Wristband Radio: Thank You, Steve Jobs
(The following is a repost from my other site, Wristband Radio.)
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
— from Steve Jobs' commencement address to Stanford in 2005
When Josh and I started Wristband Radio, we wanted to take advantage of how far the Internet had come in order to create a local radio station that served a local audience. The insight that made this focus so clear for me had come from a moment I had two years before. On the day the iPhone 3G launched, I was taking my new prize home from the Apple Store and had stopped for groceries. On the way in, I downloaded the Pandora app, installed it, and started to listen to it as I walked through the frozen food section.
I stopped short (next to the frozen peas) as I realized what I was doing: I was enjoying a channel that was playing nothing but great Jazz bassists. It was streaming to me not over a wire or even on my home wireless network, but in the frozen food section at the grocery store. I thought, "That's it. Traditional radio is dead. We're just waiting for the body get cold." So when the opportunity to work on Wristband Radio came up, there was no doubt in my mind how to proceed.
If you go to our How to Use page, you'll see that there are apps that allow you to listen to WBR on every major smartphone. But at the top, you'll also see that you don't need any of them to listen to Omaha's great local musicians on an iPhone or an iPad. Apple's consistent support for HTML5 meant that I had a proof of concept for this station working in a single line of markup code. If all I needed to worry about were iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, and the Safari browser, I could've written and tested our player in less than a day. Most of the work I've done on the technical client-side code has been to detect and support everyone else.
I can't tell you what a thrill it was to hear my station on the same iPhone that had inspired me to realize how the world was changing. During testing, WBR "just worked" right from the browser on every iOS device, from my Dad's original iPhone, to both iPads, to my current gen iPhone 4. When the iPhone 4S ships later this month, I already know that WBR will be ready for users to enjoy.
This kind of direction doesn't form in a vacuum. It came from Apple's commitment to supporting some of the best new web standards. In turn, Apple's vision for the browser came from the man who gave us the iPod: Steve Jobs. Music is in that company's DNA because it was so important to its co-founder and two-time CEO. Jobs dragged the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century with the iPod and with iTunes, the first legitimate venue for buying digital music to gain traction both with the labels and with users.
If it hadn't been for Jobs, it would be a different world for musicians and music-lovers. If the the industry had its way, we would still be listening to a handful of artists over the air and buying plastic discs as listeners. As artists, we'd still be scraping at the door for a handful of records deals. As it stands now, WBR artists have many of their albums in the same iTunes and Amazon stores that sell songs by whomever was just splattered all over the cover of Rolling Stone.
The world has changed and we are better for it. We listen to whomever, wherever, whenever.
On behalf of myself, my wonderful business parter Josh, the 150 talented local artists we play, and the listeners who've made this project worthwhile, I want to say from the bottom of my heart, thank you, Steve Jobs. Thank you for everything.
Andrew Neely
Technology Manager, Wristband Radio
