Your Station Anywhere — How Might This Tagline Change Your Radio Future?

Finding the right motto or tagline is tougher than we imagined. We had to struggle to distill our message into as few words as possible, yet convey the essence of what makes Backbone Radio unique.  Our previous tagline was “Internet Radio Simplified”. That expression was correct, but it didn’t tell people how radio can be great again.

Backbone Networks - Your Station AnywhereWe like our new tagline better, because it concisely says what we provide: freedom and power. How’s that? Let’s examine the tagline to see what we mean, starting with the noun.

STATION
Backbone creates Internet radio stations. We aren’t in the business of producing “shows” or time slots on existing radio stations.  A station is a 24/7, round-the-clock entity, and it always has programs running no matter when a listener tunes in.  Maybe listeners will find your station on your station’s website and listen there; maybe on an Internet tuner like TuneIniTunes or dar.fm. Maybe on their laptop, desktop, iPhone or Android, or any of hundreds of devices like Roku or their car’s digital dashboard.

The station is what listeners search for. A program or show is what’s playing when they find your station.  So, your station could include your show, your choice of PSA’s or none at all, shows contributed by your esteemed colleagues or best friends, shows contributed by people who pay you to air them, or any other audio content you choose. That is the importance of the word YOUR.

YOUR
In traditional over-the-air (OTA) radio, your job is at the will of someone else. Ultimately, that other person is the OTA station owner.  He chooses who to hire and who to fire based on fundamental economics, the same way he makes decisions about transmitter maintenance and janitorial services. Your job is always on the line.

You UsYou prove your value by bringing in listeners and creating a following, which in turn brings in revenue from sponsors and advertisers. Your value has to pay for your salary plus millions of dollars worth of annual station operating costs.

Imagine for a moment that you converted that value to a station that had no existing overhead burden; you retain your following, your loyal sponsors and you build your own station.  You are the station owner, and you call the shots.  This is now YOUR station, so where do you put it?

ANYWHERE
This is the key word. Anywhere.  The power of radio has always been its ability to connect with people at a very personal level.  Want to cover a concert or conference, broadcast an interview from the mayor’s office, or do your show from Cancun? You have the freedom to pick up and go out into the community where things are happening making your radio station more personal.

Obviously, you will need some overhead, but how much?  Well, for starters, on the Internet you don’t have to build a tower, so no requirement for real estate, not to mention permission from the FCC, FAA or any other government bureau.  And you don’t have to sit in the same old studio day after day. You are free to take your studio with you…anywhere.

Liz Claiborne Radio RowBecause your Backbone Radio station resides “in the cloud”, your live studio can simply be “a Mac and a mic”, plus maybe a small mixer, in your backpack. As long as you can find an Internet connection (WiFi, 3G/4G, WiMax or other) you can be broadcasting live. Your other hosts for your other shows can similarly go live from their Macbooks from wherever they are at the time.

And since your archived programs and audio, syndicated content, and a very powerful automation system also reside in your station in the cloud, just stop your live broadcast session, and your automated program schedule takes over. Your studio is wherever you are, and your station is always on the air.

So, that’s it in a nutshell. YOUR STATION ANYWHERE.  It is a complete radio station, you are in control, and you are free to take it wherever you want without limitation. Now you know what we meant by our tagline and how Backbone is changing radio forever.

Your Community Radio – What About LPFM?

It’s a beautiful thing when a technology like ours can simultaneously give a worldwide reach to a community and still be the most affordable, effective way to communicate with local residents. That’s the message we will be bringing to two conferences in May in both Boston and San Francisco.

MassAccess WGBH composite logosFirst on May 3rd at WGBH in Boston, at the MassAccess Spring Mini Conference, we will meet with local TV stations and community media centers from across Massachusetts.  Then, at the end of the month in San Francisco at the Alliance for Community Media Annual Conference, we will meet with media centers from around the United States to discuss how to employ radio to promote civic engagement.

Alliance for Community Media LogoOf course, you would expect us to be promoting Internet Radio for communities – we’ve been serving city-wide school districts and community youth centers for a few years now.  What we hope to achieve at these conferences is to help communities find an effective way to integrate their “hyperlocal” (LPFM) terrestrial radio with their Internet radio operations, and save money in the bargain.

