The changing face of internet radio and the death of the chat room! By Steve Sheppard

 

The changing face of internet radio and the death of the chat room!

By

Steve Sheppard

 

What was once seen as a gimmick, perhaps in the same way as CB radio, Internet Radio has now gone from a train spotter’s paradise, to a multi-platformed broadcast service worldwide, what was once seen as a little fun, a chance to be a pirate radio station, or an opportunity to invent the most crass and vulgar shows, has now developed into a truly serious business that unless you know your stuff, you will be gone in less than 60 seconds.

BBC Sport Steve

 

However back in the day internet radio was at times a lot of fun, but until 2004 I’d never heard of it, during the 90’s I spent most of my time on sports reporting live at events with the B.B.C., we were still not using the internet much at all in the late 90s either, and by the time we have all got past the rather uneventful millennium bug, I was then working for commercial radio on FM an experience that has nothing to do with music, but where cash is king!

I must be one of the few presenters who also had a show on the old AM wave band, which was to the say interesting, but the inevitable happened, one of the fellow DJ’s at the station mentioned to me that at night he lurked in the dark shadows of the evening, creeping through dank alleyways and for 90 minutes became a pirate radio DJ! I asked for more details, and I blame him for this whole internet radio journey, which started for me in 2004 and on to this day.

It all seemed rather nerdish when I arrived at this station, it was owned by two very odd individuals and housed in an industrial estate for small businesses, which I guess gave it a strange form of credibility; later I would go onto find out that they had none at all, oh and no license, not a single legit thing that would make them legal in any aspect.

It was that time that I became infected with the technology called a chat room, a place where people could come into at any time it was open, to leave your messages and suggestions for tracks to be played, and if you could get passed the perverts, the spam links to grow your penis to a mile long, and copious amounts of porn sites, it strangely worked.

By 2005 I worked by day as a postman, at weekends for the BBC, during the afternoons as the weather and travel presenter for a commercial radio station, and at night, I would slip into my anorak and become, internet radio man, this was exciting, I could e-mail all of my 11 friends and 7 of them would turn up in the chat room for 90 minutes of music I wanted to play, which was amazing as on commercial radio at that time the computer choose for you and Motorhead back to back with the Spice girls never worked.

There were some fun times it has to be said, but as it was largely unregulated, those who would never get a job on local or national radio, now had a voice and the vulgarity and vile language was so bad, that at times, the radio authority would phone the studio to complain, which I found strange as this station was illegal, but never once did they ever turn up to check them out, but here I was  playing the music I wanted to get heard, and I was getting a large following even back then, but let’s get back to the seedy world of chat rooms and the internet stations.

Apart from my own, QBR as they were (they now no longer exist, which is no surprise as they were run so badly that at times, they wouldn’t even bother to turn up to the studio to open it), I have never graced another internet based station. I have broadcast via the net for various BBC stations but that is under the regulation of the same body for the main stations output.

So the chat room and emails were at that time, they way of generating listeners, word of mouth and the occasionally lucky listener who had been surfing the internet would be your audience. I stuck it for some 3 years or so until I was asked to open up my first spiritual radio station, at that time called Southern Spiritual Radio, with reflection that was a huge mistake, as listeners expected to tune into pastor Steve from the deep south, laying his healing hands of his brothers and sisters from his shack in Alabama, not hear some British guy talking about Reiki, Shamanism and healing Crystals.

A salutary lesson in getting your brand right, this was now 2008 and the internet was the place to be, lot of stations were springing up, but most others were amateurs and lacked the professional training of myself, but the chat room was now at its height, although this station was not mine, I was appointed station manager, we now had a radio station with a working website and an abundant chat room. Unlike today, then you could judge your shows listeners by how many people were in the chat room, one I may add that was purpose built and on the front of the website.

By 2010 the owners closed the station and I opened up my first business online which would at that time be called One World Radio, due to my contacts over the years it didn’t take us long to establish the following again, and soon I was hitting 5000 listeners a month, now note, even in this short time of 2 years, chat rooms were on the wobble, MSN had closed their groups and the Behemoth of what was now known as social media, and Facebook was on the rise.

But, let’s just give a fading tip of the hat to MySpace which was huge back then. Chat rooms, were a way of meeting up with your friends, listeners and even the musicians all in one place, and apart from those wishing to indulge in cybersex and other such bizarre dirty rain-coat menageries, were now largely on the wane, so much so, that the website company we use, and still do, Moonfruit, really couldn’t be bothered to compete anymore and simply stopped the function themselves, and farmed it out to other companies if you wished to have one, so communicating with your listeners was fast becoming a changing operation.

