British Invasion Radio News

And we have plenty to celebrate!

In the 12 months we’ve been streaming around the world, we’ve far exceeded our listenership projections:

• In the latest month, people spent an aggregate of 18,000 hours listening to British Invasion Radio.
• Almost 100 Live365 listeners have named British Invasion Radio as their favorite radio station.
• 1,000 fans have added us as a preset on their Internet radios.
• Over the last 12 months, the average listener kept British Invasion Radio tuned in for almost one hour per session.
• We now rank #150 in popularity among Live365’s almost 10,000 radio stations.
• British Invasion Radio is now carried on iTunes Radio and is a member of Live365’s eliteX5000 stations.
• Close to 50,000 people have visited the British Invasion Radio website in the last year.

And we couldn’t have done any of it with you! We truly appreciate your support and look forward to many more years of bringing you the music that rocked a generation.

Everybody’s got one… what are your favorite songs from the British Invasion era?

We’re compiling a list of listener choices. If your favorite tunes are included in the Top 50:

• They’ll be featured in a special program — “Your Top 50 Favorite British Invasion Songs”
• We’ll publish the results here on the website
• They’ll get more airplay on British Invasion Radio

So share your favorites with us now. Click here for a ballot.

While the British Invasion gave us more than its share of great music, it’s sometimes a challenge to find enough songs to keep our listeners entertained 24/7. Here are a few reasons why:

• Our musical niche was a victim of its own success. By the late 1960s, so many artists around the world were playing the same kind of music that it no longer could be identified as a product of the U.K. As a result, recordings attributed to British Invasion musicians span only about six years.
• While British Invasion performers put out thousands of recordings between 1962 and 1967, we doubt most people want to hear each one of them. Many just aren’t very good.
• As Internet broadcasters, we’re also limited by a bizarre federal law that prohibits us from playing some artists as much as we’d like. If we had our way, you would hear a Beatles record at least every 15 or 20 minutes. But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prevents us from airing songs by the same performers(s) more than once an hour.

In order to bring you enough good music to keep you coming back for more, we need to bend the rules sometimes:

• We don’t automatically exclude artists from outside the U.K.. For example, we play “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie Small, who’s from Jamaica, because it’s a good song, it was recorded in Britain and was a big hit there and in the States. You’ll also hear the Walker Brothers, who happen to be Americans. But while they weren’t particularly popular in the U.S., their records were consistently big bits in England. About half the members of Fleetwood Mac were also Yanks, but you’ll hear a lot of their music on our station.
• Likewise, not all of the songs on our playlist were recorded during the years of the British Invasion. Many artists who were a part of the original Invasion have continued performing for decades since — the Stones, Eric Clapton, the Kinks and the individual Beatles, to name just a few. We’ve included a lot of their recordings from the Seventies and beyond.
• Strictly speaking, Elton John, 10cc and several others came on the scene after the Invasion ended. But we’re glad to include their contributions that were influenced by the first wave of musicians.
• We’ve also added many recordings that never charted in the U.S. although they were hits in Great Britain.

And finally, we’ll drill down to find good music that never received very much airplay or attention. This past week, we’ve added about 30 of those tracks to our playlist, including:

• Can’t Let Maggie Go (Honeybus)
• Getaway (Georgie Fame)
• Helule Helule (Tremeloes)
• See My Friends (Kinks)
• Same Old Feeling (Pickettywitch)
• Look Before You Leap (Dave Clark Five)

We think British Invasion Radio plays a pretty good mix… but obviously, we’re a little biased. Let us know what you think.

British Invasion Radio can now be heard around the world in all of its CD-quality 64k MP3-PRO splendor!

Our broadcasts began on Monday, April 19, featuring the best music of the British Invasion of the 1960s. You’ve probably heard many of these 500+ cuts before — other songs might be less-familiar — but every single tune was chosen for its quality and listenability.

Please tell your friends and family about British Invasion Radio. Our broadcast is free of charge – you need only register with Live365 (and they won’t bug you after you sign up). If you really like what you’re hearing, consider Live 365 VIP membership: For just a few bucks a month, you can hear our station (and thousands of others) in even better quality and with no commercials.

Please bookmark us to get your fix of British Invasion music as often as you want… and let us know what you want to hear.