ShoutCast is a central interface to several thousand servers running broadcasting software delivering music in all forms -- all different genres. With this clear diversity of interest in music, I began thinking of listeners' choices and usage patterns. What genres are hot and what are not? Classical music fans appear to be diminishing at concerts, so is it the same over the Internet?
To address with ShoutCast.com's data, I wrote a little perl routine to access it and save each one of the 19 different genre's top 20 "stations" page. The routine analyzed each page's HTML and extracted the number of current listeners and the number of potential slots, the maximum number of concurrent listeners an individual server can handle.
The following table, with some percentages, are what I observed:
So how does the classical music audience rank? 2.4% of all the listeners at the point where I took the measurements. I've done it at a few different points during the day and 2.4% is pretty consistent. For all of ShoutCast's total 400 thousand current listeners, that's still a pretty small audience.
Current % of Total % of
Genre Users Total Slots Total
---------------- ------- ----- ------ -----
Alternative 14419 3.4% 74709 5.5%
Classical 10110 2.4% 30973 2.3%
Comedy 1634 0.4% 10865 0.8%
Country 8917 2.1% 48355 3.6%
Dance 42693 10.2% 125477 9.3%
Funk 8992 2.1% 43823 3.3%
Jazz 14898 3.6% 49916 3.7%
Metal 8508 2.0% 36024 2.7%
Mixed 3338 0.8% 11996 0.9%
Pop 52327 12.5% 136385 10.1%
Rap 19169 4.6% 79631 5.9%
Rhythm and Blues 21522 5.1% 79925 5.9%
Rock 52511 12.5% 147951 11.0%
Talk 5224 1.2% 34151 2.5%
Techno 31127 7.4% 80498 6.0%
TopTen 80941 19.3% 201824 15.0%
World 10723 2.6% 48000 3.6%
70s 9401 2.2% 35881 2.7%
80s 22273 5.3% 70788 5.3%
TOTALS 418727 100.0% 1347172 100.0%
You can also question what the "classical" genre designation means. On one other Internet radio site, the only "classic" music was "Classic Rock"! Sampling various "stations" I've found that very often it means "light" orchestral music or "contemporary" easy-listening piano music. Opera seems to be represented fairly well and some seem to be streamed in their entirety. As an aside, it is the world-wide Internet ShoutCasters are listening to. Sometimes the stations make announcements in their native language. Hungarian I don't understand!!
It's probably an open question whether or not classical audiences are shrinking. In my experience, they are "greying" and attendance is smaller -- but that's just my personal observation. Older people are generally less Internet savvy, so I guess the ShoutCast numbers aren't really surprising. It is interesting technology.
Shoutcast.Com also provides down loadable software to "run your own radio station". I installed and configured it on my Linux box. It works quite well. I was able to wire in my entire private collection of mp3s but I haven't decided whether I want to run it in addition to my other base application. With a radio, the announcer would choose what to broadcast. But what if you have all the control? Sometimes I like surprises, sometimes not. In my base music application, somewhat similar to iTunes but hand-grown and much older, I can either select specific composers and pieces, choose from some random selections or accept a mystery piece. That all appears to be a bit more work under ShoutCast's server, but clearly possible.
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