I found this Radio Caroline article a couple of days’ ago and it was fun reading. Internet is great as a lot of historical information is finally available. You could also read about the background related to Radio Caroline in this Wikipedia article, too.
Imagine being this kid growing up in Northern Europe, and at the end of the sixties and early seventies there were not really much rock music in the local radio. You ended up wiring huge antennas above your room in the house to pick up faint interesting stations such as Radio Caroline in order to get your daily dose of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, Pink Floyd and similar band acts.
Compare this with growing up today in any corner of the world, if you have Internet, you could listen to anything. It is my own opinion but this plethora of music has deflated the pure fun of being able to listen to interesting music. Compare downloading thousands of songs to an iPod versus struggling to listen to a boat that might or might not send a signal if the sea is rough, in addition to having battles of East European stations taking over the frequencies with propaganda drum rolls. Or even if the AM signal could reach quite far, sometimes the athmospheric conditions were bad so you could not pick anything up.
Anyway, that was my weekend fun, staying up until 6am or so listening to Radio Caroline and similar radio stations with an ancient tube radio.
It is even better, with Nicecast you could start any station you want and broadcast your own music, world-wide. Again, the supply is so big so it’s a matter of being picked up from the huge amount of broadcast:ed music, instead of being one of the few. Still, it’s one of my goals to set up my own Internet radio station with own music — just need to work hard in the studio this incoming holiday season. This in honor of the old pirate radio stations that broadcast:ed cool music to music-starving young people around Europe.
PS: Radio Caroline is still alive, in some form, broadcasting over Internet.