Jason Herring - Station Owner and Presenter

[00:00:02.660] - Martyn Brown

Welcome to the Vinyl Impressions Radio Show's syndication Podcast, where we bring you the groove and essence of radio all wrapped up in the timeless charm of Vinyl Records. I'm your host, Martyn Brown, and on this show, we delve into the world of radio, exploring captivating interviews with station owners, talented presenters, and visionary entrepreneurs. Join me as we uncover the secrets of successful radio promotion and discover innovative ways to elevate your online presence. Whether you're a station owner, a show presenter, or a DJ, our guests offer valuable insights and strategies to help you flourish in the digital age. To get in touch with the podcast or share your thoughts, drop us an email at podcast@vinylimpressions. Club. For more updates and exciting content, visit our main website at vinylimpressions. Club and connect with us on our Facebook page, Vinyl Impressions Radio. Jason Herring's journey in the world of radio and DJing sounds fascinating. Welcome, Jason.

 

[00:01:20.400] - Jay Sun

Fascinating? I don't know, but I guess we'll see what we.

 

[00:01:24.090] - Martyn Brown

Make of it in this interview. Yeah. Can you tell us about your early days as an Internet DJ in the late 90s? And what motivated you to set up your own server and DJing, start DJing, and despite the initial challenge of having a few listeners?

 

[00:01:40.160] - Jay Sun

It actually goes way further back than that. As a young child listening to whatever radio my parents happen to have on, and just I guess I have one of those brains, and you'll probably see that as we talk more, where I enjoy things the way they come out, and then for some reason, I also want to understand how they work. A good example would be our home radio station that played top 40 hits. You hear the music, you hear the DJs talk, and then there's this Casey Kasem guy that comes on and he's counting down the hits. Oh, wow, that guy is cool. I'm glad that we have him here in Baltimore where I was growing up. Now we're taking a road trip to a cabin that our family has in Pennsylvania. We're on a different radio station because we can't get that Baltimore radio station. Oh, they have this Casey Kason guy too. How do they do that? What is that about? And then that top 40 station went off the air. So it was like, okay, now what do I do? For some reason, I had a time period where I got into talk radio.

 

[00:02:42.290] - Jay Sun

And of course, on the talk radio station was our local team, the Orioles baseball games. Then they're like, Let's pause for station identification. I'm like, What? But I already know what I'm listening to. Then you find out later again, if you're somewhere else, Wait, other stations have this too. How does that work? It was all that like, this radio stuff happens, how does it happen? I want to learn that and I want to be part of that. Turn into then the radio DJs I grew up with, listen to the stations and they're like these godlike people, booming through a radio no matter where you go. I'm like, I want to be one of those people. Oh, look, there's this shoutcast thing and you can get these MP3s that are these music files. I figured out on my own how to broadcast those and how to crack open a microphone and talk to people. At that time, I'm just like a teenager, so I don't have money nor do I want to spend the money. I just figured out how to do it free, which, as you saw in my bio, was just setting it up locally on my computer, on my network, which was another thing I self-taught, how to network stuff and host stuff out to the internet from my house.

 

[00:03:59.140] - Jay Sun

Then yes, that was then, as my bio says, I was like, Hey, everybody, tune in. I see the numbers like, Oh, cool, three people are listening. Now they've all tuned out. Okay.

 

[00:04:09.220] - Martyn Brown

We've all been there.

 

[00:04:09.960] - Jay Sun

Yeah.

 

[00:04:12.020] - Martyn Brown

How did you feel when community-based Internet radio stations started allowing you to broadcast, what were the key lessons you learned during that time?

 

[00:04:22.270] - Jay Sun

The first part of the question is, how did I feel about getting into that community Internet radio? Suddenly it was like, Oh, I'm not such a freak. There's other people that are doing the same thing. They probably had that same journey. They heard their local stations. They were like, I would love to do that. Those guys, again, these godlike people are playing the music they want you to hear. Of course, you find out later that no, they really were playing music that they were told we were supposed to hear. But we got into the Internet. I got into this community of people, like-minded. We all were like, check out this awesome song. It's giving you a flavor of their personality and what was happening in their neck of the woods. The first station I was on was largely UK-based. There were a lot of different accents to navigate. There were a lot of different words to navigate. Then there were people from other parts of the United States that were also on there. Again, it was getting those flavors of other cultures and other places. That sitting in my home in Baltimore, I didn't have as much of an experience with, but as I went through that journey, you do find out that the internet is still a little bit clickish.

 

[00:05:33.100] - Jay Sun

We all have our school thoughts of which were you hanging with the jocks? Were you hanging with the nerds? Were you just completely a loaner who didn't want to either associate with any of them or they just didn't want to associate with you because you weren't nerd enough, you weren't jock enough. You get those things on the Internet as well. You end up learning the same lessons from your life. It's who can you trust? Who are your good friends who are truly the ones who are like-minded? Because when it turns out, once you get to know people more, some people might have different motivations. Some people might have different people that they are aligned with. You were mean to this person, and I'm their friend, so therefore I don't like you anymore. And I'm going to go leave and start my own station, stuff like that.

 

[00:06:20.250] - Martyn Brown

It's a high school. Yeah, and starting your own station is a significant endeavor. What were the biggest challenges you faced when setting up and running your own station? And how did you overcome them?

