Let’s be honest about the current state of terrestrial radio in American urban markets – Black radio stations play “Black music”, White radio stations play “White music” and Hispanic radio stations play “Hispanic music” and the whole industry is racially segregated and been that way since mid-20th century. Then you got mostly white-owned “party radio” that plays cornball “pop music” that supposed to appeal to everybody as if that is a solution. With that honestly, I want to present our solution to eventually disrupt and destroy this unfortunate racial component in the quest to find, listen and love music and make it a part of our lives.
As a Black kid growing up on the West Side of Chicago, I grew up on UK punk groups and my favorite is Joy Division/New Order. I remember back in the late-80s I let my new girl I was crazy about borrow my Aiwa auto-reverse cassette tape player I bought from Shutterbug in the Water Tower but I forgot to take out my Joy Division “Substance” tape. She was a south side sista and I was scared she thought I was this weirdo who listen to “white music” or whatever. I remember she stated she like “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “She Lost Control” but I can’t believe she listened to the whole album when “Warsaw” was the first song.
I bring this up because we lived in a world of media programming that also created this race-based social construct that Black people should listen to Black radio and White people should listen to White radio. If you were Black and liked White music, you were considered an oreo or if you was a White person that listened to Black music, you were a White person trying to be down with the Blacks. But if you were an urban musician, you had to listen to all forms of music. I knew a brotha on the West Side of Chicago who was a electric guitarist who was crazy about Whitesnake. When it came to house music and I will explain this in another blog article, house music synth rhythms came from the Italian House scene in early 1980s as they were the strongest disco synth programmers. Many Chicago people don’t want to admit but most of their 1980s BMX “hot lunch” mix tapes were European tracks.
This video above confuses so many house people because the 1983 video above is where EDM evolved from, not Chicago house music. It can be argued Chicago House Music involved from EDM which is my official opinion. Chicago House Music with the synth dance beats came around 1985 as a result of the Italian dance scene which involved into today EDM scene and people like Benny Benassi come from the original source which is the video above. Do you noticed how everybody is dressed up like they at an EDM festival and you see cats on stilts like a May Day fair back in 1983? So I just need the Chicago Black people to acknowledge and admit the role of Italian dance music and most Chicago House artists had to fly to Italy/Berlin to get a feel of the scene and take it back home.
Also, house music was inspired by NYC SalSoul Records from the 1970s that was a mix of Black and Dominican and Puerto-Rican rhythms and over in Chicago in the early 1980s we were mixing all genre of music from SalSoul, Philly Sound as well as European Hi-NRG or high energy – Hi-NRG is the primary predecessor of current EDM music that coming out of Sweden and Norway.
Noticed how “High Energy” sounds a lot like Frankie Goes to Hollywood “Relax” that came out years later? Notice in “High Energy” kicks in the 4-beat? This is actually a historical track and some consider this song the birth of Chicago house music format to come the following years later. Okay, let me continue because the reason I’m talking about the past is to give a context that the person who wrote this blog grew up on more than “black music” and I had the fortunate childhood of being able to love and appreciate all kind of dance music all around the world from Depeche Mode to ESG to Herbie Hancock.
So with that said, I have zero intention of launching an EDM radio station here in Atlanta that focus on playing primary Afrojack and Calvin Harris. I have every intention of playing and covering the whole global genre of EDM from the past 30 years and we are going to everywhere from Medusa’s on the North Side of Chicago to the Paradise Garage in New York to Club Hacienda in London. On our classic weekend, we are going to play all the old school from Den Harrow to Erasure to Taana Gardner. In our popular format, we going to incorporate everything from Reggaeton to Dubstep and we will also be bringing in J-POP and K-POP into the mix as well as electronic Afrobeat. If I’m going to do this and no one else is willing to take up the gambit of launching a true EDM genre station, I’m going to do this my way and from what I know and my background. With that said I realize there is a big challenge ahead.
The problem and challenge is how can I play all these genre of dance music to an audience who was conditioned to listen to racially segregated music all their lives? I personally find it distressing and unfortunate to see around me these black-identity radio stations that hellbent on playing “urban music” and claim this is what the Black community just listen to while refusing to play Detroit techno and LA hip-hop as well as our Reggae artists and of course, urban dance music from drum n bass to house music.
