Today I received an email from RP and I thought forum readers might appreciate the philosophy behind it, so here it is:
Greetings from Radio Paradise!
William here, checking in from RP World HQ, on California's far north coast, where the weather hardly ever tries to kill you.
(Yay non-lethal weather!)
I'll be talking about the Main Mix, and other programming and audio details. And I do mean details.
Feel free to skim ahead to whatever section seems interesting. If you're an audiophile, for instance, make sure you don't miss what I have to say about sound quality!
Hit reply on this email if you have something to say to me (though don't feel obligated). I promise to read every email.
If I don't respond, it's not you, and it's not I don't care. Just mail volume & time pressure.
Let's start with something I hope doesn't apply to you, though I know it might.
Not a regular Main Mix listener?
Maybe you were at one point, but got bored. Or annoyed. Or whatever.
Maybe you switched to another one of our mixes. Maybe you don't listen to Radio Paradise at all any more. Maybe you've never listened much, and just haven't bothered to get off our list. Maybe you have no idea how you even got on our list.
In any case, if you have an opinion about the Main Mix it's probably wrong. I'll explain.
What fits the mix and what doesn't, and the balance between all of its elements, is subject to constant changes, tweaks, revisions, and detours.
Over the past 25 years, the Main Mix has evolved, flowed, and continually reinvented itself. So, unless your impression is very recent, it can't help but be wrong.
I am equally sure that the Main Mix has never sounded better. In several respects. Let's start with the most important one.
The Main Mix Playlist
There is so much great music out there! I've refined and expanded my music discovery network over the past couple of years, and feel like I do a better job of staying on top of what's happening than I ever have before. And there is a LOT of exciting stuff happening! I'll come back to that.
As a consequence, the Main Mix features a lot more new music — including new artist discoveries — than it has in the past. However, that does NOT mean repeating the same "new" songs every day until we're all sick of them.
I've set a very high bar for The Main Mix. I want you to be able to listen for a full week, 8 hours every day, and never hear the same song twice.
We're very close. I'd say we're currently at the "probably won't hear a song twice in one week, and if you do it's likely brand new" point.
My point is that the Main Mix has never been less repetitive. So if that was one of your complaints, you might want to give it another shot.
This change required me to unlearn a deeply embedded bit of behavior, acquired — like so many other bad habits and dubious practices — during my years in commercial radio.
It's nasty. And insidious, because it first presents as excitement! About something I love!
When a song comes along that I really like, and want to add to the Main Mix, there's a voice in my head. It is not a subtle voice.
It sounds a lot like Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP, and it says — no, SHOUTS: "Oh boy! New song! Play it! As much as you can! All day, every day! Until hurling commences! Maybe longer!".
By the time I started Radio Paradise I'd already learned to ignore most of Johnny's toxic advice. RP has always been better than commercial radio at avoiding repetition (granted, a VERY low bar...) but there was room for improvement, and we've made a lot of it recently.
There's also a different feel to the mix. It's not easy to label accurately. It's not part of any logical plan, or based on any research. It's my intuitive read of the musical vibe of the moment. What feels in, and what feels out.
This could not be any more imprecise. It's guaranteed to be right in some ways, and wrong in others. I'm OK with that, so here we go:
WHAT'S OUT:
Most big hit songs, especially from the 70s thru 90s.
Confessional singer-songwriters.
Guitar solos. Not all, but most.
Relationship drama & angst.
Anything contrived, pretentious or calculated.
Anything bland, tepid, tentative, or ordinary.
Celebrity obsessions. Including politics.
WHAT'S IN:
Musical risk & adventure.
Rhythm! Movement! Energy!
Artists you've never heard before.
Songs you've never heard by artists you love.
Different sounds and textures.
Fun! Especially thoughtful fun. Fun that gives a damn.
Songs by people who don't look/sound/think like you.
Songs that expand your world.
