Apparently you can do more than kvetch about the demise of Indie 103.1. You can fill out an online petition that essentially tells station owners, “Nooooooooooooo!” Log on to LetIndieLive.com, and you'll be greeted by this message:
On Thursday, January 15, 2009, LA and the OC's only radio alternative shut down.
Please sign this petition and tell the people at Entravision that INDIE MUST STAY ON THE AIRWAVES.
Not only is it vital to keep it on-air for the loyal listeners but, for our music community.
We won't go quietly…..
Included is this disclaimer: “Please excuse the simplicity of this web page as I am a music lover, not a website builder.” That music lover would be former Indie employee Katie Laster, who conceived the idea for the site after hearing program director/on-air host/”Mr. Shovel” Mark Sovel suggest during an interview with Kevin Bronson on Little Radio that listeners start petitions to bring the station back. “I called Mark to see if he was serious,” Laster tells LAist, “and Let Indie Live was born.”
Her initial goal was to generate 2,000 signatures, which was reached near instantly. So many people have volunteered to collect signatures that she has had to turn them away, asking they instead spread the word about LetIndieLive.com and its online petition. She is under no delusions thousands of John Hancocks will change the minds of Entravision, but as LetIndieLive.com proclaims, “It is better to do something than nothing.”
If you need an Indie fix, you can stream to what's left of the station here. Sadly, no Jonesy, though.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.