VIRGIN RADIO UK - WORLD RADIO SUPERPOWER

One of the best innovations of the past decade for music lovers - only second to the IPod - is no doubt Internet Radio.

Some of you may have no idea what I'm talking about, but if you were a child of the 1980's when leg warmers, Cabbage Patch Kids, and Pac Man Fever ruled the earth, you had a boom box - you know the kind you could either carry around as one unit or use as a stereo when you detached the speakers, and waited desperately to hit play and record on your tape deck when a great song came on the top 40 stations. Lot's of times you were pissed because the DJ would talk over the music.

Then Internet Radio comes along in the mid 90's and all of a sudden you start listening to radio stations from cities across the world from Budapest to Dublin to Fresno. And when you listen to the commericals and the DJ's, they talk about local happenings, advertising local TV and local businesses, as if you lived there. Not sure about you but when I hooked onto this, I stopped listening to local radio all together. But through all the stations that became known through the internet, the undisputed heavyweight champion that has set the standard in internet radio becoming the world's most listened to station, is no doubt, VIRGIN RADIO UK. Yeah, the company that Richard Branson owns. In the words of Kelly LeBrock, don't hate him because he's beautiful!

Listening to this station has meant many things for me. It's meant a whole new level of great rock and pop music that you almost never hear in the US. It's meant revisiting all those bands from my childhood, who made it here for 15 minutes in the early 80's but continued on to great things in the UK. It's meant a whole new fresh perspective on music not readily available on local top 40 hit stations that have libraries the size of my hand. It's meant realizing just how many points the UK is above us on the hip and happening scale (A recent article in New York magazine totally supports this point).

Most of all it's meant a large expansion of my music horizon - which consisted of top 40 until the arrival of the world radio superpower that is Virgin Radio UK.