GOOM RADIO à NYC
Le site américain Radio-Info revient sur le lancement cet été de Goom Radio dans sa version américaine. Les studio situés à New York, accueillent une cinquantaine de personnes qui travaillent ardemment à la création de cette radio entièrement numérique.
Goom Radio: The Radio-Info Interview
By Sean Ross, Executive Editor of Music & Programming
After four months of heavy publicity, the U.S. version of Goom Radio arrived in late July. Launched last year in France by Emmanuel Jayr and Roberto Ciurleo, former executives at Top 40 network NRJ, Goom followed a similar path here, tapping CEO Rob Williams, previously market manager of Clear Channel/New York (after more than a decade with Clear Channel and its predecessors) and head of programming Tim “Romeo” Herbster from the MD job at CC’s WHTZ (Z100) New York.
At this writing, Goom has debuted nine channels, most recently Urban Jams and “teen hits” format Sweeet Radio, that, like their French counterpart, have the hosted, produced feel of mainstream radio, but with more of a new music emphasis. Additional channels as well as the ability to create user-generated stations (a promo says “you can even sing your own jingle”) are on the way. Radio-Info talked to Williams and Herbster about the new site and their journeys from terrestrial radio to new platforms.
What was the path to Goom from mainstream terrestrial radio?
RW: I had been thinking about the general idea of creating an Internet radio site and user-generated radio site – it seemed to me that was a real opportunity that broadcasters were missing. Every broadcaster does nothing more than take an existing station and place it on line. There’s nothing to separate it from the pack. There’s no compelling reason to go to a station’s Website when you could hear [the same thing] on FM. I thought stations had to do something more.
I met the guys who became my partners, Emmanuel Jayr and Roberto Ciurleo, who had the same vision but had gone a lot further: they had created the technology, they had addressed the sound piece of the puzzle so that the sound would be exceptional, and they had raised the money. I went to Paris and was exposed to it; when I left Clear Channel, [I knew] it was something I wanted to focus on.
TH: I didn’t even know Rob was in the project when I talked to [Emmanuel] and Roberto, we were all under Clear Channel at the time. The user-generated aspect was something I would have died to have when I was 14 or 15 years old. When I saw the presentation for MyGoom, it was like a mini broadcasting school. Letting kids or any user program a radio station the same way that we were professionally programming a station—you’re picking the music, picking the sweepers, picking the jingles, creating the content. That was what drove me to it.
Romeo, you seemed like one of the few people who were having a good time in mainstream, terrestrial radio?
TH: Absolutely. It had to take a big special project to walk away from Z100. I really confided in Paul “Cubby” Bryant who had walked away from Z100 to do a morning show with Whoopi Goldberg … It had to be that special opportunity, not just a better job and management position, but a chance to be part of of history and lay the groundwork for everything to follow for mainstream radio.
RW: People couch things in “it must feel great to get out of Clear Channel. Tim and I both had fantastic experiences at Clear Channel.”… It was a great experience for both of us. He was MD at one of the most important stations in the world. I was running arguably the most successful cluster of stations in the country. We worked with great people, like Tom Poleman. We had great jobs. I think we both saw what was possible to start our own company and do the things that we’re setting out to do right now.
Romeo, you always seemed to have pretty mainstream tastes in some of the music that you brought to Z100, which isn’t always characteristic of the people who end up doing radio on new platforms. Were you also the guy trying to bring more left-field music into the music meeting at Z100, and we just never knew about it?
TH: I’ve done pop, rock, country, and urban. It’s always been natural for me to grab crossover hits. But at Z100 every week, I would also have [potential] hits that were nowhere near any chart. Tom Poleman had the vision to really let me make those gut calls on records that nobody else was playing. That absolutely translates in the move to Goom. We play 20-30% exclusive titles, whether it’s international hits that we’re exposing for the first time … or a crazy remix that FM hasn’t touched yet.
To that effect, last night’s top five on the Just Hits channel was all songs that aren’t on Z100 yet. Were you trying to make a statement – or are the listeners that far ahead of what’s on terrestrial radio?
TH: It’s not necessarily “making a statement.” It’s just providing the groundwork for what Goom’s all about. Those songs have absolutely been reacting for us. We’re always going to have a couple of those international songs or songs that we’re early on, but we’ll play the big hits as well. But each station will be thought of as a ‘new music server.’ We’ve [arranged the clocks to be] hit/new/hit/new. We know that’s why the kids are leaving FM; they’re only hearing one new song an hour. They’re going on line to discover new music so we want to serve them.
