold at night. I got my radio on!!”

There was no sad New England guy in Jett’s version. “It’s so exciting here with the skyscrapers and the dark,” she ecstatically continued. “I feel in touch with the modern world. I feel in touch, I feel alive, I feel in touch with 50,000 watts of POWER!” Still, the loneliness/radio thing wasn’t going to be squelched by one tough rocker gal’s cover. Donna Summer kept it going with her 1979 masterpiece, On the Radio, one of my favorite disco songs.

“Someone found a letter you wrote me, on the radio
And they told the world just how you felt
It must have fallen out of a hole in your old brown overcoat
They never said your name
But I knew just who they meant. . . .”

The notion, of course, that some DJ might find a lost romantic missive intended for you, then actually read it over the airwaves, is almost entirely foreign to our time (much less that somebody else might recognize it as referring to them). But Summer’s piece opened with a beautiful, slow piano accompaniment that made it clear that she really believed in her miracle story.

“If you think that love isn’t found on the radio,” the Queen of Disco insisted, “Well, tune right in. You may find the love you lost. ‘Cause now I’m sitting here with the man I sent away long ago. It sounded really loud, they said it really loud, on the radio.”

Not as loudly as The Clash shouted their anthem for the medium two years later. This is Radio Clash (1981) was the band’s nod to the urban/reggae funk scene exploding in the United States. A demonic Halloween laugh introduced porno-flick guitar riffs and saxophone grunts thumping in the background, then came some kind of declaration of independence from something or other. Forget being lonely or ecstatic, Radio Clash was about Being Bad on the Air.

“This is radio clash from pirate satellite
Orbiting your living room,
Cashing in the bill of rights
Cuban army surplus or refusing all third lights
This is radio clash on pirate satellite”

It was the transatlantic Thatcher/Reagan empire that the Clash boys were railing against here—they soon to locate their alternate reality in Nicaragua’s Sandinista experiment. What Radio Clash got at was both pirate radio’s potential for poking at authority from the margins, and its inability to be anything but marginal.

“Hands of law have sorted through My identity,” the song protested. “But now this sound is brave. And wants to be free.” At the same time, the tune nervously wondered who, if anybody, comprised the audience. “This is radio clash, using aural ammunition. This is radio clash, can we get that world to listen?”

I was listening. Back then, I thought that I was in pop radio heaven. It was the golden age of “modern rock”—an urbanized reinvention of the genre that rescued it from the bland, Woodstocky ditch into which it had sunk, and made rock competitive with disco again. New radio stations played a huge role in that Renaissance. Prominent among them was San Francisco’s Live 105. Not the shadow of its former self that you hear today, but the creative, experimental, and endlessly local version that broadcast in the 1980s.

But I should have known that nothing lasts forever. Elvis Costello was trying to tell us so with his brilliantly contradictory song, Radio Radio, which can read as a reaction to the diametrically opposite directions that the industry seemed to be heading in 1978. “Radio is a sound salvation! Radio is cleaning up the nation!” Costello cried as Free Form slid down the tubes and Format/Talk Radio began taking its place.

So which was it? Salvation or cleanup? In Radio Radio, Costello never figures it out. First he’s in love.

“I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial
doing anything my radio advised
with every one of those late night stations
playing songs bringing tears to me eyes
I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver
when the switch broke ’cause it’s old
They’re saying things that I can hardly believe.
They really think we’re getting out of control.”

Then he’s in hate:

“Some of my friends sit around every evening
and they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
and the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut out;
they don’t wanna hear about it.
It’s only inches on the reel-to-reel.
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel.”

In the end, all Costello could do was snarl. “I wanna bite the hand that feeds me,” he confessed. “I wanna bite that hand so badly. I want to make them wish they’d never seen me.”

Thirty years later it’s hard to find any strong feelings about radio in the lyrics of pop performers. It’s not like nobody’s still cheering. Beyoncé included a rather metallic sounding tribute in her 2008 album, My Name is Sasha Fierce. But in the age of Clear Channel, most artists and fans would probably agree with the Future of Music’s recent study of terrestrial radio playlists in New York City. FOM concluded that, despite New York state and the FCC’s recent crackdown on payola, the majority of big apple stations stick to a core playlist of songs that are over five years old.

“Radio tends to play it safe;” the survey notes. “Programmers sandwich new material in between recognizable hits from the past to keep core audiences from changing the dial when content becomes too unfamiliar.” As for independent labels, which represent almost a third of the U.S. music market, they’re “left to vie for mere slivers of airtime, despite negotiated attempts to address this programming imbalance.”

And so this reminiscence concludes with what appears to be the last honest word about the subject, Tom Petty’s The Last DJ—a song that confirms what The Ramones and Elvis Costello intuited decades ago would happen to over-the-air commercial radio. The whole album is, in fact, a cry of rage against corruption in the music industry. But more importantly, the lead tune reminds us of what we would really like broadcast DJs to be: themselves.

“The top brass don’t like him talking so much,” Petty says of his archetypal announcer. “And he won’t play what they say to play,” and so:

“There goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
And says what he wants to say
Hey, hey, hey
And there goes your freedom of choice
There goes the last human voice
There goes the last DJ”

Is it really as bleak as Petty’s song suggests? Today I listen to Pandora on my Blackberry, but it’s hard to imagine anyone producing a hit tune about doing that. Perhaps when our passage through this present cauldron of streaming 4G wireless Web 2.0 change comes to some kind of resting place, there will be room again for the kind of radio for which Elvis, Jonathan, Joan, and Donna wrote songs of endearment. Radio, that is, guided by actual human voices who make you feel connected to the places that you live, who play songs that bring tears to your eyes, and who even read discarded love letters over the air that listeners realize were written for them. Hope springs eternal.

Problem solved! See update to this story.

Drat and double drat, I said, following the considerable amount of time it took to put Slacker radio’s app on my Blackberry Curve. It took about 15 minutes for the whole shebang to download and install, and then what? It played a tune for about a minute and crashed the whole darn operating system.

I patiently waited for my Blackberry to reboot, then tried again, thinking maybe that would fix the problem. The thing just bonked out again. Nuts.

It’s slow as poop too. Pandora is so much faster. But I’m trying the app again as I write this. Meanwhile I went over to Blackberry Cool today and it looks like I’m not the only one encountering this problem. Here’s what Ed had to report in his comments:

“Slow? Yes but also bugged up. It crashes my curve often. Still I think its great when it works. I never bothered with radio streams until slacker came out with their caching feature. I have deleted all my mp3 files from my media card to make room for stations.”

Ditto says Martin. “On a Curve the thing is almost unusable. The performance is dog slow and seems to tie up the whole device,” he notes. “I removed it figuring its probably designed for a Bold….”

Alas. But hmmm… When I fire the app up it says, “You’ll need an SD card to cache stations.” I think that might be the problem. More on this when I find out.

Meanwhile, Slacker whacked my system again. Doh!