Moonshadows

Article, first draft

August 27th, 2006

We stumbled into children’s music when Chloe was a baby. Rob had found some very bad and some very good children’s music on eMusic.com. We all really enjoyed the music from “Ralph’s World.” Wen I saw he was performing at our Border’s, the girls and I went and had a fabulous time. Ralph Covert was an engaging, fun entertainer; it is no surprise that he was nominated for a Grammy Award this past year. We became instant groupies after that show. So much so that we’ve had him to play at our house a couple of time and taken numerous roadtrips and even flown to see him and his band perform in many different cities.

After listening to almost exclusively to Ralph’s World and Ralph’s adult band, The Bad Examples, for three years, we started to find other kids’ muci that we liked. Justin Roberts, Dan Zanes, They Might Be Giants, and so on. We listen to some weekly streaming radio sations to learn about other bands. One, called “Spare the Rock” is hosted by father-daughter team.

When I stumbled across Live365,a streaming radio provider, I thought that it could be a lot of fun to have our own station. Tey had a five day trial, so I signed up and worked on creating a program. It was a little frustrating at first since there are many rules about how often songs from the same album or artist can be played. With some tweaking, we had a small program that worked. Camille recorded some readings and Chloe told an original story to add some interest.

I am not yet clear on the “copyright” side of the broadcasting, but it is my understanding that Live365 takes care of any royalities that are due to the artists whose music we play.

One pleasant surpirse is that even after only one week broadcasting, I received unsolicited offers from bands to
send me free music to play on the station. We’ve had a few more offers come in since then too. I am still working on creating a system to make it easy to update the station, but right now updating the playlist is a bit time consuming.

I can see the station being a wonderful homeschooling tool as we go along. Recording and broadcasting makes poem recitation much more interesting! We can broadcast interviews and other fun things as I figure out how to be more efficient at updating our radio station’s playlist.

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