Corey: Give me a brief history of HitzRadio.com
Steve: It started in 1999 in a guy’s basement – his name is Sonny – and he started it out of his basement on just a 33k modem just feeding it off to his friends. Later on it became a little more popular and then the joys of Shoutcast came along…and through Shoutcast his audience came to grow more and more…and you can now find his radio on Shoutcast and iTunes and all over the Internet. So, it was just sort of the old-fashioned grass roots effort.
Corey: How are you guys broadcasting now?
Steve: We are going through Shoutcast which is our main source of listeners but again, we’re on iTunes and across a few different networks and starting in about a month we’ll be going to satellite and we’re going to be featured on satellite throughout Europe and Asia. Also, we’ve just signed a deal with a couple of mobile companies that are going to feature HitzRadio on their mobile phones.
Corey: What is your programming philosophy?
Steve: Our philosophy is pretty simple. It’s very interactive. We’re a mainstream Top 30 radio station and we play mainstream Top 40 songs. In addition to that we have the ability to have a lot more recurrent and lot more gold and a lot more variety.
Corey: How do you come up with the music you play?
Steve: it’s mainly based on current charts and the older stuff we just get fans’ feedback. We watch the numbers constantly. At any moment we can see the number of listeners we have and log that and watch that. In addition to that we have HitzRadio.com where people can go in and give us feedback on the songs that we’re playing.
Corey: And you really react to this feedback…
Steve: Very much so. In fact, We set up a second Internet stream and we called it HR2 in which we took literally everything we have in the HitzRadio library and we threw it all in with no sort of format clock done – there was nothing other than we hit random and stuck all the songs in and just let them play one time and just watch as people reacted to the songs. We used it more like a survey to see what songs worked, what didn’t, and sort of gauged it a little more in depth that way.
Corey: Having come out of terrestrial radio, what is it like to be your own boss? Does it make Radio fun again?
Steve: That’s the reason why I got out. In fact it got so bad I was working at a station that was playing songs off a computer and literally we didn’t even get to turn on the mike. A light would come on, and the mike would be open and we’d say exactly what was on the screen at the moment. So, it was essentially an automated station except we had live people sitting there and doing the liners for ‘em. That’s where I sort of got tired of it. It’s refreshing to do what we’re doing now in programming the station according to listener reaction. It’s kind of like the old days of Radio again.
Recent Listening Statistic According to Shoutcast:
Report Date: Tuesday 01/24/2006 12:00:01 AM EST
30 day rolling total, taken from 17.7 days of data
HitzRadio.com:
TTSL (Total Time Spent Listening) - 1,386,754 minutes
TUNE-INS - 1,572,527 users
5-MINUTE-TUNE-INS - 1,018,331 users
(Note: There is a companion Podcast (16:12) featuring an expanded version of this interview including more questions and answers. You can listen online at RadioRadioShow.com)