That paints at least a fuzzy picture of the radio station I hear in my mind and attempt to emulate. A steady stream of unusual, thoughtful music you can dance to, mostly. Music that leaves you feeling like you've discovered something special. Real music. Honest music. Fun music for serious times.
Give it a listen. If you have your own sense of this moment's musical vibe, see how mine compares. My intuition tells me there might be a lot of commonalities.
Keep in mind that The Main Mix is designed for long term listening. What you hear during any particular hour, or day, or week, is only part of the larger whole. And the nature of that larger whole requires it to be tolerant of short-term defects.
That's pretty abstract. I think I might be reading too many philosophical essays. It's simple, really.
I have to allow myself the freedom to screw up. To make wrong turns, and then correct course. That applies at both the bad-day and the oops-year level.
The attempt to avoid mistakes inevitably leads to planning, structure, research, and logic. And once any artist heads down that road, they're lost. Literally.
They're stumbling in the dark, past numerous points of no return, with cacophonous corvids scarfing every breadcrumb. No maps. Certainly not on that Pocket Preciousssss.
It's the mindset of control — born of the delusion that art is something other than wild, intuitive, uninhibited, and unpredictable. Once you're immersed in that delusion your ability to navigate your own internal artistic — and moral! — course quickly atrophies.
The plan, and all of the carefully researched techniques for implementing it, starts to make sense. You start to frame your artistic impulses in terms of how they meet the needs of the plan. Even to yourself.
That's when you might as well abandon all hope, trudge through the gate, enter the belly of the beast, and settle in for the slow decay of everything that once fired your passions.
The application of planning, structure, research, and logic destroyed the industry I dedicated my life to — my whole life, not just the part labeled "career". OMFG do I have some things to say about that. Next email...
So, there is no logic to Main Mix. You'll never discern a formula or pattern to what songs I choose or how I sequence them, because there isn't one.
All of the existing software tools for managing radio libraries and playlists are built around formulas, structure, and logic, so I've never used any of them at RP. I've developed my own tools that encourage serendipity, discovery, and intuition.
I'll have more on the DJ software front a bit later in this email (in the Radio As Art section, if you start skipping ahead).
Right now, though, I want to be clear: There is no formula. It may have seemed like I was describing one with my lists and such. If so, I should have been clearer. Because there really is no formula. No plan. No guarantees.
You could turn on the Main Mix right now and hear an hour of music that totally contradicts everything that I wrote above. I certainly make space for that to happen, to make sure that I always give myself permission to wander off the path, down a less-traveled road, and end up somewhere that logic and intention could never have taken me.
That's how the magic happens. Magic always begins with permission.
The F**king Problem
The use of so-called "profanity" in song lyrics has gradually increased over the last 20 or 30 years. Until recently. Now it's increasing almost exponentially.
For a long time, we avoided almost all profanity on RP. Rebecca, my former partner (in RP and in life), was particularly sensitive to the fact that we were frequently played in shared spaces like offices and cafes, where a business owner might be concerned about their image. And we would hear from time to time from people who were genuinely disturbed by certain words.
Our Mellow Mix remains a profanity-free zone, but I've allowed quite a few exceptions on the Main Mix, and I know that's bothered some of you. I'm pleased to report that we've come up with a solution.
But before I get into that, there's an important detail to clarify.
There's a list of words that broadcasters in the US aren't allowed to air. If you don't know what they are, I refer you to the following web search: "George Carlin 7 words". If that doesn't ring a bell, then you should absolutely watch that right now. Come back, though, OK?
A couple of the words Carlin mentions have been totally normalized, as have others that were once censored. Other commonly-censored words just don't come up in song lyrics. Not the lyrics of any songs we'd play, anyway.
It comes down to two words, and words derived from them. One of those bad boys is so close to being normalized that we might as well just assume it's already happened. It's the one I'll call s**t (in case this email ends up having to get past corporate firewalls or aggressive spam filters). I can defend s**t.