 

[00:06:32.540] - Jay Sun

So setting up was actually the easiest part. We all had come from other stations, so we all got a little bit of that flavor of here's the things that do work. Here's the things that don't work. There's probably not as much in the shoutcast landscape these days of companies that you can go to for hosting. Back then, it was this endless landscape and every one of them were charging about the same amount of money, but it came down to, oh, yeah, when I was at this station, they were using this provider and every week the server went down and we couldn't reach anybody in support to get it back up. Or our listeners are like, wow, you guys are buffering a lot. There's a lot of skipping and stuff and you'd get support online immediately and they go, it must be something with their Internet because we're not seeing any problems here. We're like, yeah, but these are people in all different countries using all different Internet, so it can't just be their Internet. You also learned that thing when you were opening a support ticket, like what questions they're going to ask. You can just go ahead and say, look, we've already had them reboot the routers.

 

[00:07:46.340] - Jay Sun

We've already checked this. We restarted the server with this. Look, we're pinging your server. It's timing out. It's not their Internet. Stop it. The technical stuff was pretty much figured out. Again, it was the personality dynamics. It was who was there to run a successful station and work with everybody together and who is there for whatever their motives might be for their own stroke and their own ego, which I guess all of us were doing that. But some of it was just again, it's had that click, bring in all of your friends. But then if one of your friends doesn't like how things go and maybe that is a friend who's, I want to be an op at the station, what do you really bring to it? I just want to be an op. Like, I deserve it. I've been here long enough. And you learn that those kinds of people are just no good.

 

[00:08:37.270] - Martyn Brown

It's interesting how we got probably 1,000 DJs out there with presenters. There's a difference between a DJ and a presenter, I'm told. They've all been through pretty well the same type of thing. They've got of course, but could you share some insights into the process of automating your radio station? What benefits and drawbacks did you encounter while experimenting with this automation? Because so many people are going through the same thing and been through the roadblocks and sorted them before they all get to it.

 

[00:09:11.950] - Jay Sun

And that did, by the way, start with one of those, again, personality conflicts with somebody at the station. We have a guy who would record all the shows, and he apparently never slept. And at the end of the day, when everybody went to sleep and he was still awake, he would take all the shows that he recorded and just put it in a replay loop. So it was manual, but it was keeping programming going. And then personality conflict, he left the station. So then it became, okay, how do I replicate what he did? First thing obviously, again, really cheap guy. What can I get that's like a free solution? I don't know if it's still out there, but I know I have a copy of it because I save everything, called Streamripper, which for some reason they decided to call it Stripper, S-Stripper, which I changed the name because that's just not right. At the time, we were in our IRC-based chat room. I don't know how many people can claim that you're going to talk to. Everything in the chat room was based on you could type a command in. If you wanted to accept requests, you would type requests on or exclamation requests on something like that.

 

[00:10:25.290] - Jay Sun

Then the bot would know that you want requests. When people send requests, you'd get them in your private message window, so you didn't have to search through a big chat room. But also you could use it for stuff like if the auto stream is playing music or replays, whatever it happens to be, you'd hit a trigger on air, exclamation on air. The exclamation on air would drop the auto stream and it would start recording the stream automatically. Then you do your show. It even was like grabbing all of the song tags. When a replay would happen, everybody would still see the song tag. It just wouldn't be like DJ name show this date. Maybe we'd have a whole day of programming or somebody would go off Air, they'd come back on air later. But we just keep a running replay until the time period where we wanted the replay to run, which that again added a lot of complexity to it. The base was on air, record your show. Later on, when somebody hits off air, it just replays the shows. Then it became, okay, we have gaps in the schedule. I don't want the replays to start.

 

[00:11:30.420] - Jay Sun

I have a Windows batch file that just it knows that at 2:00 PM, I want to play Martyn Brown's Vinyl Impressions. Set a flag so that when they hit off air, instead of playing the replays, it goes to the folder that's got Martyn Brown's Vinyl Impressions and it plays that at two o'clock. Then later on at night, set the flag back or just remove the flag, and then it knows, okay, now I'm just going to do normal replays. That's where that all started. Now I'm messing with it. By back then, it was just Winamp. Again, I don't know if anybody can claim Winamp very well. -clean, yeah, I still have it right here.

 

[00:12:12.870] - Martyn Brown

I'll be in the corner of my screen.

 

[00:12:15.480] - Jay Sun

Nice. I started that stuff in Winamp. Then one of the big things people were using for a long time when I was using Winamp was Sam Broadcaster. Oh, yeah. When I was using Winamp on a Windows XP machine, and that was the easiest way to use Winamp because you could just set your recording stuff so you could talk over the music and stuff. But most of the other flavors of Windows didn't have that ability, so I ended up going to Sam Broadcaster. Then it started all over. It's okay, Sam Broadcaster. Let's see, that's a little different than Winamp. You can't just run a command line that says Winamp and then the playlist you want to run, and then you could stack them up too. You could be like Winamp and then this playlist and this playlist. It would open Winamp and it would play them. Sam can't do that. Then it was okay, what automation can I do in Sam? More importantly, for some reason, when you record your shows, especially with Streamreaper, you can't do it the same way as you can with Winamp because for some reason, all of the tags come up say it's, let me think, journey, don't stop believing.

