I’m sure there are a billion crappy Internet radio shows. but I am totally in love with several that I want to (re)share.

Grant over at The Revolution has been weeding through the good and bad entries of the CC Mixter contest entries and for the third and final time presents Rip. Mix. Sample. Countdown. a show that presents only best of the pack (as rated by site members.)

He also did a regular show last weekend Revolution #7 which features the world debut of “I Don’t Care (If You Lie)” by c. layne from the upcoming Magnatune album that I produced for c. (Grant has decided to use his next show, tomorrow night, as a sleep aid and will feature an interview he did with me. If you’re having trouble falling asleep tune in.)

My big new discovery this week is Sounds Like Radio by Andrew over the pond in London. Unlike the Revolution and Staccato SLR does not stick strictly to Creative Commons music but Andrew is amazing at digging around the Internet to find really good pop music. His show is a great example of what radio DJ’ing used to sound like over the airwaves and why I’m so jazzed on it now.

Brill.

A site is up that chronicles Rhino’s Elvis Costello reissues. It’s a great story of a smaller label taking care of a back-catalog in a way the major labels have no idea how to.

I worked at CBS Columbia records as a house hippie in Elvis’ 80′s heyday and wormed my way into many (100? more?) live shows. Always a mind blowing show, never the same show twice, which can no longer be said of his last few tours. When I say not the same show, I mean not even the same band, instrumentation or song set. I once saw him five nights in a row in one theater in Los Angeles and he had five completely different band line-ups.

I also worked at Rhino when it was a three man operation (two of them from my high school) and was amazed at the catalog they were building then!

The difference between the two labels was striking. CBS had signed hundreds of artists and had no idea how to treat them or their music (this was around the time they initially refused to release Herbie’s “Rockit”) and drove them into poverty. Rhino, to the best of my knowlegde, has never had a recording artist under contract (maybe Weird Al? or that kazoo band that did Zepplin covers?) but treated the music they were collecting with reverance and revived the careers of many treasured artists who were literally discarded by the majors.

CBS (now Sony Record) retains 100% of the rights to the back catalogs of artists they dump. About 80% of the time they stop pressing the CDs and prevent anybody else from doing the same. The artist is left in debt, in poverty and with a career’s worth of music they are not allowed to sell. What is the company waiting for? They are desparately hoping the artist will commit a messy suicide or die in a firey plane crash so they could reissue a ‘tribute’ or ‘greatest’ hits.

Rhino gathers up this back catalog music and treats it with the respect it deserves and do their best to make sure the artist or their estate are treated fairly.

Elvis has dozens of albums and thousands of songs in his catalog and knows the danger. He isn’t waiting for his plane crash or career to be 20 years over to make the change.

CBS fired me several times over the course of 10 years.

Rhino fired me once after a week and a half and I never heard from them again.

One of these labels knows what they are doing.

[link via Keith]