Which leaves us with f**k. For most of us, there are many circumstances where f**king just isn't appropriate. Even if it's only happening in a song.
Our solution? The Main Mix, Unf**ked.
The name is still a work in progress, and suggestions are welcome. Hopefully it'll keep tender ears from being f**ked with, while letting the rest of us hear the song as the artist intended.
Sound Quality
Right from the beginning, I've been obsessed with delivering the best possible sound to those of you with high end audio gear. And ears of gold to match, of course ;-).
32kbps MP3 mono was our "HiFi" offering. Seriously. I was quite proud of how good it sounded compared to everything else at the time. In 2002 we upgraded to a 128k stereo MP3 stream that was state of the art at the time, and for a decade or so afterward.
Then came our 320k AAC stream — the first that really qualified as high fidelity IMHO — followed by something that once been impossible and had only recently graduated to almost-impossible. And I'm a sucker for almost-impossible.
No radio service had figured out how to do FLAC or ALAC. Playlists of individual songs? Yes. Radio? No.
Turns out, the main reason was that no other radio service really wanted to do lossless streaming. So we had to invent a lot of our own tools, and puzzle our way through arcane technical details, but we pulled it off. I say "we", but technically "Jarred" would be more accurate.
The result is the world's first and only lossless radio distribution platform. It makes us the world's best-sounding radio signal, and we don't want to keep it to ourselves. The idea of enabling the same sound quality for other DJs or stations and their listeners makes me smile.
It's been quite a process. I've spent hundreds of hours evaluating different masters and remixes for classic recordings, and sought out high-definition masters. I've also located and replaced files with various defects and processing errors. We had some totally crap files in our library at one point, but I've rooted them all out. I think.
I'm quite proud of how amazing it all sounds, and, best of all, it's not something that just sounds good on my system. It sounds just as good when you hear it on yours, anywhere in the world. Knowing just how good RP sounds on all of that lovely audiophile gear out there is one of the great joys of my life. Seriously.
If it's been a while since you've turned us up good and loud on your system, do it. Please. I've been doing a lot of high volume listening lately, and there are times when I am frankly stunned at how good RP sounds. Especially lossless, up loud. Do it.
Never thought of it quite like this, but my goal has always been to get you turn RP up loud, and eliminate anything that would make you turn us down. Of course, I'll eventually fail. But I'm serious about the goal, and it informs every decision I make.
I want RP to shine at delivering quality sound at the volume levels you'd get live, in real life. For a lot of what we play, that's pretty freakin' loud!
RP needs to work at rock-concert or dance-club volume levels. You may not listen that loud very often, but when you do I want to provide the kind of pristine, thoughtfully mixed, fully dynamic audio that such listening requires. Anything less is a disservice to the music, to its creators, and to you.
Most of the time, though, you can't (or don't want to) listen at full volume. Music becomes a part of the scene, rather than its primary focus.
Unfortunately, the quieter parts of that fully dynamic audio get easily lost at lower volume levels, or in a noisy environment like a car or a house with teenagers. All FM stations, and most Internet radio services, process their audio to make the quiet parts louder and the loud parts quieter.
If overused (as it often is), this kind of processing can reduce everything to a tepid sludge — beige, I'm pretty sure — with all of its soul and energy sucked out. We used it initially, but dropped it about a dozen years ago.
Since then, I've just accepted the fact that RP is less than ideal as a background music source. In my mind, the tradeoff (great sound up loud) was worth it. And if something about our audio at low volumes annoys you into cranking it up, I call that a win.
But I've always known that we were shorting those of you who often CAN'T listen loud (you know, jobs, families, that sort of thing) and I like the way that dynamics processing lets you hear a lot of details in the music when listening at low volumes.
I've finally come up with what feels like a good compromise!
I've added some subtle dynamics processing to our streams at 128k & below, just enough to keep things audible at low volumes. I think it sounds great, even loud. But up loud, you'll probably want to choose our lossless or 320k options. Those will remain pristine and unprocessed.