Some of the topics we hope to discuss include:

  • Reaching out with both smart phones and FM radios
  • Engaging communities better through live, remote broadcasts
  • Operating a station with a staff of one…or fewer
  • Creating professional presence with minimal capital equipment
  • How to share audio content with/from other communities, self-syndication

This appears to be a pivotal year for community radio, and we want to be a part of it.  We hope to see you at one of these events.  Please let us know if you’ll be attending.

Internet Radio Takes SxSW Music Live, Worldwide, with a Berklee Finale

South By Southwest just keeps getting bigger and better, and we had the pleasure of bringing a lot of the entertainment live to music fans around the globe this year.  Teaming up with the “Indie Ambassadors” of Presskit.to, we helped create the majority, if not all, of the live radio coverage from Austin.  In fact, in the entire SxSW Trade Show Exhibition, Backbone was the only exhibitor under the category of “radio”.

Ben Maitland-Lewis - Whole Foods, AustinAs we mentioned in our previous post, we planned to broadcast three large events, including one from the Whole Foods“mothership” store and the RockSXSW day party from the world famous Maggie Mae’s Gibson Lounge on Sixth Street.  What we didn’t tell you is our fourth music showcase would be the eighth annual Berklee College of Music’s SxSW Day Party.

See the Berklee Blogs for more photos and artist lineup on this excellent party.

We at Backbone are proud to have the opportunity to work with Presskit.to on these productions, and to have helped all of these artists reach a much wider audience from the Live Music Capital of the World.

College Radio Has a Reason to Thrive…Let’s Work on How

Keene State College logoI saw an interesting post on PolicyMic recently by Adam Hogue, where he relates his transition from a college radio broadcaster at Keene State to becoming an NPR listener, like his (egad) father, and the general decline of Radio from its golden era. What jumped off the page to me were his views about how the future of radio seems to be college radio, because it best serves today’s youth.   Here are some of the verbatim nuggets that appealed to me:

  • All around America, there are stations that people take regional pride in. Most of these stations turn out to be college radio stations.
  • The radio is communication. It is part of our communities, and as long as it continues to evolve with the communities, it will not die.
  • College radio should be the local voice of local youth. While radio is rapidly losing the young listeners demographic (people ages 12 to 24), I believe that it is the job of college radio to be the community alternative for young people.
  • College stations need to be out there in the community and they need to stay relevant with their fan-base in order to grow. Young people have time to listen if they are given a reason to.
  • People should be able to listen to programs from anywhere and enjoy them.  Today, radio has the power to be anywhere; it is no longer confined to a frequency alone.
  • Radio stations need to play music, no matter what the music is, and have local personalities that bring people in and keep them loyal…radio should be a way to learn about new music or just listen to what people have to say about it.
  • It helps that most college radio stations receive a solid amount of money from the school.… A problem occurs when the school sees radio as outdated or too costly, and the station is sold off to a community.

As I see it, this short list distills down to three main points we need to focus on in order to escape the death spiral that’s enveloping Commercial Radio.  Our College Radio stations (IBS Student Radio Network stations and others) need to:

  • Create compelling content to attract and hold onto loyal, repeat listeners,
  • Become an active participant in the community, no matter where your listeners are tuning in from, and
  • Become monetarily self-sufficient to keep from becoming a burden on their schools’ budgets.

We’re going to need some time to look at each of these points and create a plan of attack. There are other necessary improvement points, to be sure, and I’d like your input on those, as well.

I would like to invite comments, emails and blog posts from interested station managers and faculty advisors.  I think it’s time we put our collective network heads together and establish an action plan with some guidelines for how we might go about making these improvements.

Internet Radio — “By This Time Next Year” Survey Results

survey55-listen_to_one_year_from_nowHere’s something you already know in your gut, but you probably haven’t visually seen yet. The recent article by Audio Graphics summarizes “the trouble around the bend” for terrestrial broadcast radio, and how Internet radio continues to capture its listening audience. This one graph displays what online radio listeners say they will be listening to by mid-2013.

