The Current is launching a new stream dedicated to music from Minnesota’s north shore. Online only stream.This stream is in addition to their primary stream, their MN local stream, their kids stream, and the American Heartland stream. That’s 5 streams. Only one of which has an over the air presence.

Which means, today, 80% of The Current’s offerings aren’t available over your car audio. This problem has frustrated me for years – actually a decade (since podcasting’s bootstrap).

Receiving those streams in a car means a cheap enough and reliable enough data connection covers every street and interstate. It also means having at least an auxiliary port in the dashboard. Two of my last 3 vehicles (1997, 2004 model years) didn’t even have that very primitive technology.

“Alert: Within two years, AM and FM will no longer be offered by two automakers. According to the Convergence panel, radio will be gone from all new cars within five years. Since the automotive companies work three years in advance, these decisions are being made now. It appears that radio really will be gone from the dash unless it’s heard through an Internet radio distribution platform.”

This is huge. I predict this will be an extension of the OnStar service.