Local musical artist? Have a gig coming up at a venue you haven’t played yet? Worried that no one will show up? The solution is simple. All you need is radio exposure.
“Not likely,” you say? Well, the recently launched DeliRadio, based in Berkeley, makes it incredibly easy for bands to create their own custom Internet radio station. Listeners can check out artists about to play their area.
DeliRadio founder/CEO Wayne Skeen, who also began the record label Ninth Street Opus, says, “The concept was really built around tools that we were building for our label, looking at the pieces of information and assets we had, like songs and photos and tour dates. By combining all those things, you come up with a list, for any given person, wherever they are, of bands that have a show coming up nearby. So, why couldn’t that be a radio-station playlist? Our filter is the local booking agent, the local promoters.”
Fifty clubs, in just the last few months, have added their own DeliRadio.com stations to their home pages. Among them are San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill, Yoshi’s, Red Devil Lounge and Brick and Mortar, as well as Redwood City’s Club Fox and Mountain View’s Red Rock Coffee. The free stations are a way for the venues to promote their calendars.
“Anyone can find a band’s closest tour date to them. So if you have fans all over California, when you post a new track, the guy in Fresno sees the date in Fresno and the guy in San Luis Obispo sees the date at that club. And there’s a ticket link. And we make it real easy for fans to share music with other people.
“Anybody in the United States, within 100 miles of them, there are several bands that they would absolutely love, if they just knew about them. And you can go see them for 10 bucks, if not for free.”
Photos add another element of familiarity with the band you’re going to see. And a free mobile phone app is available.
Artists have responded enthusiastically to DeliRadio, which launched in September 2011. The first year, Skeen mostly focused on acquiring content. With 8,200 artists already on board, now DeliRadio is ready to reach out to potential listeners.
Skeen, 44, grew up with a different kind of radio. “I was listening to Top 40, back when it contained a little bit of everything. You’d hear Elton John, then Juice Newton, then The Thompson Twins, all on the same station. That would be inconceivable today.”
Entirely possible on DeliRadio, however. You’ll find tremendous diversity, including indie rock, EDM (electronic dance music), singer-songwriters, country, hip-hop, ska, New Age, funk, Christian, metal, bluegrass, classical and Afro-Cuban.
Listeners can sort by show dates, as well as genre and geographic location. Soon, users will be able to sort by ticket price, too.
Skeen says, “DeliRadio isn’t really in competition with other streaming radio services, like Pandora and Spotify. It’s for a different use, by a different type of consumer-concertgoers.”
It’s free for the artists and the listeners. The artists are in control of their own profiles. They can also sell music on DeliRadio, and the company doesn’t take a percentage. No royalties are paid for streaming.
“All through the building of the site, which took 15 months, before we could launch it, there were doomsayers who said, ‘Artists will never go for this. You can’t start from scratch in this business.’ But we did.”
A former Chicago resident, Skeen moved to the Bay Area after college. He put together a home studio in 2000, later set up a state-of-the-art studio, and, in 2008, started Berkeley’s Ninth Street Opus indie label.
“Working on Opus, we took on lots of bands that were starting out, some halfway up the ladder. Carrie Rodriguez is probably our best known. We quickly realized that exposure was pretty much the only thing we needed. And all these sideshow debates about streaming royalties were utterly irrelevant to us. I needed people to hear the music and get exposed to it. I didn’t care about the thousandth-of-a-penny per stream. It was really about getting the artists heard in the markets where they had a show coming up and selling some tickets there. And that’s what the tool of DeliRadio is, for the artist.”
Skeen originally got into the music business with an eye towards production, engineering and, his favorite craft, mixing.
“I’ve always been a real keen listener for details. I’ve always analyzed how textures happen in records,” he says.
Over the 2011 holiday season, Skeen took a vacation and mixed “Vast As The Sky,” an album by The Roseline, working with producer Jim Greer. This holiday season, he worked on a project by San Francisco band Minute 2 Midnight.
Opus is morphing into an artist services group, with its name changing to Shift Independent. It’s being run now by Sara Mertz, as Skeen is devoting his efforts to DeliRadio.
Establishing a label was a challenge. “I’d almost say it was was futile,” Skeen explains. “We had been in a secular recession, in the music business. And then, put that inside of the overall economic recession, very difficult. But based on what we’ve learned and what we’ve created in DeliRadio, we don’t have any regrets about how we spent those three or four years.
“It’s just that the part that an album plays in an artist’s career has changed. Now it’s more of a loss leader for other avenues of income. For young artists just starting out, I think it’s a mistake to try to monetize their music, at least before the licensing takes off.”
Top management of DeliRadio came from Opus. They met at a music show at Beckett’s Pub in Berkeley.
“None of us had any inkling that we were going to be in the music business until 2007. For several years, we were all just passionate about music and became good friends. Among us, we had just the right skill sets. We had a lawyer, a manager, a marketing guy, and me with a finance and programming background. So it just kind of coalesced into, first, the record label and then the DeliRadio idea.”
Skeen himself has found several new personal favorites by perusing DeliRadio, among them, the Bay Area’s Lia Rose, Thee Oh Sees, and Billy and Dolly, as well as Austin band Mobley and the U.K.’s Graffiti6.
DeliRadio now includes artists from 75 nations, listeners from 104 countries. And the numbers are growing.
“I’d like DeliRadio to be a place that people who are interested in live music spend some time every week. It’s not going to replace anything. People will always want to get on Pandora, type in ‘Frank Sinatra’ and push play. But that’s not where they’re going to hear the guy from Santa Cruz who’s just as good. He’s just unknown. And even if he’s not quite as good, you can still go out with friends and, over a drink or two, see him perform. In summing up all the subjective enjoyment, there’s something to be said for that.”
Skeen envisions a time when living artists don’t want their music intermingled with classics. “Why pour your music into the sea of all eternity, which is on Spotify, when you have this wonderful thing about you, which is, you’re alive? And you’re playing. And you’re on Twitter, on Facebook. You’re available. And you’re on stage, commenting on today’s society.”
Email Paul Freeman at paul@popcultureclassics.com.