In the coming months, your choice of 4 or 5 sound quality options (often with vague descriptions) will be replaced with a choice between Normal (the default & best choice for most listening - 128k AAC with processing, lower bitrates if needed) & Lossless (FLAC or ALAC, no processing, 320k AAC fallback).
Radio as Art
There was a time when I thought of myself as more of a technician than an artist. It seemed a bit pretentious to apply such a lofty label to something as mundane as radio programming.
Fortunately, I hang out with people who continually remind me that real art doesn't live in museums and galleries. It's everywhere, and thrives in the gritty corners of daily life.
Art has a purpose, a meaning, a resonance with what feels real and true. It changes a person, or reveals something about them. If it doesn't, it's not art.
I can think of many moments when a voice, a melody, or an idea reached out through the static and chaos of the radio dial to change me forever, or enable me to see something I'd been blind to. Something important.
I've heard from many people over the years about how I was there, through the magic of radio, to be part of similar critical moments in their lives. Or how the presence of the music I choose as it accompanies them through their days has had a profound effect over the years.
So yeah. I'm an artist. This thing that I've dedicated my life to really is a vital, important, and worthy use of my energy. And it makes sense that I approach my work in the unstructured, undisciplined way that I do. It can't really be any other way.
One aspect of my chosen medium that I've always been obsessed with are song segues — the blending of one song into another, then another; weaving a musical and lyrical flow that, when done properly, achieves a power and beauty that none of its component pieces possesses on its own.
DJ Tools is the software package that I've been working on for a long time (30 years, really) and everything about it is designed to facilitate the artistic aspects of radio.
The commercial software packages used by radio stations, on the other hand, may as well have been specifically designed to suppress the creation of on-air art. The primacy of commerce and exploitation are built into the very structure of their products.
It's not finished yet. Maybe it never will be. But it's on the verge of being ready to add additional DJs and other radio artists, and some of my more recent refinements in the code have really upgraded its capabilities.
They have also sharpened the contrast between DJ Tools and the commercial radio programming software that virtually every other radio service in the world utilizes. Like most modern business software, those products are all about eliminating work, finding ways for the machine to make decisions formerly made by humans. They are quite adept at the flawlessly logical decisions required to maximize the monetization of audience attention — and to minimize a station's reliance on messy human qualities like insight, intuition, talent, and artistry.
Everyone in the radio industry — broadcast, online, satellite, everyone — knows that you can't properly program a music format without software that lets you apply structure, formulas and such.
In the early days of music radio, DJs were free-range beasts. They played whatever struck their fancy, or that they hoped might excite their audience. It was chaotic, unpredictable, unprofessional. And expensive.
When you're dependent on a temperamental artiste to keep the ad dollars pouring in, they can often sniff that out and take advantage. You know, try to keep some of those dollars themselves.
All radio programming software divides music into categories: hits, oldies, fast, slow, boy, girl, this genre & that. The possibilities are endless. Then those categories are used to build what's called an "hourly clock", filled with an orderly, logical sequence of music categories, a road map for an hour of radio. Songs in each of the categories are rotated, often using very sophisticated algorithms, to ensure proper spacing and exposure.
Whatever a DJ brings to a music show (if they bring anything at all — they're often just hired voices) happens on top of, or as part of, that underlying structure. You begin with an hour of music that has been assembled by an algorithm, following that hour's "clock" to select songs from the various categories, using rules that range from very basic to incredibly complex.
At a commercial station, that's generally it. The algorithm rules with a silicon fist and DJs have zero, or near-zero, input. But the same software is used at the satellite channels and on non-commercial stations. And yeah, even at commercial stations people get away with stuff.
In those cases, DJs can tinker with the hour's music — either in advance or on the fly — swapping songs in or out (limited, of course, to whatever has been added to the station's digital library). And the structure, the underlying mindset — analytical, taxonomic, procedural — will remain.