When you look at the additional survey data, you see that most of the music discovery occurs with Internet radio, which leads you to believe that Internet-only channels account for the majority of new artist coverage, since that rarely occurs on simulcast FM stations.  Not Pandora, but real Internet stations.

We are all very fortunate to be in an industry that’s on the rise, not in decline.

Backbone Radio YouTube Channel – Internet Radio Simplified

You-Tube logoOver the years we have given a lot of training sessions on Backbone radio.  Afterwards many people said, “that was simple”.  With that kind of response we felt that we were doing the right thing by providing the personalized service of one to one online training sessions, going to conferences or even a few visits.

Since it is so simple we decided we should just do a quick set of videos on how easy it is to get started with Backbone radio.  So today we are launching a playlist of videos on how to operate Backbone radio along with our new tagline, “Internet Radio Simplified”.

There are only four videos:

  1. Installation and Configuration
  2. Loading Content
  3. Creating Rotational Playlists
  4. XTSR Station Training Video

The first two are quite short, less than 3 minutes a piece.  The third one, while a little over 7 minutes, provides a bit more depth on rotation and how it can be used as a powerful programming tool for your station.  There is a forth one from XTSR at Towson University, this is the video they use if for the training for their station operations.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL44AC0624A240407E

In launching Backbone Networks YouTube Channel we found a number of other great videos created by our stations or by our friends in the industry.  Even if you are already a customer and use the software daily please watch. Leave comments here or on our YouTube channel about what you think.  We would appreciate your feedback on what you like and what we could to to improve them going forward.

We are also looking for additional topics for short videos on using the our service.

Backbone at SxSW 2012, launches “Internet Radio Simplified”

There’s no event that’s more exhilarating than Austin’s South by Southwest, an annual festival that combines InteractiveMusic and Film, all tied together with the new, expanding Trade Show floor.  Of course, Backbone was right in the middle of it, demonstrating “Internet Radio Simplified” for the crowds.

SXSW Trade ShowNaturally, we were delighted being the only turnkey Internet radio station provider in the event, and even more pleased so often to hear “there’s nothing else like what Backbone does”. So that’s why we bring a mobile studio to these events, to show attendees how quickly and easily they can be on the air. And because everything they need for a remote broadcast fits into a backpack (Mac+mixer+mics), setup time is only a couple of minutes.

Backbone at SXSW 2012Our mission at SxSW was twofold:

  • Introduce new schools to your IBS Student Radio Network by Backbone, and
  • Build on relationships with our partners to provide greater services and features for our member stations.

We think we did pretty well on both counts.  We met student radio representatives from a number of large universities, all of whom voiced that being part of the IBS-SRN would be a major upgrade for their radio clubs.

On the partnership front, we can’t say too much here, but we’re continuing to make good progress for your Backbone-hosted station.  For example, in the area of delivery, not only is your station now available in both the TuneIn and iTunes radio tuners, but we expect to soon have your station become available on a new service that allows your listeners to actually record your shows for later listening, just like time shifting TV programs on your DVR.  We also met up with our friends from the Public Radio Exchange who tell us that they are getting quite a reception for their Public Radio Remix efforts that is available on XM/123, terrestrially and on the Internet.

From Texas we jumped on a plane and headed back to New York for the College Media Association’s NYC12 conference.  More on this soon.

John Tesh and Connie Sellecca Donate to KCOD College Internet Radio

We’re proud to report that musician and radio personality John Tesh and his actress wife Connie Sellecca have generously donated broadcast hardware, Apple iMac computers and Backbone software & services to KCOD, the student-run radio station of The College of the Desert, in Palm Springs, CA.  The gift grew out of a panel discussion at the Dec. 3, 2011 Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS) Conference in Los Angeles where Mr. Tesh was a panelist.

Tesh SelleccaWith this gift, KCOD, launched in the Spring of 2011, is the newest member station in the IBS Student Radio Network by Backbone (IBS-SRN).  The school notes that the station “has generated tremendous interest from students, broadcast professionals, potential sponsors, local politicians and the surrounding community.”  See more on the KCOD blog.
Listen to KCOD online.