Interestingly enough, one has to stand back when talking about chat and chat rooms; I remember working for BBC Surrey once and asked how the listener figures were for last week’s show, and he said something that made me think to this day, “Last week it was a bit quiet Steve, we only had 25 thousand listening” for him that was light, for me, for a 30 minute show, 25 thousand was beyond huge, so that many people wanted to listen to me for half an hour and not turn off, wow, so it indeed it is all a matter of perspective, and what you want to get out of the experience of being a radio presenter.

One World Music started in 2013, we had developed away from the static servers like Ice Cast etc. and chose Mixlr, a service you could literally transport anywhere, and we trialled this before moving to Cyprus. During one whole month in 2014, we broadcasted using Mixlr from our new home, easy. By now social media had pretty much removed the need for a chat room, so much so that we tried to invent one on Facebook, which for a while was pretty successful, but internet radio had changed so much by then, that swimming in the small pond was no longer an option, and the best way to communicate with your audience was your output. A good example with my falling out of love with chat rooms was that I found myself conducting one a few years back for one of my shows, and found myself virtually typing my entire broadcasted audio onto a Facebook chat room, a complete waste of time and frustrating as well.

So now we see the arrival of podcasts, thanks to PRS our licensing company, they called me one day to ask me about my stations license and to see if I had the correct one, during the conversation they informed me about this sparkling new world of keeping everything on a cloud, now this actually started for us back in 2013, and as a company Mixcloud did me a big favour, as until then I would be only able to keep 10 podcasts up on my website, now thanks to this cloud kingdom it was virtually limitless, and sure enough it has worked brilliantly for years now. I have a feeling we have somewhere in the region of 4000 shows you can access on our podcast service as of today, and it is constantly growing.

So we now had Mixlr as our portable server to the world, if we wished to use it they also had their own purpose built chat room, and Mixcloud had its own purpose built forum for every show uploaded, social media had exploded, but so had the APP world of the internet, this was now the latest big thing, what was once thought of as a hard thing to communicate with your end listener, is now a virtual impossibility not to do so, which is a nice thing for us at OWMR as 98% of them are lovely people.

So we stand above the coffin now, and look at the casket marked chat room, I do think we banged the last nail into the most eager of woods, by changing to our all singing and dancing responsive website, and inventing the 6 hour constant live play of all shows on OWMR, listeners now can now not only choose how to listen, but where and when they wish as well, for example, those who wish to find me online during the week, can do so by logging onto and listening to the shows on the first of our of 6 daily broadcasts on Cyprus time, you will find me there listening, but now we have arrived at a very interesting juncture in intent radio and chat, as most stations in 2020 just stream endless ice cold streams of music, with no real soul.

The personality has gone out of radio, I’m now also a musician and I adore it when I get one of my tracks played and they mention my name on LIVE RADIO, oh yeah baby, massage my ego, there, you missed a spot, ah yes, that’s better, but seriously we broadcast live warm content and include real people to do it. I once listened to a station locally who tried to broadcast a show with chat, and playing his music from Spotify, let’s just say it was a little embarrassing. Imagine “So let’s go to our next track, this is Queen and We Will Rock You” big build up and big silence as we hear “And we will be with Freddie and the boys as soon as my Spotify stops spinning in circles, wait, oh, almost there” You get my point, though things have changed, the skill set of being organized and professional hasn’t.

So internet radio is now a technologically driven industry, which at our age how we keep up with it is a miracle all of its own, but we love what we do and I hope it shows. Gone are the days of emailing your mates and basing your shows popularity on how many people roll up in a chat room; only recently in fact last week this happened, Tuesdays is our main stream rock and pop day, and let’s say that we were just short of 1000 listeners for 3 live shows that evening, but with hardly anyone chatting in our Facebook group, and this is where we enter the last phase of this never ending story, as there are now so many platforms out there now on social media, allowing us to all pick and choose our favourites, the biggest growth I have seen for us is Instagram, Facebook is now just another fish in an already overcrowded pool, and perhaps one day someone will go the same way as MySpace again, into the void of irrelevance.

The one thing that is certain in life is change, we can all testify to that; while Chrissie and I are not getting any younger, I have a feeling we will still be around in the once murky old world of the internet for a few years yet, and instead of sitting up till the wee small hours talking in a chat room, I now enjoy waking up each morning and answering all the messages and e-mails I have got from listeners regarding my show, so the moral of the story is, make technology work for you, never become a slave to it!