 

[00:13:26.120] - Jay Sun

Instead of the tag being journey, don't stop believing, it's question-dash-question, apostry-question. It replaces all the letters with question marks. I had to figure out how to record those differently so that, again, the tag would be like that. Now I'm messing with there's aLiquid Soap, which is a Unix-based solution for radio broadcasting. There's a couple of softwares. Azurcast is one of them that uses that as its backend. Azurcast is a extremely user-friendly graphical interface. I actually have a couple of stations using that, but I've got also a couple using the liquid soap, which is super basic. It's just shuffling a playlist, but I'm working on figuring out how to have it put different playlists in at different times. I know there's a way to do it. I just haven't figured it out yet. It's a continued trying different stuff. Oh, that doesn't work right. The last thing I want to say too, with the automation, so a lot of the syndicated shows that I do right now, they'll put it on a Dropbox. In your case, thesync. Com, and then the old way, sometimes they just email you something from WeTransfer, which is a super pain because it's so manual, but they don't have a consistency in that I guess they don't realize that there are people doing automation.

 

[00:14:54.170] - Jay Sun

They figure you're just manually pulling it down and then dropping in your old playlist. They'll call the file something different over time, which breaks the automation because the automation is expecting to be called a certain thing. And then suddenly, hey, why isn't it picking up? Because they added the to the beginning of the file name. Thanks, guys.

 

[00:15:13.250] - Martyn Brown

I'm guilty of this. I've recently started taking on guest presenters, and everybody's got a different system, or they've been radio stations, and every radio station has got a different system, some really high end pieces of equipment, which is amazing, but most of the Internet radio DJs, they can't afford to get into that, and nor do they want it. They're doing it for the fun of it. They enjoy it, and they just want it to work. Moving on from their podcasting has become a popular medium over the years. How did you transition from running a radio station to producing podcasts both for yourself and for others?

 

[00:15:53.350] - Jay Sun

One of the automations that I had going on was an on-demand. It would record everybody's shows and it would actually automatically update them to an FTP server, and then the website was set to just pull that file down. That stopped working, and I also realized nobody really consumed the shows that way, but people definitely do consume shows in a podcast format. Most phones come with some podcast, I don't know if readers, the right term, podcast listener. I think that's how people consume their shows, is like they subscribe to the stuff that they want and they get the notifications pop up when a new episode comes in, and then I guess they either can make the decision at that point to listen to it then, think about it later, add it to a playlist, whatever they want to do. I felt like that was the more user friendly version for people to consume some form of my shows. The shows that I tended to do that were live could be long and rambling and sometimes go nowhere. I'd get people that were like, Let me call into the show. Okay, and they call in, What do you want to talk about?

 

[00:17:04.280] - Jay Sun

I don't know. I just want to call into the show. What's going on, man? I didn't want any of that stuff. I wanted it to be a short succinct. I think actually the description of the podcast actually says people often ask me what I play on my shows. This is the answer. And it's the version of just here's the music and then I'll come in every 10 songs or something, and I'll have a 10, 15 second quip, and then I'll just go back into the next ones. Now when I started doing that, a friend of mine that used to call on my radio show a lot was like, oh, since that seems to be working for you, because for some reason, a lot of people download my podcast and I don't know where these people come from. I don't know what they're searching, but I'll get the downloads a day after the episode drops. And I don't promote it like that. So I don't know what those people are searching for. I told my friend who called into my show a lot, and next thing we're doing these almost like fireside chat type of things where we just set up the recorder and we just riff about whatever.

 

[00:18:05.460] - Jay Sun

Then I somehow turn it into an episode. Actually, I ended up turning it into four or five episodes. I'll cut it up into parts and try to keep like topics together so that it has some flow to it because we tended to go all over the place. The last thing that ended up happening was a couple of years ago, I got back in touch with an internet radio station that I used to be on called AKA Radio. There's a pattern over there. I just floated out the idea of doing a podcast to at the least have something out there into the Internet sphere to put their name out there to promote them, whatever. It was going to be largely highlights of different shows that aired over the week or a couple of weeks or whatever. And instead, what happened? It got taken over by a guy that started the station, but then quit and handed the to somebody else, and now he's back. And he uses it largely as his comedic playground, I guess, is the right term for it because he is a stand-up comedian. I think he takes some subjects that he either wants to talk about on stage or never got the guts to talk about on stage and we turn him into little comedy bits or just have a little conversation about them and just riff with whatever funny things come to mind, which because it's a podcast if they don't hit well, I just edit them out.

 

[00:19:33.130] - Jay Sun

Bad joke never happened.

 

[00:19:35.670] - Martyn Brown

It doesn't have to be jokes. It can be just based on the situation around you. And that is funny in itself. And if it isn't funny, comedians can make it funny. So they can listen to it from that different angle and a different view. I do love what you were talking about on the Convert.

 

[00:19:52.360] - Jay Sun

Sorry. We have a pretty good relationship where he'll come up with a basic concept and maybe he'll write some lines and then I'll read it and I'll be like, okay, that's pretty funny, but we could probably add this line here or this subject here to make it even funnier. And then he's, oh, that's good. And then he comes up with something else to add on to it. And then we build that baseball bat of comedic possible genius. In our minds, it's comedic genius. I don't know how everybody else feels, but we love it.

 

[00:20:22.140] - Martyn Brown

Brilliant. I do love the conversational style of podcasting as well, where you almost just sat down, chat in a couple of mates and you're chatting away. It forms, I know it's done in the editing, but it does form the basis of a very entertaining show, and they're my favourite type. Personally, moving from Maryland to Florida, that must have been an exciting change. How has the transition influenced your approach to radio presenting? And what unique opportunities do you find in your new hometown?

 

[00:20:55.710] - Jay Sun

I feel like I gave you some information that led to that question.