From Wikipedia:
John Tesh is an American pianist and composer of pop music, as well as a radio host and television presenter. His 10-year-old ‘Intelligence for Your Life Radio Show‘ reaches 14.2 Million listeners/week, and is syndicated by Teshmedia on 400 stations in US, Canada, and the UK. Tesh has won six music Emmys, has four gold albums, two Grammy nominations, and an Associated Press award for investigative journalism. Tesh has sold over eight million records. His live concerts have raised more than $20 million for PBS. His NBC Basketball Theme has been hailed as one of the top three sports themes of all time. He is also known as the longtime co-host of the television program Entertainment Tonight. He has previously worked as a sportscaster for the Olympic Games, a news anchor and a reporter.

Never lose a listener

From time to time, we plan to invite notable industry experts to contribute to our blog about running your Internet radio station.  This is the first of those occasions, and we’re excited about it.

The primary thing that drives any radio station is content. That content drives listeners and builds your special community.  Today’s article is a conversation with Geller Media International President and author Valerie Geller.  Valerie was named 2011 recipient of the Conclave’s highest honor – the Rockwell Lifetime Achievement award for broadcasting.

Valerie GellerVALERIE GELLER Author – Beyond Powerful Radio- A Communicator’s Guide to the Internet Age for Broadcast, Podcast, Internet & Radio (Focal Press 2011)

Whether you podcast your show, are running an internet college station or “broadcasting” live over the airwaves, you already know – radio isn’t just “radio.” Audiences get their entertainment, music, news, and information – their “radio” on many platforms. There’s a lot of “noise” out there – competition for the time and attention of your listeners. That’s why it’s vital to insure that what comes out of the speaker (or mobile device) is relevant. They want relevant CONTENT. Audiences are fickle. According to PPM, we also have proof – they’ve generally got a SHORT attention span. Chances are, while they’re listening to your show, they’re also multi-tasking.

So what can you do to grow your audience and keep your listeners listening longer?

I coach talent all over the world and work one-on-one with air personalities – They all want to know “What’s the formula?”

The formula is simple: Listeners come when they are informed, entertained and engaged, they leave when they are bored. The success formula for growing radio audiences is based on deeply engaging your audience – by working with these three “Powerful Radio” principles:

1. Tell the truth
2. Make it matter
3. Never be boring.

HOW DO YOU “NEVER LOSE A LISTENER?

Beyond Powerful Radio coverThis KEY issue is a question I am asked, all over our planet. And the answers for keeping your audience, and getting them to listen longer, are pretty similar all everywhere on earth, whether I’m working with DJs, news reporters, talk hosts or producers in in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, Europe and Africa. The answer is: NEVER BE BORING.

To Create Powerful Radio: Your content must be relevant. If your listener is not engaged, or bored, it’s the kiss of death, he or she either “zones out” or TUNES out. When that happens, your listeners either leave the station mentally, or tune out physically, their attention goes elsewhere. One clue is to try to avoid “manufactured topics for air…” Always ask yourself:
If you would not talk about this subject OFF air, WHY are you talking about this on your show?

WHY DO LISTENERS LEAVE? WHAT MAKES ‘EM GO?

Think about it. Have you ever sat in your car, stuck in traffic waiting for the traffic report to come on? You WORK IN RADIO. You KNOW when that report is coming, so you wait. Or maybe you’re waiting to hear a song title. You want to find out the CD or the artist, but somehow you zone out…the report came and went or the song title came and went, and YOU MISSED IT? WHY? Because the person on air did NOT make it matter.

A misconception: Pace and tempo do not equate ENERGY. “Energy” does not equate MAKING IT MATTER. Storytelling makes it matter. A storyteller who CARES about what he or she is presenting is what always works. This is NOT an acting job. If it means something to the person on air, it’ll matter more to the audience. Part of telling the truth is being authentic, and genuinely caring about what you are talking about on air. Always focus on WHAT IS IN THIS FOR THE LISTENER?

WHAT ARE LISTENERS NOT GETTING FROM YOU?

