At what point do you abandon a hobby you’ve had for six years? Toastie Radio grew out of a need I had to have my music with me at work without bringing CDs or copies of MP3s to work. I’d just stream a playlist from home. When I realized that others from around the world would tune in, I put some effort into it…sometimes. Sometimes, I’ve let the project languish for months without any changes. By changes, I mean playlist changes, new music, promos, website updates, website features, and a general effort to improve the “product’”. I’d measure my success by my Shoutcast ranking, until Shoutcast stopped keeping track. Shoutcast stopped caring a number of years ago. There has never been much in the way of support or documentation for the (free) software.

Over the past year, I’ve tracked average point-in-time listenership. I was getting around 20 back in May, but then it dropped off to around 13 when I changed servers. I used to just pay for renting a Shoutcast server instance on a remote server. Now I rent a whole server, on which I can presumably do much more than just the song streaming. But I don’t now what to do with it all.

I certainly don’t need an online radio station to listen to my music collection. iTunes works just fine for that. And the whole idea of an online radio station, or any radio station for that matter, is a dying one, I think, since one has lots of options for either easily listening to their own music collection or finding a service that streams music specially tailored for one’s own interests. So given the lack of potential for this “medium” and my lack of ability to increase listenership, is it worth the time and expense to main this? I spent a good deal of time this past week trying to implement a new song-rating function which would improve upon the current one by allowing me to house the data on my own server. Mostly, I hoped this would allow me to allow website viewers to rate lots of songs on the site, not just the song currently playing. But my technical skills and patience wore thin, as I found too many drawbacks to the new tool. So no change.

Anyway, I could just dump these thoughts into the TR blog, but no one reads this; typing words into a void is tough for me these days. Despite my constant proclamations of zero-relevance, I manage a few readers here. So, for the vaults, I’ll also present the Toastie Radio Top 25, as of November 16, 2007. This is not to be confused with my own personal Top 25, although I’m a listener, so my votes figure into this.