 

[00:20:59.210] - Martyn Brown

Yes, I did a little bit of research. But your bio was wonderful. I enjoyed reading it.

 

[00:21:04.730] - Jay Sun

Thank you. So everything I've told you thus far has been the Internet radio sphere, doing something that's like a regular radio thing, but not with a regular radio type of audience or with a regular radio type of project. There's a really good website. I don't know that it's got anything for the UK on it, but for the US, it's called Radio Locator. You can throw in a zip code or a town, you can throw it. If you're really curious, you could be like, I want to know every radio station in the entire United States that's at the frequency 98.9. I don't know what good that would be. But I went on that site and I searched a couple of the zip codes that we were going to possibly be moving into. What I was looking for specifically was community-driven, low power, FM radio stations. I don't know if they do this in the UK, but here there was a time period where the FCC was selling frequencies to local government, churches, anybody that could basically say, I'm a community organization, and they could get a low power FM signal that would be like a focus into their one area.

 

[00:22:21.400] - Jay Sun

You drive out of that area, it's gone. But within that area, they're strong and they're serving the community. There were a couple of those near where I used to live in Maryland, but within an hour or so away. I'm like, I want to find one that's closer than that when I move to Florida and see if I can get a show on the air and/or help in any way, basically. I talked to a couple of them ahead of time because we didn't know exactly where we were moving yet. Once we got settled then I reached out to the one that was closest to our area, which over that... Nope, that's shoulder. Hold on, it's backwards. Sunshine 96.7 FM, St. Petersburg, Florida. They are a community radio station, like I said. They do a lot of local interest stuff. They cover local sports, local news, and then they have a fair bit of syndicated stuff from PRX and stuff like that. They've got a growing list of not only local musicians that they play on the air, but local DJs as well that present those local musician shows sometimes in a thematic way. One of my favorites is Fiona Frenchie.

 

[00:23:34.080] - Jay Sun

She does The Women of Song. It's all local Florida women artists performing songs. That's nice. Yeah, that's one of my favorite shows for sure. And Fiona is a little bit crazy. And I mean that in a good way, Fiona, in case you hear this. Right now I'm not actually doing any shows on Sunshine 96.7. It's going to be an eventual thing. They had a guy, I can't remember his name now. It was Rick something. So he was one of the guys that was on those offshore barge pirate radio stations in the UK.

 

[00:24:13.240] - Martyn Brown

That.

 

[00:24:14.130] - Jay Sun

Broadcasted the rock and roll music over to the shore. He was one of those guys. He has now retired, but they bought the station from him. He was doing, when I first tuned in a show in the afternoons, where he was just going through, hey, here's who's performing at John's Tiki hut tonight, and here's who's going to be performing over at Bahama breeze. Then he'd play stuff from their catalog from those people. I would like to start that show back up now that he is retired and maybe get a little bit more. I have a Zoom meeting like this, meet with a buddy, whoever, for 15 minutes and just ask him some standard questions or maybe get a bio from him and ask him questions based on his bio. And then I can be like, oh, here's John. He's performing at the Tiki hut this weekend. We recently met with him and talked about, insert whatever topic, his favorite places to perform or his favorite place to go on vacation. And here's a song where he's singing about his favorite place to go on vacation, do that presentation. Right now, I'm learning yet again more about automation and stuff like that.

 

[00:25:23.200] - Jay Sun

They use a site called Radio. Co, which I do not recommend because of what their technology has its limitations. If your show that you've thrown into the playlist spot is one hour and five seconds, it's going to cut off the last five seconds of the show. There's no, Oh, I can wait for that to finish, and then the next one. Actually, there technically is, but it doesn't work the way it's supposed to. But I'm helping them with that, including some automation behind the scenes. The guy that runs the station, Joe Bourneau, still has a regular job. He takes several hours out of every day to grab all the stuff from WeTransfer, Dropbox, Sync. Com, all of the places that it's coming from to make sure the playlist for the next day is in. I'm trying to help him do some automation in that so that he doesn't have to pull the stuff. Also, I figured out yet another free program called Cmail that will literally email us if it can't find a file for the broadcast that it's looking for. It will also email us if it can find it and it'll do a DIR to show you, Oh, yeah, here it is.

 

[00:26:37.680] - Jay Sun

It's the one that was pulled from today at 5:00 AM. But it's not like pulling an old copy of it, stuff like that. That's been fun. I've learned a new stuff on WordPress. Wordpress is a good website program to have. My own station, I use it and I use Experingly. Then Joe comes and he's like, I need a frame that does this, or can you make it display this? Then I have to Google and look for plug ins, and then usually the first one I put in doesn't work right, and then I have to figure that out. So that again plays into that hole. I want to know how stuff works, and Sunshine 96.7 definitely helps me with that.

 

[00:27:17.040] - Martyn Brown

I definitely use Word for most of what I do, pretty well all really, to be honest. One or two projects might go elsewhere. But the only thing with Word is amazing. If you want it to do something, you can get it to do it, but you rely on plug-ins, which most of us do. If they're not supported 100 %, they are the root cause of all the problems. And to put everything down to a plug-in, once I find it and then find out how to alter it.

 

[00:27:48.230] - Jay Sun

And it's amazing, right? Because that one plug-in can bring the entire site down if it's not compatible.

 

[00:27:53.070] - Martyn Brown

I've had that. I've got a… I use a control panel that goes out to about 105 websites and that tells me which one is doing what. And sometimes we do an update too early and a whole raft of sites go down and they're all complaining, banging on the phone, What's going on? And it's always a plug in. We'll get it. That way throughout your career, you've engaged with different types of audiences, it seems, from the early Internet days to community-based radio, and now a small community radio station. And do you tailor your content? How do you tailor your content to suit each audience's preferences and interests?

