I’ve only written in to a radio station once—it was two years ago, when I praised the program director of Indie 103.1 for giving Steve Jones, the former guitarist of the Sex Pistols, free reign on his own show, Jonesy’s Jukebox. As I listened to Jones shuffle through the CD cases he had brought from home to find the name of the last track he played before “visiting the duke” and cutting to commercial, I thought, “I can’t believe this nearly unintelligible dude has his own radio show. But it’s awesome!”

It was a great show, and Indie, the alternative music station in Los Angeles and Orange County, was a great station. As of ten a.m. Thursday morning, both ceased to exist. A message on Indie’s Web site says in part:

Indie 103.1 will cease broadcasting over this frequency effective immediately. Because of changes in the radio industry and the way radio audiences are measured, stations in this market are being forced to play too much Britney, Puffy and alternative music that is neither new nor cutting edge. Due to these challenges, Indie 103.1 was recently faced with only one option—to play the corporate radio game.

There was really no other station like Indie, where you could turn on your radio and actually hear good, quality rock music that hadn’t been pre-programed and played to death. Each DJ had his or her own style—nowhere else could you hear Steve Jones tell tales about thieving from shop merchants before joining the Pistols, or Henry Rollins speak for three minutes without taking a breath about the new mind-blowing South African tracks he had found at a market in Johannesburg.

It’s clear now that Indie was never going to last. Former DJ Chris Morris detailed the demise of Indie in the Los Angeles CityBeat in December. When the station shut down Thursday morning, Steve Carney at the L.A. Times’ music blog reported the station was ranked 38th in the Los Angeles market, with only .6 percent of the L.A. listening market.

And yet KROQ, the behemoth modern-rock station that represents all that is evil in radio, continues to thrive with 3.5 percent of the market and a ranking of 9th-most-popular station in all of Southern California. How does this happen? Who knows? Why do people prefer to listen to over-hyper DJs that press buttons on a computer instead of original, open-ended programming?

When my wife and I returned to northern California to visit our families over the holidays, we were subjected to your typical modern rock stations. Before turning off the radio in disgust each time we heard an old Nirvana song or the new Paramore single one of us would say, “at least we have Indie at home.” Now there’s nothing to save us from terrible, terrible corporate rock.

I might sound like an aging hippie lamenting the good ol’ days, and maybe that’s how I should think about Indie 103.1. Half the time I turned on the station I thought to myself, “this is too good to be true.” Turns out it was. The station is broadcasting online now; for the few hours I listened Thursday I only heard a DJ speak once, saying “yes, we’re still on.” Other than that it was just music, from Lily Allen to the Dead Kennedys.

A couple of display ads on the Indie Web site surely can’t pay the salary of dozens of unique DJs, including Steve Jones, the station’s anchor and definitive voice. He’ll probably be on satellite radio in a matter of weeks.

I won’t get too melodramatic. It was just a radio station. I can make my own playlists on my iPod. But it’s still a damn shame.