I just wrapped up a nice, week long vacation which gave me some time to ponder a bit around music. I’ve hit a lull of sorts after deciding to pull our radio station a few months ago. For those that are new to the site, we (Ray Randall and I) ran a 24/7 Internet Radio station here on AmericanaRoots.com for the past 3-4 years. Each Sunday, we would rally up our favorite new tracks of the week combined with our fancy Radio Scheduling software and knock out a week’s worth of playlists for rotation. It is and was something we both throughly enjoyed however as I have mentioned before it accounted for 75% of our month expenses and netted us around 10% of our actual traffic. Back to my vacation though, I started to ponder how to create a radio service which would really connect with people while at the same time allowing us to rotate in new artists we felt match our sound. Ultimately, this is the same question across all of radio land (not just here).

A Little Background of Radio
Radio has changed so much over the past two years with the birth of stations like random format stations like “Jack” & “Bob” coupled with the insane growth of iPods mixed in with Satellite radio. The idea of playlists and scheduling really harp back to an the past era of radio. In radio, you generally schedule music to a “clockwheel” which generally consists of categories which will make up one hour of music. For example, you may spin 40% Big Hits, 20% Medium Hits & 40% Classic Songs in one hour of radio airplay. This gives you an prelimanary way to define your stations sounds. The music director (in our case Ray and I) would define tracks into these categories (we had many more but for simplicity sakes I’ve only included 3 categories). Each week, we would add a few tracks to Big Hits and remove an equal amount.
There are a host of radio promoters that we work with on a weekly basis plus dozens of artists which call me each week to alert me of new music. The challenge for us as music directors is really around listening to hundreds of songs each week and deciding which 2-3 would make it for that week. No easy task to say the least, especially when your talking about the ungenre genre — Americana. It’s often difficult to define a sound of the station or a theme because our genre is so vast. This vastness is a good thing however, regular radio normally has some kind of underlying theme which is tough to manage.

This brings me back to my pondering during vacation…the future of radio and more importantly (at least for me) the future of AmericanaRoots.com Radio.

I have an experimental concept which I’d like to try however it requires some user interaction which is often hard to come by, so I need some volunteers. Here’s the early concept in a nutshell and I’ve tentatively named this concept the “Ameri-a-Matic Radio”

What is Ameri-a-Matic Radio?
Ameri-A-Matic combines technology with a large catalog of music to build a daily playlist defined by an artist song.

This may sound confusing, so let me elaborate a bit. Each week, we will ask you (the readers) to provide us a name of an artist and one of their songs to be the theme of each day of that week. We will use technology (a combination of BPM,Mood,Sound and Relatability) to build a playlist off of that one song per day. For example, if you choose Robert Earl Keen’s song “Road Goes On Forever”, we will plug this into our software and build a playlist of songs which are compaitible to that song. Think of it as a Pandora type radio station, however you define the song for that day. This will differ from Pandora in that we will mix in a small sample of new americana tracks to help support the new music which comes out each and every day.

So before I go out and spend days/weeks trying to put together this elaborate system, I would love to get some feedback on if you would be willing to offer up some of your favorite Americana Tracks to help get us started. All we need is for you to name one Artist and song which you’d like to start with. As we progress, we’ll ask for more.

My apologies for the very wordy post, however I haven’t written in weeks so…

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