I'm old enough to have worked in radio's pre-algorithmic era. I was set free with an extensive library of music and trusted to do something entertaining with it. If I failed, they'd find someone else. That was the whole formula right there.
I'm picturing KLRB, where I worked from 1973-1976 (probably still some photos floating the interwebs). Sometimes I'd walk into the studio knowing what song I wanted to start my show with, or some vague idea about what I'd do that night.
Usually, though, my first song would be an impulsive grab from the stack of new releases in the studio.
Then I would do the thing. The core of my artistic practice, then and now. I would listen to the song that was playing, really listen to it. And I would ask a question. THE question.
What song goes next?
That answer may well be informed by factors like song rotation and genre balance, by popularity charts sometimes. Usually, though, there's at least some intuitive component to the choice. Sometimes it's ALL intuition.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, Intuition influences all of our decisions, including those made in the contexts like the radio software. But nothing about those systems is designed to facilitate intuition. You could make a compelling case for the opposite, actually.
In DJ Tools I've added as many features to encourage intuition as I can, and removed obstacles to it when I find them.
When programming the Main Mix, sometimes I'm working a few hours ahead of air time, occasionally as much as a week, but it's never real time.
Preparing radio programming in advance like that can be a very clinical, mechanical process. It certainly is using the usual radio software. The previous iterations of my own software (I've run RP on my own homegrown software right from the start) were equally guilty in many ways.
DJ Tools encourages me, at every turn, to make "What song goes next?" decisions by turning the speakers up (it helps that they're great speakers...), and let the song wash over me while I flip through a list of possible followups. I may have applied a filter to favor a particular musical direction, or not.
The list is compact, but very VERY data-dense, using lots of color-coding and such to show each song's beginning and ending key, tempo, year of release, length, amount of recent airplay, a detailed histogram showing audience response to the song, and a clear indicator of whether or not it passes all of the tests for song and artist separation.
No, there won't be a quiz on that :-).
My point is that I'm immersing myself in one piece of the thing via my ear-based input processing, along with a really massive visual blast of data about the next piece of the thing.
It's me flipping through stacks of vinyl with a song playing loud, waiting for inspiration to strike. Except better. Orders of magnitude better.
Magic. That's what it feels like.
The workflow of my wildest dreams. I'm joyfully doing the best work of my life, and I'm loving every minute of it.
OK. I promised myself I'd call it quits here if I started writing anything that didn't feel 100% true. And I just did that.
Not the joyful part, or the wildest dreams, and definitely not the best work of my life part. I stand by that, proudly, with a big smile on my face.
It's the "loving every minute". Anyone who works with me knows that there are many minutes here that I do not love. At all. Some minutes, hours, days are really hard. My "pick an almost-impossible goal and then drive yourself insane trying to reach it" tendencies may have gotten in the way.
Lots of work remains on DJ Tools, and on everything else we have planned here. My digital work world is filled with half-finished rooms, seriously rough edges, and one bug infestation after another. Lots to do, but we're doing it. And it's a very solid "we" these days.
More on that later. I know for a fact that I've overindulged myself here. I'm amazed you're still reading, actually. And, like I said, I have lots to do. I should get to it. You probably have things to do as well. Thanks for taking the time — a substantial chunk of it, unless you're the skip-to-the-end type — to read this. I'm honored by your gift.
I seriously love our new communications system. I love that, time permitting, I can write as much as I want, knowing that it will show up in your inbox as a totally standalone piece that you can easily skip past, skim briefly, or read some or all of in detail.
In the past, our newsletter was all about trying to get you to click over to our website to read blog posts. A lot of you did. But all indications are that more of you will hear more of what we say if we say it right here in your inbox. Like one of my grandkids said a while back, "Nobody goes to websites any more."
Silly us. Getting all excited about the new website features we're working on (lol). But that's another email. There will be many more emails :-).
Thanks so much for reading.
And for everything else.
-William