 

[00:28:33.050] - Jay Sun

So amazingly, you've not caught my bad language that I tend to... I spout a lot of curse words. How I've been able to curb that I do not know in this interview. So with the main stations that I go live, none of them care what the language is. Whatever comes to mind immediately comes out, there's no filter. With the podcast, so all of my blurbs do get recorded on the fly, but since it's not coming out live, I can pick and choose. So if I do curse, I usually beep out my curses or remove the spot with the curse if it makes sense to. The music still goes out uncensored, because I feel like that's probably less jarring than your presenter just suddenly going on a rant for some reason.

 

[00:29:24.450] - Martyn Brown

We're reserved to the UK. We don't like any swearing. You can't.

 

[00:29:27.590] - Jay Sun

Say that.

 

[00:29:28.070] - Martyn Brown

Really? We've got to be very careful. In fact, when I play around, I'm annoyed if it's got a curse in it, because I've then got to go and use my. That tiny bit just for the sake of that. And when I want to use the song later on, I've got to do the same thing again now.

 

[00:29:47.400] - Jay Sun

That.

 

[00:29:48.190] - Martyn Brown

Frustrates me. But my audience just wouldn't like it. They take me off.

 

[00:29:54.450] - Jay Sun

Yeah, because I guess most of your presentations make it on some hospital radio stations too, right?

 

[00:30:01.040] - Martyn Brown

That's how it all started. I've got a hundred and something of them, I think. So you've got to be so careful. What I say is going to be generic, totally generic. I have an opinion.

 

[00:30:11.930] - Jay Sun

Oh, yeah, especially nothing political, which reminds me. So the latest podcast that I do, actually, that's not true. No, not that one, too. It's AKA Podcast is the one that's associated with AKA Radio, the one that I came back to. That has a lot of political commentary in it, a lot of cursing in it, and that is what that audience expects or-.

 

[00:30:38.460] - Martyn Brown

I.

 

[00:30:38.660] - Jay Sun

See. -we just don't care. It's our biggest creative arm. It's really we lay bare all of the stuff that's bothering us, all of the stuff that it's just we have to talk about this. We can't not talk about this. That one gets very few sensors. We pulled a clip of somebody using some racial language that we're like, Okay, that probably won't sit well, so we'll go ahead and beep that one. But for the most part, it'll go straight through. A movie review podcast has come out of that. I guess it's a movie panel podcast. That has a lot of that element too, because there is elements of movies these days where they feel like they have to have certain things in them to be popular for certain audiences. We do rip a lot of that up of why did you feel you needed to do this movie maker. One of the hosts of it tends to be like, Here's what you should have done. Here's what would have made a great movie. They come up with something where it's, Well, I would totally watch that movie. It's at the expense of, Yeah, you're going to probably make some people angry.

 

[00:31:51.030] - Martyn Brown

Radio presenting requires creativity, adaptability. How do you keep your content fresh and engaging? How do you stay up to date with the latest trends in the industry?

 

[00:32:04.700] - Jay Sun

That's the toughest question. Okay. My live shows, I've pretty much been doing the same way since I started them in 2013, probably 2013. No, 2004. Sorry. I can guarantee it's super outdated and I don't really care. But the one, the AKA podcast I was talking about, that is 100% driven by current affairs. That's just a matter of keeping up on as much news as possible, obviously from different sources because some aren't going to report certain things that others are reporting, and vice versa. You have to get all sides of it, which can really mess with your psyche after a while. You feel bad about the world. I think that's almost why that comes out the way it does too, is because we have a little bit of anger that we even had to read those things or see those things and now we have to talk about them. That's probably why that's the biting podcast. That's how we keep that one current. Like I said, the movie one, we're trying to watch more current stuff, but we do watch old stuff too, and we do compare the two. It's all that would be that thing that happened in that movie.

 

[00:33:18.380] - Jay Sun

That could never happen in a movie these days. They wouldn't let them do that. People again would be offended or protest or whatever it might be. That certainly has occurred as well. I've got trends in the industry. I don't know. I feel like almost at this point that I don't do what the industry does.

 

[00:33:37.400] - Martyn Brown

I understand. Yeah.

 

[00:33:39.370] - Jay Sun

I think I'm almost doing what I told you about the movie podcast, where the guy's like, if I were doing a movie, I'd do it this way. I almost feel like at this point, I'm like, if I had my own radio station, I would do it this way, which that's another thing that's in my mind. I have a friend that he's always got different projects he's got in mind. He's, Oh, this Low Power FM station just went up for sale. We can buy the transmitter and the license. We can't buy the building. We'll have to figure that part out. We can just drop $10,000 and we'll be all set for at least a year. You got that money? No, I was hoping you did. But if we did, it would not be like a normal radio station. One of his things is he's big into punk music and scah music, and you can't get that on radio hardly anywhere. Even the satellite radio company here, SiriusXM, they had a punk station for a really long time, and they replaced it with a talk station. They did move the punk stuff onto their Internet tier, but you can't get them on the actual satellite radios, which breaks the whole purpose for having a satellite radio.

