KONA Radio is Back

Good news for fans of GoSpeed Racer and KONA radio. The "cleverly named" DJ recently informed the Newser that her radio stream is back in business. "We are now affiliated with SONIXCAST.com out of Canada," she told us, "They pay royalties to SOCAN which is the entity that collects and distributes royalties in Canada. The station is now free of many restrictions including not having to run ad breaks. Also, more good news. We are now listed in iTunes under the '70s Retro category."

For GoSpeed Racer, this is the best news in months. In January, facing skyrocketing "insane" royalty fees, she made a deal with Radionomy to keep broadcasting, But as she stated in the KONA blog, it "hasn’t been a fun ride to say the least" with server outages and poor communications. Finally a lawsuit by Sony resulted in Radionomy blocking it's stream to a number of countries where KONA had listeners. So GoSpeed reluctantly made the decision to close KONA as a station. But it was just days later she made a deal with Sonixcast, "They are a Canadian based company that provides streams and royalty coverage. It’s not a free service but the monthly cost are very reasonable compared to the other alternatives. We are looking forward to spending many productive years with them and keep sharing the music!"

For more information, or to just hear the tunes, check http://www.konastream.com/.

Bixyl Shuftan