When a listener leaves either mentally or physically and actually switches off the station, here is what is NOT happening. That listener is NOT engaged. He or she is BORED. ZONED OUT. Looking for another station or immersed in his or her own thoughts.

Try the following Powerful Radio techniques to engage your audience:

1. USE THE WORD “YOU.”
If there was a magic word to guarantee you could get the attention of a listener would you use it? Of course. And there is such a word. Radio’s Magic Word is: “YOU.” Always talk to the individual. Of course, logically you know intellectually that when you are talking on the radio you are in reality, talking to more than one person, but on the radio, the magic, the connection, the power of radio, is based on the feeling of intimacy between the presenter on air and each individual person listening. It never works as well on radio to talk to all those “folks” or “People out there listening” or “all of you…”

2. USE YOU instead of “I.”
Whenever you can, always try to talk to one individual. If you use YOU instead of We-Me-I or Us, listeners feel the deeper, and true connection. Think of the difference, “I have tickets to give away” or “You can win tickets.”

And it’s not just radio. A few weeks ago, I went looking at houses with a friend who has just had twins and they need more space. The estate agent said: “Now, this would be your kitchen over here. The bedrooms are upstairs, the guest room is in the back. Here, you could knock out a wall and make this an open plan. Your garden would be here, in the back…” This REALLY REALLY works.

Replacing YOU for “We, Me. I and Us takes a little time but it is worth the effort, as long as you have patience, and understand that as human beings, it is hard to change old habits. Perhaps you are familiar with the work of Australian based brain researcher Dr. Evian Gordon? (www.brainresource.com) If so, you may already know that according to the research, it takes a 1000 times of repeated behavior before you rewire your brain to change a habit, so KEEP TRYING. I have a stack of bright yellow “post-it” notes. They are everywhere and have the word YOU on them. It helps.

What else makes a listener leave?

3. TOO MANY COMMERCIALS or TOO MANY BAD COMMERCIALS
If you have commercials in your show, ask: Are your commercials causing a listener to tune out because a break is too long, or is the spot simply bad – boring, noisy, off message, or a wrong format fit? The same goes for public radio “sponsorships.” Never be boring. Research shows that your listeners actually like commercials and find them USEFUL when targeted correctly – if you’re in the market for a smart phone and you hear an ad that they’re half price at a local electronics store – you’re happy. You’ve gotten real information about a product or service that you want, and you can save money. When you air these sponsorship messages, the content should be targeted correctly and relevant.

4. GETTING THE LISTENERS YOU HAVE, TO STAY
While, there’s been so much emphasis on developing and getting NEW listeners, don’t forget that we also need to pay attention to keeping the audience you’ve already got onboard. Again, with the amount of choices people have for their time and attention, listeners are easily distracted. So how do you get a listener to listen LONGER?

5. AVOID THE MANUFACTURED TOPIC
As mentioned above, this is important. Try to think about your listener before you put anything on air. Avoid “manufactured topics.” Listeners feel it when it sounds like: “And now here is another topic manufactured to fill a bit on radio!” When they hear that, listeners tend to tune out. Ask yourself: If you are not talking about this OFF air, why is it on the air?

6. WIFM?
Always ask: What is in this for the listener? What’s in it for ME if I give you my time? A quick checklist: Is it interesting? Are they talking to me? Describing things visually? Is there humor? New Information? Talkable topics? Would you talk about this OFF air in normal conversation, if you did not have a radio show?

Some DJs or talk hosts get confused and think Personality means it’s all about YOU. But audiences care about THEMSELVES, not necessarily YOU. In personality radio, many personalities get confused and think if they talk about themselves it will be interesting. But powerful radio is not about YOU, it’s about the listener. The personal is universal, but the private tends to be boring.

7. WHAT DO LISTENERS WANT?
Your listeners want to be informed and entertained and have fun. They want new knowledge. If they are alone in room or alone in a car maybe they just do not want to feel alone. Listeners are hungry to feel connected in a somewhat isolated world that they find themselves in.
A listener wants to a connection to or “feel at home” with or comfortable with the person on air. They like to feel they “know” the person on air. Sometimes listeners like a little help in making up their minds, say, they are not completely certain of what they may think about a subject or topic, here they can get enough information or opinion or viewpoints to make up their minds. And in commercial radio, when the spots are effective, listeners say they like to learn about bargains, new products or services. And if a listener is having a down or despairing black moment, he or she wants to be lifted out of that mood.