 

[00:34:48.940] - Jay Sun

He wants a station that has punk rock and he wants a station that nobody out there is doing. That's probably because it wouldn't have any profitability to it or anything, but it goes back to the spirit of what I've been doing the whole time. None of these things I've told you, I'm not making a cent from it. It's all been money that I end up sinking into it if it's something where I need to sink money into it, if I can't find some free alternative. I just enjoy it in that way. I don't expect any money ever from any of it, but I enjoy the final product and I hope other people out there do as well. I could set up a... Let's see, what's the place where you can run campaigns for people like a patron or something, but I'm sure that will make a couple of dollars.

 

[00:35:36.730] - Martyn Brown

With the community radio, is there any regulation that would keep you in order should you decide to do something? I know on YouTube, for example, they take your video down if you say something about the medical industry that the media have been blocked from reporting on. And it's so sensitive, isn't it? You have to be so careful, certainly in the UK.

 

[00:35:59.680] - Jay Sun

For Sunshine 96.7, I would just be doing a music show anyway, so I wouldn't be hitting any of those kinds of topics. I already know that because of that mouth that I told you about, I would probably never do a live show in there. Radio. Co does let you do lots of voice tracking and playlist thing ahead of time. I would again do that thing where I would record myself ahead of time if I'm like, Yeah, it didn't sound right. I said, Oh, I'm an a too much. Of course, I tend to go in and I can edit those pretty easily. I could see in the waveforms like, Oh, here's where I took a big deep breath or I coughed. Just zapped that right out. I would really do it that way so that nothing that came out from that would be controversial for at least when people actually hear the final product.

 

[00:36:43.730] - Martyn Brown

I.

 

[00:36:43.880] - Jay Sun

Don't know what.

 

[00:36:44.460] - Martyn Brown

Went into it. You carried around the music that you use. Is it CD-based or is it DAT or on the computer?

 

[00:36:51.180] - Jay Sun

It is all on the computer. On their website too, for all of the Florida musicians, they have an email address that they send their MP3s to, and they tell them to please tag them correctly and make sure that they're in a good sound quality format for air. Yeah, they get all that stuff and they just drop it onto the radio. Co. Server and set up the playlists and the rotations as they wish.

 

[00:37:14.860] - Martyn Brown

What's the ideal Kille-A-Bits you use? Is it just copy above 200 or something?

 

[00:37:20.240] - Jay Sun

I think we ask them for 320. Let me look at that. I don't know.

 

[00:37:25.650] - Martyn Brown

When I get shows sent in to me, they're all different qualities, and you.

 

[00:37:30.000] - Jay Sun

Can try.

 

[00:37:30.430] - Martyn Brown

And the higher, the better. But of course, it takes up room, but room isn't an issue like it used to be with your hard drive, put an album on and it's full up. Collaboration, and you've spoken on this already, is essential in the world of radio and broadcasting. Could you share a memorable experience when you collaborated with someone and how it impacted your work?

 

[00:37:58.300] - Jay Sun

So I have had the joy of, on many occasions, going and meeting the people that I've done internet radio with. Some of the UK people were up in Pennsylvania visiting one of the other DJs. There was a group of, I don't know, like eight to 10 of us that were that were going around Philadelphia and just having good conversations, good times. We would always try to meet in a room together and do a broadcast, which usually sounded awful. But in person, it was really fun. That was that one. Another guy that I was DJing with, he was living in Rockaway Beach, New York. Him and I would take turns visiting each other. He was the one that really taught me that whole world of the comedy radio bits. He taught me all the tips and tricks about, Oh, if you're doing an edit and it's super, it cuts in the middle, just do a little fade in right at the beginning. Just make it a little fade in. It's not as jarring. They can't even tell. How to put in sound effects and the level things out, balance things out. We came up with a bunch of great comedy bits.

 

[00:39:09.370] - Jay Sun

Again, that was a good friendship. Then the banner behind me is actually we just had our third year on AKA, where we went to a location that was near somebody and then hung out for a weekend, did a show again, made some memories outside of the on air, which we could then share on air later. The last one was actually down here. The one before was in New Jersey, and the one before that was near Chicago. I believe we're doing West Virginia next year. Again, it's near all our DJs. A lot of people get to also experience those areas. We have a really good core group of people that, again, we've made friendships and we collaborate in the same room, which is so different from collaborating in the boxes on the screen. I think we get a little bit more understanding about each other. Sometimes things annoy us about each other. But that's how you round the relationship. That's how you get to know everybody.

 

[00:40:08.500] - Martyn Brown

As a radio station owner and presenter, you've likely seen the industry change over the years because you've been doing it a while. What do you envisage for the future of radio? And how do you see community-based stations fitting into that future?

 

[00:40:28.900] - Jay Sun

The future might not be.

 

[00:40:32.360] - Martyn Brown

So bleak.

 

[00:40:33.630] - Jay Sun

What I've noticed is that... Here we have the big conglomerate radio station owners. You've got your iHeart radio. You've got, I don't even know who's left after iHeart. They've swallowed up so much, but they're finding themselves having a lot of financial difficulties. They're finding themselves losing the big audience because one time they were like, satellite radio is like, oh, man, who's going to pay for radio? Whatever, these people are dummies. Then a lot of people started paying for radio and they went, oh. That was when they invented the concept of HD radio, which I think you guys just call DAB, like digital audio broadcasting like that. They invented the HD radio concept where you started having the digital signals and then there were the subchannels where you would just click one up on your local hits radio station and there they might have a punk station or they might have a sports station from another market. I can guarantee you, if I ask 10 people in this town what HD radio is or if they listen to an HD station, maybe one of them will know. It is a completely failed concept. I love it because most of the HD stations don't have commercials.

