A Brief History of 80sAirwaves.com
With my recent fascination (addiction) to Twitter, there has been a surge in traffic to 80sAirwaves.com. Okay, maybe not a surge, but SOME traffic - most of whom we will presume had never really heard of 80sAirwaves before my recent Twitter postings (Tweets). So here, in a virtual nutshell, is the story behind 80s Airwaves, the online radio station and this months four year anniversary of my blog.
At the height of my music buying frenzy (age 18-24), during the late 80s and very early 90s, I had already been a club DJ at a few places in the Northwest Chicago suburbs and up into the tiny tourist town of Lake Geneva Wisconsin, as well as a radio DJ working the night shift (9pm-12am) at WCBR 92.7 (The Bear!) in Arlington Heights, IL. Whether I was dropping two bills on used vinyl at a record store, attending record swap meets in Chicago (always a great source for bootlegs) or taking stacks of promotional CDs back to my hovel, always in the back of my mind there existed a dream to have my own radio station unlike any other. I wanted to mix up a wide variety of music with short bits of media into a stream that was both entertaining and informational.
After more than a decade of acquiring music and music media of all sorts and owning a library of thousands of albums, CDs, videos, etc. I was diagnosed with cancer in 2001. While it wasn’t major - nothing that eight weeks of radiation couldn’t cure - it was enough to make me realize how quickly my life could change. My wife, Aimee, and I started to talk about the things we wanted to do and of course, my dream of a radio station was at the top of that list. So in late 2002 we actually started to prepare and figure out what would be needed to actually stream a radio station online 24/7. While I have always been into computers, since my first Vic-20, I was never really into Windows machines, so my solutions for broadcasting always involved Apple Macintosh. In late 2003 or early 2004 I hit upon the combination of RogueAmoeba’s Nicecast and MegaSeg DJ software (with SOME automation features) and all systems were go.
A wide culmination of events lead up to the 80s Airwaves launch party on April 30, 2004 culminating with a countdown and the launch of the station at midnight (May 1, 2004), among aout 50+ family, friends, neighbors and strangers - the strangers were just curious about all the odd people dressed like it was the 80’s. The online radio station, 80s Airwaves was now a reality and was broadcasting “live from a bonus room over the garage”. This wasn’t just a cute marketing tagline - it was the reality. Plus any marketing budget we had was pretty much blown on the party - we did very little promotion of 80sAirwaves.com online or off and simply expected the word of mouth about our great station to carry us. And, for the most part, it did…
Using the Shoutcast directory of online broadcasters as our barometer, we were pleased to announce after our first 30 days on the “air” that we had hit #1303 and climbed into the top 20% of nearly 7,000 broadcasters (now, four years later there are more than 23,000). Within about eight months of our launch we had reached the top 10% of broadcasters and while we struggled with that position, our listener base continued to grow month after month. And while all this success sounds great, the reality is that as online radio stations grow, they require more bandwidth (a serious expense) and need to pay more royalties (just as serious).
In the early part of 2005, things started to get shakey with the company I had been working for over 11 years. The writing was on the wall and I knew I had to get serious about finding a new gig while keeping my current one and running a growing radio station. On the one year anniversary of our little station, May 1, 2005, we had an average of 500 people tuning in each day. The success was bittersweet as I understood it would be impossible for us to keep the station going financially and still get serious about finding a new career, especially since we both wanted to move east. Throughout the Spring and Summer of 2005 the radio station became less of a priority: we added less music, we sent out fewer newsletters and, less response to requests and, not surprisingly, our station ratings decliened with our dedication. In early October 2005, I posted a notice on this blog letting our listeners know about our decision to pull the plug. What was missing from that post was a primary concern about getting a new job which I couldn’t communicate since everyone at my office was aware of the station and some were fulltime listeners. So Friday, October 21, 2005 was the last broadcast day for 80s Airwaves and our final song was “This is Goodbye” by the Characters. Less than six months later, after dedicating ourselves totally to a new location and a new job, I had a new position and a few months after that we had moved out of the house with the “bonus room over the garage” and 80s Airwaves, the online radio station, was history.
There are several morales to this story, but I’ll get to those in a part two in a few days…
-pjc