Revisiting My Radio

Greetings Friends And Family,

How've you been? It's been quite a while since we've talked. So long in fact, that when my friend Mr. Chair sent me an email the other day, he closed it by saying, "YO. Write something new in your f**king blog why don't you!" He actually spelled out the f-word but I only like using that word here when I feel the need for that extra kind of expression.

So I decided that since I have the day off, I'd come have a cup of coffee here at Starbucks in downtown Stamford and just start typing away. There's so many things I have to talk about but for now, I only have time to talk about the radio station.

I HAVE A RADIO STATION! WOO-HOO!!!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I relaunched my Live365 radio station a month and a half ago. It's probably the radio station that has kept me away from blogging as the gratification from creating the station comes much quicker than wondering if anyone's reading my blog. To show you how disinterested I've been in finding out how my blog is being received, I just this very moment realized that I deleted my blog tracking abilities over a month ago when I screwed up my blog template while trying to update it.

Now I realize that I'm not flexing my creative muscles as much by programming music instead of writing about my world but I do enjoy putting together tunes that people enjoy listening to. Allow me to give you some interesting stats.

I have created an online radio station that in the last days has been listened to for 3 hours in Wisconsin, 5 hours in Illinois and Virginia, 6 hours in Georgia and Texas, 7 hours in Arizona, 10 hours in Oregon12 hours in Florida, 21 hours in New York, 30 hours in Miami and a Whopping 156 hours in California. Not bad for a 33 year old guy living in Stamford, CT.

Now I love my country but even more fascinating to me is that Dave Tunes has been listened to for 3 hours in Vietnam and Singapore, 5 hours in Japan, 6 hours in Australia (one of my earliest supporters, Thank You Australia), 8 hours in Canada and Malaysia as well as 12 hours in Peru. PERU!!! I'm embarrassed to say I'm not even sure where that is.

Those numbers are awesome for my little startup station. Thank you all very much and I hope you continue to listen.

For those of you curious to know how I come by my playlists, it goes something like this. Each week, I update an iTunes playlist I have that consists of the albums of the artists with songs on Billboard's Pop 100 chart. Throughout the week, I listen to these tunes on random on my iPod and snag the tunes I like by giving them a 5 star rating. Every other day or so, I sit at my computer and upload somewhere between 3 to 10 tunes from my 5 star list to my Live365 library. At the same time, I'll pull a few songs out of the library based on whether or not an artist is still on the Pop chart and how I feel about the song. I then create a new random playlist which I then organize a little bit and when I'm done with that, the playlist goes live. In this month and a half time, I have created close to 40 of these playlists and my most current playlist has a running time of almost 10 hours.

Now if I was doing this dj thing for real, I would really be thinking thru the order of these songs and maybe even be programming the songs live which I'm capable of doing on Live365. However, while I do have a huge love a music and would love to do just that, I just don't have the time. So instead I've taken this alternate approach of posting somewhat consistent music that I enjoy on a regular basis with the idea that I'm maintaining a fresh and contemporary music station.

As for how well the station is doing...well, for the moment, I seem to plateaued. Live365 has this system of little blue men to let you know the amount of listening hours as station is getting in a months time. 3 blue men represents a minimum of 100 hours whereas 4 blue men represents a minimum of 1000. A couple weeks ago I was sooooo close to that 1000 mark. I was pretty sure that when that weekend was over, I would have achieved my fourth blue man. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. Since then, I've been fluctuating around the 800/900 mark in spite of the fact that each day, I gain more listeners and more people are setting Dave Tunes as a preset. Where I had once reached the number 70 listing of all pop stations on Live365, today I reside at number 81.

Now, sure I'd love to go to number 1 but that's a long ways away and an unrealistic expectation. Getting to such a number requires plenty of more work with a lot more marketing. Not to mention the fact that I'm not a true mainstream station in that I play a lot of tunes by popular artists that many people are not familiar with. When all is said and done, I've created a station I enjoy and I'm happy there are people out there who enjoy what I've done.

I should also mention that unless something changes, this little experimental foray into radio programming probably only has a 1 year life span with 2 of the months already having passed. Back when I first opened the Live365 account, I clearly was a single guy with a few extra bucks in my back pocket I didn't mind burning. When I started aggressively programming the station again, I looked into exactly what I was spending to give people free music and well...Wow. Now, I do get a very small kickback anytime a premium live365 subscriber is listening to my station but I can't imagine acquiring enough listeners in the next year to subsidize the cost of the station. I will say though that had I ever picked up free songs via file sharing (and I'm not saying I have), I certainly wouldn't feel bad about it after what I've payed for the last couple of years to broadcast those tunes.

So in conclusion, I'm enjoying this internet radio thing and I'm glad all of you enjoy it while it lasts.