 

[00:41:59.860] - Jay Sun

So you can drive down the road and not have to worry about that. Most cars still don't come with it. Or if they do, people don't know what it is, so they don't mess with it. Completely failed concept. It's okay, what's left? Actual local radio because you can go to… That was a beautiful thing about the early days of radio, too, is that you were excited picking up radio from another state or drive into a different place and being like, Oh, what radio stations are there here? Because there would be this local flavor. Here's this toacky guy with a weird voice who's really entertaining and he's playing a song you've never heard before. Now you can literally, a lot of times, hear the same voices because they just voice track and they send it out to six different stations throughout the United States. But they don't say, Oh, I'm this network show. No, I'm Joe Schmoe here in the studio from the top of the insert some local reference here. No, he's sitting at the same place and wherever he is in California, and he's just putting all these recordings out. The community radio stations are the only ones that still have that local flavor that they're still going, hey, I'm here at the grape and vine on Main Street.

 

[00:43:15.710] - Jay Sun

Come on down and say hi. Here we got some local performers. We're going to play some of their stuff now or we're going to broadcast them live right now. They're the only ones doing that stuff now. I could even say on the Internet side of things, although again, it hasn't turned out too well, but we've broadcasted live from stuff. A station I was on that unfortunately they've gone now, they had some agreements with some local venues where they broadcast stuff from them all the time. They gave them a line right off of the board and they just ran through their laptop onto the stream. A friend of mine who's a musician would have a party at his house every year with all his musician friends and they'd just jam the entire day. I would broadcast that live with, as I said, varying results of what the sounded like. But yeah, you're not getting that again on an iHeart Radio station. The best you get is iHeart Radio Music Festival. But guess what? Every station is getting that. Same exact music festival from wherever.

 

[00:44:12.670] - Martyn Brown

It is. And people in this country seem to get fed up of the advertisements. They appreciate that they need them to pay station, but they're allowing, the government are allowing more and more time to be given to advertisements. And whereas you used to get the ad break every now and again, now you get almost 12 minutes, I think, in a row, apart from maybe the traffic news in between after six minutes. We're spoiled in the fact that we've got the BBC and they don't run ads. So when a really popular presenter or a group of presenters leave the station and go to commercial, they all follow them, but don't stay long. They come back to the BBC because you cannot a continuous music and chat without those same ads blasting you. And there is this thing, a bone of contention with the advertising. You get the odd supporters, somebody said, This show is supported by, and they're fine, but it's the ones where they just get greedy and just plaster, war to war advertisement. Do you still get that? Or is it just the communities that are running without ads?

 

[00:45:24.130] - Jay Sun

That's another one of those things. Those iHeart stations, they used to be like that. There were two ways to go about it. I believe they sell something like 12 to 18 minutes of commercials an hour, something like that. Probably it depends on if it's a drive time or if it's just like a random middle of the day. Some of them would play three songs and then take a quick commercial break and then two songs, take a slightly longer commercial break, and then, oh, 20 minutes of continuous light favorites. Then they play those and then they fill in the rest of the hour at that point. They got all their ad breaks. We are so used to that stuff here because also, and I said I had a talk radio time period, they were for... I think for talk radio, it was maybe a 20 to 25 minute ads per hour. What one of the shows I would listen to would do is they would broadcast for an hour and a half straight, and then they drop all the ads in. You'd have to wait like a half an hour to 40 minutes to come back and hear the rest of the show, but you got your whole hour and a half in a chunk.

 

[00:46:39.520] - Jay Sun

That was pretty nice. But I'm noticing those ads break shrinking a lot. I think, again, it's because they don't have the advertisers anymore.

 

[00:46:48.040] - Martyn Brown

Does it still work? Does advertising on the radio, do people listen and go out and buy it? Does that work? I'm not sure it does the same because you've got the Internet now.

 

[00:46:58.970] - Jay Sun

See, iHeart is the perfect example because iHeart has built their own app. There's banner ads within the app. There's local ads within the app. If you pick a random radio station from a place that's not even your town and they go to a commercial break, it looks at whatever IP address you're listening from and it goes, Okay, you are in Central Florida and it plays you only ads for Central Florida. It brings it back into a local thing. I think they do better that way, or maybe they make up the exact same amount of ads that they used to get people buying from. But in a way that I guess in the end, it makes a relief for us because they probably do half of the amount of the pools for ads on the radio because the other half is filled up by the online listeners. That might be a win in the end. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it actually works, how much money they actually pull in. I just know that I've heard before that they're having financial troubles. But then it's weird because then they're like, the iHeart Music Festival, and that's a festival you can't even buy tickets to.

 

[00:48:07.310] - Jay Sun

All it is is like comped, like win tickets. They'll give so many to the DJs themselves, and then the radio stations give away the rest. You can't buy an iHeart Radio Music Festival ticket. How do we make the money? I don't know.

 

[00:48:23.650] - Martyn Brown

I do not know. I've been involved in marketing with what I do daytime job. It's fascinating to see what works and what doesn't online because you can measure every click. But I'm not sure radio if it's the same, but it's an interesting subject. I was going to say beyond radio and broadcasting, do you have any other creative interest or hobbies that influence your work on air?

