Radio Drops #19: How I Would Do Internet Radio

Here’s What’s Gonna Work

By “Work”, I mean build and maintain a loyal audience of listeners. We are facing such massive competition for the ears now such that I could never have imagined when I was a kid radio guy back in the last century. If I was a kid who wanted to play this game today, I’d be starting an internet station first. Here’s what I’d advise that boy about how to go about it. This is one of my longer drops; runs seven minutes.

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #19: How I'd Do Internet Radio

One Live Show, Six Times a Day

Back in my radio programming and consulting days, I usually had only one other competitor in town, one other station in my format. That was my main opponent. If I was programming a top 40 CHR station, I studied the other CHR station in town, looking for ways to counterprogram them, to do it better. With a country station, I listened for what the other country station was doing wrong.

Today, the landscape of competition has vastly changed. Back in the ’90s, in my largest market, Houston, there were only 20 viable signals in the metro area. Three of them were country stations, and I was one of them. Those three big-time stations were going at each other, and it got lots of national press. No other market had more than two country stations at the time, and most large markets had only one. Country was something of a minority format back then.

If I started an internet station today, pop or oldies or country or hip-hop, the competition would be ten times what I used to face. Maybe a hundred times. I couldn’t listen to all of them and counterprogram them, nor would I have to. They all have one common weakness that I see.

The Missing Element

Most of them don’t have live announcers. There’s nobody on the other side of the speaker talking to the listener right now, today, about the singer and the song, or that the group is going on tour. What I hear missing from nearly every station I sample is personalities. I hear playlists interspersed with station imaging. Everything is pre-recorded. There’s little evidence of any spontaneity.

One thing I learned long ago is that an automated station cannot beat a live programmed radio station, unless that live station is really lousy: playing the wrong music, second-rate production and imaging, the announcers suck. The human element is the magic potion that will beat the machine. A computer might beat us at chess, but it’s not going to beat us when it comes to being human.

Humanity is the missing element in most internet radio stations I hear: humanness and immediacy. The broadcast radio disc jockey is immediate, or at least he seems to be, alive and talking to me right now. If I’m going to build a successful internet radio station, it’s got to be as live as it can possibly be.

How I’d Do It

But I’m only one guy running this train, right? If I’m lucky, I might have one other pal helping me. For the most part, I’ve just got me.

Here’s what I’m going to do: one live four-hour disc jockey shift a day. A real DJ show: introducing the songs, backselling them, a little history of the artist, little musical tidbits in between. I’ll do it live myself every day, record it, and loop it. I’ll play my daily four-hour show six times. Same show, same music, same jokes.

Now, this is not a silly thing to do. Remember American Top 40, the weekly syndicated countdown show Casey Kasem did for 25 years in the US and around the world? It was number one in its time period nearly every time, on the hundreds of stations that ran it every weekend in the US and more around the world.

Casey did four hours. When I had the license to run it at my station, I always ran it twice. At my last station I ran it three times: Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. People often told me they listened to all three.

And what did Casey do besides play the countdown? He talked about the music, the songs, the singers. He told little stories about how a song had played a very important part in the emotional life of some person and their mate. Mostly very short bits in between the records. That’s the essence of being a music radio disc jockey.

Live, Whenever They Tune In

Now think about how podcasts are consumed. Only a minority of podcast fans listen to a show while it’s actually streaming live. Most people time-shift. They stream the show later or download it to their phone.

We can do that with music radio. We can’t let people download a daily music radio show, for copyright and licensing reasons. But we can give our listeners an excellent time whenever they hit our stream. And we can sound very live, because while we’re doing the show, we are live. Most people who hear us later in the day will hear us in a live environment.

That’s how I’d do it. A daily four-hour show, recorded. I might have to voice track it, but I’d make those voice tracks sound as live as they could be. Then I’d play it six times a day, with a new show every weekday at the very least.

If I picked the music properly and shared my thoughts and feelings about those songs the way Casey Kasem used to, I’d build a very loyal audience. That audience would come back to listen to me more frequently than to other internet radio streams they might like. My station would become part of their life, part of their daily routine, because I’d sound like their friend, the way Casey Kasem always sounded so friendly.

I would format and program my station to reach and resonate with the people I wish to reach. Then, and most importantly, I would share little bits and pieces of myself: my knowledge, and my love of the music my listener also loves. Sharing yourself is the foundation for a great, long-term relationship.