Retired Radio Stations Find a Calling Online

Old radio stations don’t die anymore. They just reappear on the Internet.

Two radio stations that disappeared from the Los Angeles airwaves--hard-rock KNAC 105.5 FM and techno-dance-oriented Groove Radio 103.1 FM--are being resurrected with 24-hour broadcasts via the World Wide Web.

“We’ve got the future of radio transmitting live, right here, on GrooveRadio.com,” disc jockey Holly Adams said during her evening show Tuesday, the station’s first day on the Internet. “We’re broadcasting live all over the universe.”

Listeners can be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a broadcast transmitted over the airwaves and one carried on the Internet. Both offer continuous music, chatty DJs and slick promos touting the station.

There are differences, of course. KNAC.com and GrooveRadio.com have fewer commercials; DJs and their guests are not subject to government rules restricting foul language; and the stations are available to listeners all over the world.

And because they’re Web start-ups, profits are nowhere in sight. But they hope to survive by selling radio and Web ads, along with a smattering of e-commerce and operating with pared-down staffs. They also predict it will be easier to become profitable once wireless technologies make the Web accessible away from the computer desktop.

Meanwhile, there are other concerns. The streaming music sometimes comes to an unexpected halt because of congestion on the Net, and listeners can tune in only when they’re sitting at a personal computer. Plus, the Recording Industry Assn. of America is trying to collect music royalties from Web broadcasters under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Still, the old and new breeds of radio stations are more similar than different, which is why hundreds of stations have begun streaming simulcasts of their signals over the Web. Locally, radio stations such as KCRW-FM 89.9, Channel 103.1 KACD-FM and KLOS-FM 95.5 offer live feeds of their broadcasts on the Web. And hundreds of other stations have emerged that broadcast exclusively on the Internet.

Listeners to local sports talk shows sometimes call in from far-flung places after tuning in to their hometown stations via the Web. Syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh frequently entertains callers who listen in on the Internet.

What’s unique about KNAC.com and GrooveRadio.com is that the two stations have been re-created almost exactly as they were when they went off the air. That includes the studios in Santa Monica, the CD libraries, even the DJ lineups.

“We’re no different from a radio station,” said Rob Jones, KNAC.com’s founder and general manager. “We’re just a different broadcast methodology.”

But the Web-based stations are about more than just the broadcast. Listeners can watch DJs at work via Webcams and request songs or shoot the breeze in online chat rooms. The stations’ Web sites also include music reviews, news and feature stories, event listings, online discussion boards, free downloadable music and an online store for T-shirts and baseball caps bearing their logos.

“We’re bigger than a traditional radio station,” said Egil Aalvik, a one-time Groove Radio 103.1 DJ known as Swedish Egil, who launched GrooveRadio.com with his wife, Ena.

KNAC went off the air in 1995 after the station was sold and the new owners replaced it with a Spanish-language broadcast. Jones acquired the rights to the KNAC name and logo before he launched the Internet version.

Aalvik started Groove Radio as a syndicated radio show and persuaded the owners of KACD-FM 103.1 to use its electronic music format full time in 1996. The owners changed their minds a year later, but Aalvik retained the rights to the name.

It’s too soon to know how many people have tuned into GrooveRadio.com, but it is probably only a fraction of the 300,000 to 500,000 listeners that Groove Radio 103.1 had during a typical 15-minute period when it was a conventional radio station.

KNAC.com, which has been broadcasting since 1997, is attracting about 100,000 unique listeners a month, Jones says. That compares with an average of 250,000 listeners during a typical 15-minute period before the station went off the air in 1995. Unlike the FM version of the station, only 40% of KNAC.com’s audience is in Southern California. The rest of the listeners are scattered in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and more than 90 other countries, he said.

For stations that do not have the financial wherewithal to survive on the FM dial, turning to the Web is an attractive alternative.

“You don’t have to generate much revenue at all to broadcast on the Net,” said Ed Ryan, editor of Radio Ink, an industry magazine based in West Palm Beach, Fla. “If you’ve got some history and a recognizable format, you probably have a chance to gain back some of your listeners.”

That’s what Jones was thinking when he shelled out $1,000 for a two-channel mixing console from Radio Shack, a PC powered by a 133-megahertz Pentium processor, and access to a server so that he could start playing tapes of old KNAC broadcasts on the Web. Even today, with a creative staff of about six, Jones figures he can run KNAC.com at one-tenth the cost of acquiring a transmission tower and an FCC license.

He might face a new cost soon, however. The Recording Industry Assn. of America, a Washington-based trade group that represents record labels, is trying to get Internet radio stations to pay royalties to the labels that own the musical copyrights. The legal basis for such royalties was created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. As the name of the law implies, it affects Internet-based radio stations, but not their over-the-air counterparts.

Although market researchers do not have exact figures on how many people tune into Web stations, they say the audience is growing. In companies where employees have high-speed Internet access, about 30% of them listen to music online, according to Sujata Ramnarayan, a senior analyst with Dataquest in San Jose.

For die-hard KNAC-FM fan Ryan Gulino, the benefits of listening to KNAC.com from his office in Hermosa Beach outweigh the drawbacks.

“Obviously, the problem with listening on the Internet is you can only listen to it when you’re near a computer, whereas if you’re on the radio you can jump from your car to your house to wherever you need to go,” said Gulino.

He said he is considering signing up for cable modem service so he can listen to KNAC.com at home.

“But soon enough, that technology will change to where you can take the Internet with you in your car and on a Walkman or something like that,” said Gulino. “It’s a few years down the road, but it will be available.”

Times staff writer Karen Kaplan can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com.