Then you got the so-called “pop music radio stations” that try to pretend they are mainstream but they are playing music they think white people want to hear and avoid songs by black artists they perceive white people don’t want to hear. So these same “pop music radio stations” also play watered down songs like Katy Perry 100x a day or Maroon 5 100x a day or they will play Zedd or Calvin Harris 100x a day and think they catering to the EDM crowd.
So my challenge is how can I get a streaming broadcast that can play New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Aphex Twins, Weekend Players, Blue Six, Ten City, Roni Size, DJ Shadow, Moby, Capsule, Benny Benassi, Daft Punk, Don Omar, Culture Beat, Everything But the Girl, Nervo, Felix Cartel, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and CeCe Peniston to cover the whole EDM genre to an audience? The answer is a technology-based answer and the good thing is I came from the dance music background and now in the technology sector to address the solution.
The solution is to create an anti-mass media pattern that is a hybrid of a radio broadcast and on-demand streaming. Think of the concept of listening to “custom playlists” on a streaming service where you listen to someone create a custom playlist of songs. We take this same concept to a streaming broadcast and instead of playing a pre-programmed playlist of one song to a mass audience, we leverage on-demand programming to dynamically play EDM sub-genres based on the listener taste. But we still use the continuity effect and play advertisement and report news to a mass audience but the music itself will be personalized to the listener – the anti-mass media model.
That means on the top of the hour, you will hear the news, weather and traffic here in Atlanta but after that, based on your preference, the next 15 minutes will be Afrobeat for some cats, Eurobeat for other and Chicago House music for other cats and Dubstep for other cats, then we go into the mass media break and the next 15 minutes will be K-POP for some cats, Reggaeton for other cats and I hope you get the picture. Then when we broadcast our flashback show, New Order, Depeche Mode and Alphaville for some cats, Dead or Alive, Erasure and Frankie Goes to Hollywood for other cats, Stevie Wonder, Womack & Womack and Michael Jackson Off the Wall for other cats and then you have Adonis, Xavier Gold and DJ Pierre for other cats and then the DJs go back on the air to make live announcements on the whole EDM scene in general.
Because we are broadcasting through mobile devices and not terrestrial radio, we can capture preferences from our listeners to what genres they like and don’t like and use the same format as Pandora radio to avoid playing some songs and discover songs the user do like. If you did not realize what we done, we removed the whole segregated element of Black radio/White radio and created a broadcast that focus on playing good music that the end user can customized. We eliminated the whole notion of playing one song to a mass group and created an anti-mass model that promotes the entire genre of dance music.
Here are the benefits – we still can operate as a radio type broadcast that report on local information and take in local advertisement revenue away from racially segregated terrestrial radio stations, which is I want to personally see destroyed and go out of business. See the Black radio stations has to go to a local car dealership and tell them their demographic is Black people who like Black music and that is so racially awkward! We on the other hand go to the car dealership and tell them our demographic is a collective of people from all backgrounds who like EDM and all forms of dance music with no reference to a person racial makeup and that is so awesome!
Then by doing on-demand programming, this allows us to promote a fair distribution of royalty payments by playing multiple songs by multiple artists and everybody get paid. In the terrestrial radio model, you got the one DJ doing some “payola” type crap of playing one artist song over and over while denying some local new talent from getting recognition. Our anti-mass media pattern eliminates the whole payola problem and actually creates opportunity for local and new talent to emerge in our broadcasting model. Then you have sharing where one EDM person can be in the company of someone who listen to a different form of EDM on our broadcast and they can have a discovery discussion on what EDM songs are cool from the 1980s to what EDM songs were cool in the 2000s era, promoting diversity and discussion.
So I just wanted to keep yall updated on what we doing with the upcoming UDM broadcast. We were already testing the Shoutcast streaming and playing a playlist but felt that approach is outdated and we are basically repeating the same mistakes of mainstream radio or “pop radio” trying to play dumbed down playlists that appease everybody. Now, we have switched to a cloud-based format that is similar to our upcoming MochaStar IPTV model that allow us to play a custom playlist, play news, information and advertising that can cater to a personal audience level and allow us to please everybody at the same time.
Feel free to ask any questions and remember that we don’t care if you can out-talk us on the concept because me and my crew already know we can out-hustle you on the execution.