8. GIVE THEM ‘TALKABLE’ TOPICS
We are lucky. Most people out there listening do not have exciting lives or careers. Because of this, listeners also desire “talkable topics.” They want to be able to turn the radio off and have ideas and interesting new things to say to people.

9. MAKE THEM LAUGH
Listeners also want vicarious experiences. They like to be taken on journeys they cannot get to on their own. And everybody loves to laugh. If you can make a listener laugh, it’s like handing them a solid chunk of gold.

10. TELL THEM SOMETHING NEW
Listeners to your station like to be in the know, they like learning new things. (They also appreciate help with their “show prep” for dinner, just in case they don’t have anything interesting to say to the people in their lives.) It works if you can give them material THEY can talk about. Listeners also want you to get ahead and lead them and give them ideas, things to think about.

11. SPEAK VISUALLY
Radio is an imagination medium. Even with photos and video on the internet, the spoken word can create powerful word pictures. Use these “colors” in your paint box to engage listeners. Remember to use details to speak visually and to paint word pictures. Imagine you are talking to one person, and person is a blind man or woman! How would you describe what you are talking about so the listener can “see it?”

12. Topic selection: HEALTH, HEART POCKETBOOK
What are audiences interested in? For years, the Frank Magid study of “health, heart, pocketbook” rules of topic selection applied. Today there is a new one. In addition to health, (personal safety) heart (touching emotion of any kind) and money stories, the newest category is Transformation. How YOUR life as a listener can be better tomorrow than it was or is today because of what you’ve heard on air. Radio stories and topics showing a listener what is possible. You don’t have to settle for the life you have. It can get better. This RIVETS audiences. (Think Oprah, think Extreme Makeover, DIY fixit shows, etc)

13. INSPIRE
Finally, listeners ALL want to feel good. If you can do that, you have that audience completely with you. And if you don’t care, they don’t care. Make it matter!

Valerie Geller’s POWERFUL COMMUNICATOR PRINCIPLES:

  1. Speak visually, in terms your listener can “picture.”
  2. Find, and start with, your best material.
  3. Tell the truth.
  4. Never be boring.
  5. Listen.
  6. Make it matter.
  7. Always address the individual, use “you.” Talk to ONE listener at a time.
  8. Do smooth and engaging transitions & handoffs.
  9. Promote, brag about your stuff.
  10. Brag about other people’s stuff.
  11. Be who you are.
  12. Take risks.  Dare to be great.

All rights reserved. Reprint with permission – Copyright Valerie Geller 2011 – excerpted from “Beyond Powerful Radio. Valerie Geller, president of Geller Media International is a broadcast consultant, trainer, seminar/workshop leader, keynote speaker and talent coach working with radio and TV programmers, managers, on air personalities and broadcast journalists throughout the world, to help grow audiences through creating powerful radio. “Beyond Powerful Radio – A Communicator’s Guide to the Internet Age” is Geller’s fourth book. For more, visit beyondpowerfulradio.com or gellermedia.com. Phone 212 580-3385, email valerie@gellermedia.com, Follow her on twitter: twitter.com/vgeller

Apple TV, now supporting Internet Radio!

Apple TV - iTunes RadioOn Thursday Apple announced an update for Apple TV.  The Apple TV 3.0 update includes support for Internet radio streams.  You can now listen to you favorite Internet radio streams on through your home theatre system!

To access the radio streams choose “Internet” from the main menu and “Radio” from the drop down.  This weekend’s IBS Palooza event will be available on Apple TV and we will be adding all of Backbone’s other stations shortly.

Also, within iTunes radio you will note a new designation.  Backbone’s high fidelity AAC streams will be designated as AAC Internet Audio streams.  Stations that broadcast in AAC audio provide a higher quality sound at a lower bit-rate.

Tune in this weekend for a listen.