"Thanks for the pity," the announcer on an Illinois college radio station said on-air Wednesday afternoon. At first, I wondered what she meant. Actually, she was thanking the one person--me--who was listening online then. The DJ and her co-hosts were pleased when their show's listening audience soon increased to three and then eight. She wondered if the show would top its record of 18 people listening online.
Learning that 18 listeners was the show's record and that a California station playing good jazz was only attracting 25 online listeners that afternoon made me wonder how many people listened to my KCOU shows in the pre-Internet early '90s. I used to believe that there was always an audience when I was on the air, even if only three people were listening. After learning these online statistics, however, I'm convinced that, at least part of the time, I was only playing music for myself.
