Pitchfork

"Hey folks, we'd like to save woxy," began a simple September 19 post on the message boards of WOXY.com, the venerable Cincinnati-based radio institution that-- citing financial shortcomings-- pulled the plug last month after 23 years of playing quality music to the masses.

"We're very well funded and humbled by the great work the people here have done," the mysterious post continued. "Please tell the fab four at woxy to contact us." Most thought it a hoax, but the post's author-- Bill Nguyen, co-founder of CD-trading service lala.com-- was quite serious.

Today, his noble offer saw fruition, as WOXY returned to the internet airwaves at 10:10am EDT, 10/10/06. Now partnered with Nguyen's La La, WOXY is not only back, but it has a few new surprises up its sleeves. Allow us to spoil them for you.

The first: listener-generated playlists, or what WOXY and La La have deemed "Citizen Radio". Beginning in a matter of weeks, WOXY fans will be able to program their very own set of favorite tunes over at lala.com, drawn from the extensive and always growing WOXY digital catalog. Quite a few test playlists are already up and running at La La's website.

With La La's help, WOXY also has designs on extending its much-loved Lounge Acts series of live sessions by erecting additional studios in cities across the country. As with the main Cincinnati studio, these satellite Lounge Acts studios will host national touring acts; they'll also record sessions from promising local talent. The first will go up in San Francisco in the near future, and WOXY and La La hope to establish more in Austin, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and elsewhere eventually.

La La is essentially a CD-trading network that allows users to list CDs they want, and those they already have. By drawing from a vast body of subscribers, it facilitates multi-party trades for a small fee ($1.00 per exchange, with $0.20 going to the artist, plus $0.75 shipping)-- so if Manny in Missoula has OK Computer but wants Loveless, Billy in Boise has Loveless but wants Cracked Rear View ('cause he's crazy like that), and Ginny Sue Beth in Dallas has Cracked Rear View but wants OK Computer-- well, a few postage stamps later, everybody's satisfied. And, when trades involve deceased artists, La La donates that $0.20 to its "Z" Foundation, dedicated to "address[ing] the economic challenges [working musicians] face"-- health care, and the like.

Pitchfork recently chatted with WOXY General Manager Bryan Jay Miller, a 13-plus-year veteran of the station, about the partnership with La La and the new direction for WOXY.

"The cool thing," Miller assured fans, "is that none of the good stuff is going to be changing."

"That's one of the greatest things about this whole arrangement: that we don't have to compromise what we do in any way. And that's really, really important to us. I think if we were faced with that choice, we probably wouldn't-- we would probably choose to shut down [rather] than compromise what we do."

So WOXY remains free, as it's always been.

As for La La's part, said Miller, "I think you're going to begin to see the sites intermingle a little bit. You're going to be able to add CDs-- basically when you see song listings and album listings on the WOXY site, you'll eventually be able to add those to your La La 'Want' and 'Have' lists."

In essence, through La La, WOXY listeners will have an opportunity to not only hear choice music, but get their hands on it as well. But what about one of WOXY's specialties: newer titles, where demand is generally much greater than trading supply? La La sells them brand new in its online store. At pretty decent prices too: the Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America, for instance, goes for $11.99 on Amazon.com right now; at La La, it's only $9.29.

While some have expressed concern that the new Citizen Radio option will divert many potential listeners away from WOXY's regular programming, Miller isn't worried.

"A lot of people had said, 'Well does that compete with WOXY?' And it doesn't. It's going to be a really, really great thing. A lot of times our listeners will fill us in on stuff that we may have missed...and we'll take that feedback and we'll look into the band, and we'll stick them on the playlist if they're good. So this is even yet another way that listeners can [interact], by putting a band in their playlist that they really like.

"We're paying attention, maybe we hear it and we dig it, and we incorporate it into what we're doing."

Like podcasting, but easier, Citizen Radio in effect democratizes internet radio broadcasting-- something that has Miller pretty jazzed. "The cool thing about this is, it actually drops the cost of running an internet radio station to zero. So the only cost involved is the time that you want to put into creating your station."

Also cause for excitement is the ambitious return of WOXY's Lounge Acts series, which already has 10 sessions lined up over the next month or so. Champaign's Headlights play today at 4:00pm EDT, and the days to follow will see performances from the Wrens, Chin Up Chin Up, Asobi Seksu, Minus the Bear, the Purrs, Charlotte Martin, Pela, the Teenage Prayers, and more.

"We're really stoked, really excited to be back on the air. I would even venture to say that I'm even more excited this time around than I was last time around," said Miller, in reference to WOXY's near-demise back in 2004.

"It's almost a perfect match."