Pirate Radio challenged the establishment
your parents hated you listening to it
the authorities tried badly to shut it down
and the more they did the more loyal the kidz were to the medium
BeBo.com like pirate radio before it, is flourishing in Ireland
pirate radio broke new music acts, bebo is about to.
As Social Networking moves into TV and radio,(last week bebo renamed its flash box “BeBo TV”) I expect the Pirate analogy to grow. The “Pirate” part of Pirate Radio referred to an era that included ships and was never really a tag that stuck in terms of Piracy like Napster may have felt a few years back. So think of these social network sites as “Free Radio”; doing to a medium something the establishment must learn before it can smother it with consumerism and capitalism. And its not just bebo. there are 6000 plus Irish musicians “playing” on MySpace.com a healthy 1% of the worlds artists counting for 600,000 among Myspace’s 90 million users…. so “don’t take my BeBo away” and if you don’t want to make it the hottest property in town (and it is) then don’t give it all that establishment attention. the Kidz wanna rock, and its not txting or FM radio or compact cassettes or CB radios or the transistor radio’s this time. its Internet Radio Sharing Trading Listening Compelling 12-18 hour sticky video / audio / textual viral EXPERIENCE. No wonder the parents don’t understand, the over 40’s have a media attention span that includes 140 minutes of Gay Byrne (now Kenny) Late Late Show as a stable diet. So while my parents didn’t understand the lyrics of Paul Weller and the antics of Kenny Everett neither did my grandparents understand LuLu Twiggy Mick Jagger or Kenny Everett (the first time round). schools out for summer, child safety expert Rachel O’Connell joins BeBo on July 17th, expect a few more stories like these this summer, BBC[July 4] BBC[July 3] BBC[June 29]