 

[00:48:47.720] - Jay Sun

No, that encompasses all my hobbies. As far as my real job, I do a lot of technical work. If anything, my hobbies actually inform my real job because I know how to automate things that I'll go into a job and they'll be like, Yeah, every month you need to go in, you need to click this and do this and watch this and do this. I'm like, Wait, no, you can automate that. Why do I need to sit there and click all those things? Oh, you need to make sure you send this report out and you have to reformat? No. Let's make it so the report can run automatically and it comes out in the right format and distributes out to people. You don't even have to email at all. If so, if anything, that informs my actual job because I know that there's always other ways to do things. There's always better ways to do things. I certainly could, with my stations, sit there. Sorry, Joe Bourneau of Sunshine 96.7. I could sit there for several hours a day and manually download files and throw them into playlists and look and make sure they're good and check off a checklist.

 

[00:49:47.830] - Jay Sun

Now, I don't want to spend the time doing that. I spent a lot of time setting it up, but I can guarantee I've saved a lot of time for all of the now repetition that I no longer need to do.

 

[00:50:00.350] - Martyn Brown

It's interesting. I've said to my presenter, Could you put them into this system? Because I'm automating it. I said, Oh, no, I always do We transfer. I've been doing it a long time, and I'm not going to come away from it. And you're stuck then. I can't put you into the system. So you have to do it manually because you don't want to turn them down, especially if they've got a good show. But at the same time, you've got to give a bit of give and take in this, haven't you?

 

[00:50:24.140] - Jay Sun

Yeah. Although I can't get it to work, sync. Com does have an app that you can install to your computer. For some reason, both of my computers are choking on it when I'm trying to install it. I still have to figure that out. But once you install that, usually it makes it so that it just acts like a normal Windows drive on your computer. Then at that point, you'll be able to use automation. Okay, he has the We transfer, you download it to your downloads folder and then maybe have some automation that just picks it up and sweeps it over to the folder, something like that. But yeah, my preference is definitely Dropbox. We've gotten to the point where people that will send me a Dropbox link every week. I'm like, don't you just save... This folder is the same every week. Do you just save something new into that folder and the old one just gets moved out? They're like, yeah, I'm like, stop doing that. Just share the folder with me and my automation will when it's time to run your show. I have a program that again runs to just like a Windows Drive, the Dropbox.

 

[00:51:27.090] - Jay Sun

And so it just goes into your Dropbox folder, moves it over to where I broadcast from, makes a playlist so that it runs it in the right order and done. I love that- I think more people should do that.

 

[00:51:38.960] - Martyn Brown

There are so many of our listeners right now, over 300 that run radio stations alone who will be translated by this automation. I've got one more question, and then we run out of time, but what an amazing interview. I didn't expect this in-depth look at what you're doing. It really is incredible. What advice would you, as you're so experienced, clearly give to aspiring radio presenters or station owners who are looking to make their mark in the industry?

 

[00:52:08.430] - Jay Sun

Don't use weed transfer.

 

[00:52:14.590] - Martyn Brown

It's fun, but that's about it.

 

[00:52:19.600] - Jay Sun

I know this goes against a little bit what you were talking about, but you still do need to bring some of yourself into your projects that you bring out. Because otherwise you're just in a landscape of a lot of shows that sounds like the same person playing the same songs. Don't be afraid to bring a little bit of personality out. Certainly don't be afraid to bring some of the more obscure song choices into your broadcasts, especially I don't know how UK listeners feel, but I know us as US listeners, going back again to the iHeart Radio, it's not a DJ who's playing what he thinks you should hear, he's playing what iHeart Radio has told him you should hear. And so every station, you're going to hear the same stuff. You want to set your product ahead of that. You want to make your product something that's going to be somebody's ears perking up going, I've never heard that before. Who is this artist? I don't even know who this artist is. I want to know more. Or my even more favorite is, wow, I remember when this song first came out, and I've barely heard it since because they just never got played again.

 

[00:53:36.490] - Jay Sun

Or, oh, man, when this album came out, I listen to it front to back constantly. And that DJ just played the deepest cut on that album. That was the best song, in my opinion, that they ever put out. This guy knows his stuff. This guy, if anything, I can get with this guy. I need to listen to his show because he's probably got other stuff, or she has other stuff that they're going to play that's either going to be that caliber of stuff or I completely missed it when it came out, I need to get on board with this guy. I need to listen to the show every week because there's going to be something new I'm going to hear or some old favorite that I haven't heard in forever and it's going to be worth my time. It's going to be a great listen and stuff. I didn't know how to end that phrase.

 

[00:54:22.630] - Martyn Brown

The whole session here has been fascinating for me, and I know it will be for our listeners. So thank you for that. If they want to contact you or listen to you, can you give us some details of how they could do that?

 

[00:54:35.940] - Jay Sun

Your best bet is to go to hi-fi-radio. Net. That's H-I-F, as in Frank, I-radio. Net. That's got all of the stations that I'm currently doing as my own projects. That's got a podcast section which has RSS feeds or just feeds. I won't go too deep, which has feeds of all of the podcasts that I'm also either making or producing on. And then there's an Our Friends section which has AKA radio and many of the other stations that I am part of in some way. There's also a contact me. All that stuff is on that site, basically, and it is made with WordPress.

 

[00:55:16.380] - Martyn Brown

Well, and we'll put all those details with the video as well with the. Jason, thank you very much for your time. I do appreciate it. I've been fascinated. I know the audience.

 

[00:55:27.260] - Jay Sun

Will be. Thank you, Martyn.

 

[00:55:29.260] - Martyn Brown

Thank you for listening. For more details of any of our podcasts, please visit vinylimpressions. Com.