The Time Has Come…
After 17 months of being on the air with 80s Airwaves, later this month Aimee and I will turn the station off for good. Aimee has been highly supportive of this “business” of mine but all indicators seem to point that we have over-stayed our welcome. Specifically:
1. Ratings: The great thing about webcasting, unlike terrestrial radio, you ALWAYS know who is listening, where they are from and how you compare to thousands of other Shoutcast webcasters thanks to their stats page. When things were going well last fall/winter, each month we saw increases in Total Time Spent Listening (TTSL) which boosted our rank. We spent several consecutive months nestled warmly inside the top 10% of all webcasters position. Since spring of ‘05, those numbers started to fall, and this morning I see our 30-day rank is the worst it’s ever been, #1551. I realized before we launched the station that our programming mix wouldn’t be for everyone, but I was certain it would have greater appeal than what we’ve actually established after nearly a year and a half.
2. Marketing: Tied very closely with our ratings are two important business factors: marketing & search engine ranking. As of yesterday morning, ShoutCast has over 10,600 audio streams to choose from, Live365 probably has the same, if not more, the number of PodCasts available are way into the thousands, not to mention satellite radio choices and soon your cell phone will offer MANY entertainment options. In order to gain attention from a significant number of people today, you must have a serious advertising/promotion budget and marketing expertise. Unfortunately, we have neither. We felt certain Apple would help since we run this ALL with Macs, but no love there; Today we are STILL not listed in iTunes radio. We’ve even had difficulty getting reasonable webpage rankings with google for keywords such as “80s music” or “80’s radio”. But ultimately, the fault lies with me; this summer I wasn’t even able to get out an issue of The Transmitter! This station was something I had always wanted to do, and I’m glad I did it, but ultimately, as business guru Michael Gerber puts it in the e-myth, I was “a technician suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.” I thought that because I loved music, I could run all aspects of a commercial radio station. Obviously, that is not the case.
3. Maintenance: While I didn’t increase the on-air music library or sound-bytes archive as quickly as I would have liked, we did get to over 8,000 songs and we have come within 1GB of filling our drive on our broadcast server. That means to continue on and grow the library additional investment would be required and probably, even a swapping of servers - the current sever didn’t have the horsepower to transcode mp3 files down to 64K Stereo without noticeable buffering which is why we’ve been a 56k mono stream all along - though most have never noticed. Also, our website is in major need of renovation: Since our launch last May, we’ve had to close our guest book functions due to script kiddies and our weblog replies due to automated spammers. This has effectively shut down most of our communication channels with our listeners with just email and our request system remaining. Plus, many months ago I wanted to offer podcasts but our current content management system (MovableType) wouldn’t allow it without an upgrade or special plug-ins.
4. Support: Lastly and least important on this list is support. We’ve tried many times to gain interviews with artists which we play a lot here. Occasionally we would succeed (thank you David Lowery from Camper Van Beethoven). The majority of the time the record labels or the promotional companies they out-source to are HIGHLY friendly when they are representing a new album release. It’s when the artist comes to town and you would like to record an interview that things get cold quickly. A free CD or two is not a problem, but an interview after we’ve played four songs from a new release over 200 times and we don’t get a call back is simply disrespectful. Getting artists to record a simple station ID for us has been like pulling teeth as well, but we highly appreciate the ones who have helped (once again David from CVB, David K. from the Nails and most recently Martin Gordon). We had also hoped to have more interaction from listeners. In August we tried to do a top 40 list of the best U2 bootlegs from the 80s and had planned an entire weekend of live U2 music and to hand out 500 free DVD-Roms at a local concert (last weekend). We received ONE response from a U2 fan - and that was after posting up in a U2 traders forum as well. There are other examples, but I’m not going to place blame with listeners because all they should have to do is… listen. We just had hoped for greater participation with the station, from all avenues.
The favorite part of all of this has been our interaction with the people who regularly listen to our station. The Weird Al fan in Indiana, the youngster from Australia, our new friend in Waukesha, the guys from Motorola, our waiter/entrepreneur friend in Hyannis and Vegas, the radio DJ from Tampa, the Devo fan from the WA, our newest fan from Dublin and many others who have sent us praise over the last 17 months, we thank you most sincerely. More than anything the email and guest book posts from people who had their eyes opened to the volume of great music that was released during the 80’s really helps solidify why we were here doing what we do. We are really glad that a few folks got us and actually heard us. I will continue to argue, even after our station shuts down, that the late 70’s and all of the 80’s were a time of great musical diversity and change. We also need to send much love and respect to both Martin Hennessy III and Hal Broome. Martin has done our daily news break five times a week since DAY ONE… actually it was day three, but his 80’s Nuts Updates were always there and that content was always helpful for our listeners. If you haven’t already signed up for his weekly email, NOW would be the time. Dr. Hal, as our host for Friday Night Fantasy Concerts, took the show to a whole new place that I could not have done myself for lack of material. Lucky for all of us, Hal was busy recording live radio programs while living in Europe during the 80’s and the fact that he shares all of these programs with us via BitTorrent says a lot about his generosity - even in the face of adversity.
So now what? The way it looks this morning, Friday, October 21 will be our final day on the air. We’ll give Hal a few hours to do his thing with a final Friday Night Fantasy Concert and then Aimee and I will put together about an hours worth of songs to take us up to Midnight and then that will be that. While we launched the station with Eighties by Killing Joke, we’ve been trying to think of a great 80s goodbye song to end things with, so email us if you have some ideas (feedback(@)80sAirwaves(.)com). I had suggested Goodbye, Goodbye by Oingo Boingo, but I think Aimee’s looking for something a bit more substantive. Post radio station I might try my hand at designing hawaiian shirts or joining a Ska band. My new jeep should be in next month, maybe we’ll join a Jeep club. Or a political party here in WI. Maybe I’ll pursue another business idea or two that I’ve got rolling around in my head. Who knows, maybe at some point in time, 80s Airwaves will make a triumphant return. Regardless, I did accomplish something that I had always wanted to do (without losing my job!), and while it didn’t have the success I thought it would, at least I know I tried and gave it a fair shot. Hopefully you’re doing the same with your hopes and dreams of whatever it is that you would like to do some day. I have one bit of advice: Start. Begin doing it today so that you’ll have zero regrets later. Thanks again for listening.
Still Broadcasting Live from a Bonus Room Over the Garage…
-pjc