Sky FM

[mikedow]

I’ve discovered many great Smooth Jazz Internet stations of this site, but for some reason, I’ve never seen a mention of Sky FM. I have no idea how I missed Sky FM for so long, but last week I stumbled on this incredible collection of internet stations.

Note that Sky FM includes several Smooth Jazz stations, but I’ve only listened to two of the stations for at least fifteen hours each.

Smooth Jazz: Wow! A great background station with very little extraneous talk. This is the perfect station to have on at work or around the house. The music mix is 100% instrumental, but there’s nothing that forces you to pay attention and nothing that puts you to sleep. If you’re okay with a 100% instrumental station, this is a good as it gets.

Smooth Jazz Vocals: This is my favorite station. Smooth Jazz Vocals has a mix of music that would have been incorporated into a Smooth Jazz station before the advent of Smooth AC. You won’t hear Anita Baker, Hall and Oates, or any of the played out tunes now favored by Smooth FM stations. The music is a bit more focused on R&B rather than Folk/Rock to my tastes, but it is an incredible station.

Sky FM includes a total of thirty-six stations, about half of which are some form of jazz or light classical. There’s a spotbreak about once a half hour, but the stations seem to clear very few commercials. Mostly I hear promotions to try the paid service. The downside is that the commercials and promos eat into the next song in rotation if you do not purchase a subscription. The only interruptions are the spots. There are no vanity programs that destroy both the continuity and professionalism of many Smooth Jazz Internet stations. You can listen throughout the weekend knowing you will hear what you wanted to hear.

You can listen for free if you don’t mind the commercial breaks. I paid the five bucks for a month of service. For some reason, I’m still getting spots on the Squeezebox, though the unit tells me that it is connected to my account. I left e-mail to Sky FM about it.

I don’t know much about the service, and I’m interested in learning more. There is a short Wikipedia article, but it doesn’t say much. The website is very sparse. There’s a forum for each of the formats, but it gets very little traffic.

That’s my review. I’m interested in what the other posters on this board think.

Mike

 

[Donald_WBWH]

Mike,

Yes - SKY.FM Smooth Jazz is one of the best SJ stations out there, I discovered it a few years ago and was hooked as well. I haven't listened that much recently though - I've been listening to SmoothJazz.com.PL lately which is excellent in my opinion. SKY also has an Uptempo Smooth Jazz station as well which is very good. I believe these Smooth Jazz stations on SKY are all programmed by Jimi King, a guy who really knows great music - his live show on Sundays is great as well.

I haven't really listened to the Vocal Smooth Jazz station very much, but you are right - it's much better than those Smooth AC stations.

 

[AC Tones]

Sky FM is well known to the veteran posters on this board, and I have mentioned them a couple of times in the context of it being a bellwether for the health of this genre (due to their history, name recognition, and infrastructure), particularly on Internet radio. IMO, they are OK, nothing spectacular. They play a lot of mainstream Smooth Jazz cuts by big name artists, and don't go particularly deep on CDs and pass on some lesser known guys who have made great music over the years. But as we all can agree, it really boils down to personal preference, and developing and serving your base listeners.

 

[mikedow]

I’ve been listening to the Smooth Jazz Vocal station for about two weeks and I’m sad to report the bloom is off the rose. The playlist runs about 300 songs, and music selections that first seemed provocative have gotten very stale.

An example of this is “Lady Love” by Lou Rawls. The song is just short of a quarter century old. My first reaction to hearing “Lady Love” was positive because it suggested that the station had a very deep playlist. I figured that any station that included “Lady Love” had to have at least 1500 titles. When I heard the song the next day, I guessed that the station was rerunning its playlist. Then I heard the song again a couple of days later. “Lady Love” is easy to pick out because it is such an odd song for a station such as Smooth Jazz Vocals, but in time I noticed that the play frequency was not an anomaly.

It seems that all of the songs are on permanent shuffle. I particularly liked a very pleasant song called “Oh Lori” by the Alessi Brothers. This 1977 tune charted in the UK but not in America. It is the kind of nice addition that would add spice to a 2000+ song playlist, but gets very repetitive when the playlist is so small.

It is disappointing to find that what could have been a great station is simply a small collection of music on shuffle. The station is nice for an occasional change of pace, but nothing worth listening to for any length of time. I love the genre, and if anyone knows of a station that plays something like this, I’ve love to try them out.

The Smooth Jazz instrumental station sounds very good, but I don’t listen enough to know the size of their playlist. I hope it is larger than the Smooth Jazz Vocal station.