Music for the Masses

By Ed Martinez

July 3, 2009

Rusty Hodge dreamed of having his own radio station someday. His passion started while he was in high school in the 70s, where he operated a small neighborhood station, in which he delivered daily programming over a telephone hotline.

As a college student in the early 80s, he began to develop software applications that would allow radio stations to manage playlists in an automated fashion. His software developer skills made it possible for him to work at several radio stations, where he pioneered broadcasting radio and TV stations over the Web.

In 2000, Rusty founded SomaFM commercial-free Internet radio—with just a handful of channels. SomaFM has now expanded and its programming includes 14 unique channels with over 6 million listener hours a month. Their channels play, for the most part, music that is not typically found on commercial radio, or as Rusty puts it, music “not being done right.”  SomaFM is not only playing commercial-free radio, but it is making a difference by supporting new music talent. “I get emails from bands that say people are buying their records because they heard them on my station. I think that’s great!  In some cases, they even get signed to a label because the label companies heard them on the station,” shares Elise Nordling, Music Director of Indie Pop Rocks!  The Indie Pop Rocks! channel plays new and favorite independent classic pop tracks. Elise tells me that she really enjoys supporting these bands, “I think they are playing amazing music that they can’t get aired anywhere else.”

So how does Elise choose her music programming?  Most of the music is submitted to her from radio distributors and small label companies. PR agents will also provide material, and new bands will submit their music as well. She listens to everything submitted to her. She then chooses which tracks she would like to add to her playlist and gives it a rating. Based on the rating, a complex script-based software application builds the final playlist that she cleans up and re-orders to insure it “flows” well. Her playlist has about 12,000 songs, which extends beyond that of most FM stations—which typically average about 300 songs at any given time.

Elise also mentioned that she has received emails from music directors for movies and television that listen to the station all day, and choose music from her station for their projects. “I also had writers from television shows tell me that they listen to my station while they write new episodes ... and write in songs on purpose.”

Last May, SomaFM released an iPhone application, which gives you access to all 14 channels. “Our iPhone application is incredible, and we are very excited about it” Elise added. The new app allows you to view stations by Genre or popularity. You can also bookmark songs you like for later purchase from the iTunes Store. The stations are available in low and high bandwidth streaming, which offer great quality over 3G and Wi-Fi, and good quality over EDGE—for first generation iPhones.

The iPhone of course, is not the only way to access SomaFM. From your computer, you can listen to the station streams using popular applications such as Quicktime, Windows Media Player and Winamp. Palm Treo users can use Pocket Tunes. PocketPC and WindowsMobile devices can also listen to the  streams.

SomaFM offers commercial-free radio by donations from listeners, support from small labels and companies that provide them with the bandwidth necessary to broadcast their music around the world. Recently, they formed a partnership with NPR, which will make it possible to offer their programming over the air. Their 14 unique channels have a wide-range of music that suits just about any kind of mood you may have. Do yourself a favor and check out their great music!