What was the process leading to the launch? How was it different than a typical start-up?
TH: There were many more processes involved. It’s not as easy as just taking a CD and throwing it in Prophet. Every song is accompanied with a visual. Every song is run through about three different softwares. We have all this great software that is custom made in France just for Goom, so there’s a lot of metadata included to give you artist info, and what’s coming up next.
RW: There’s an immediacy [in] doing things online. The first day that we had our RockIt channel on at [partner Website] FriendsorEnemies.com, we were getting feedback within minutes. These were kids that were discovering, finding it and talking about it. This was really happening in real time. We’re also doing so many stations at one time, there has been this race getting everything ready, getting the team together, helping the DJs and programmers understand … the vision of these formats vs. what they’ve done before. Some of our DJs come from Sirius XM, some come from FM, some have never been DJs before.
The site refers to its various stations as “radios”—which sounds like something from the French site that was held over because it sounded different. What was the discussion like when you decided to call them “radios”?
TH: There wasn’t really a discussion … “Radio” is in every discussion we have about Goom—it really is real radio.
RW: We didn’t want to call them “stations” – that sounds like what the FCC licenses.
What is a day at the office like now?
TH: We have a staff of 50 right now, including interns and DJs and programmers and sales and marketing … The staff has been my favorite part of the whole project—[finding] the programmers and giving them the [mission to] select the best DJs for the different genres, even interviewing interns and seeing the patterns there. We had a rush of interns from Connecticut School of Broadcasting, particularly when it shut down briefly; these kids have so much passion for radio and new technology – they wanted to intern here instead of a radio station because they see the growth in this sector.
[In the course of a day] I’m scheduling music, working with jocks, working with promotions and marketing, and getting ready for the next set of stations. We hope to double the number of stations we have for our [full-scale] launch in September—I’m working on Latin and Dance stations … I’m working on the imaging. We hired Mike Young from New Zealand, who I think is the best imager in the world … He really sounds different and sets us apart.
Was there any programming research involved?
RW: The only research was looking at listening trends and seeing where people were going. You could see the growth in the streaming audience. You could see how [every aspect of] the marketplace is going on line. Radio is the last [major medium] that hasn’t been transformed by the Internet. TV has Hulu and YouTube. There’s everything from Wall Street Journal blogs and the Huffington Post to people who blog for their own friends. Radio hadn’t gone through that. We tried to stay away from [traditional] research. We can see the response from our product.
TH: On the music side, it’s very refreshing for me to not rely on talking to 30 people on the phone who are representing a market of 17 million people. Stepping away from heavy research for me is great. We put together tracking sheets where we look at the top 100 blog mentions, the most-posted songs on Facebook, the iTunes Music Store, the MySpace charts, YouTube, MTV.com. We’ll glance at Mediabase and BDS charts to see what’s happening on FM, but it doesn’t affect us at all. It’s all based on the on-line user.
It has been great to work [outside of label priorities and charts]. I now have the ability to take a chance on a record and really go out and support a record and if it doesn’t react in a week, we can back off and that’s a freedom that I haven’t had. Z100 made excellent decisions, but very analytical and very calculated decisions. We have more freedom and can attack the niche audience.
Rock-It radio is a great example of going after a young audience . [That audience supports the]Warped tour and Bamboozle, but there’s no home for them anywhere on FM or even on Sirius XM. And it’s a really huge scene. The feedback we saw from all over the world in just the few hours is just assurance that you can create something for a niche audience and it can still be huge, and you can get big, big numbers because you’re not just dealing with one market.
How have the labels been through all of this? Even some people with great relationships have felt abandoned once they weren’t at a chart reporter radio station.
TH: The labels have been great. They all love the technology. They’re very excited to see what’s going to happen in the next few months … And I’m sure that has a lot to do with our relationships over the past decade. Everybody was very intrigued. I made my rounds around the city and presented to every label that has a New York office. They’ve been particularly incredible in the indie label space because they [already rely so heavily] on their on-line [strategy].
Tell us how your partnerships work.
TH: [When you’re targeting] niche audiences, finding somebody like FriendsOrEnemies.com, which is run by Crush Management, which has 20 or 30 bands in that space, is the absolute perfect partner … Pete Wentz runs that site, he is so involved in that world … It’s really important to me that when we’re doing partner sites that they make sense for the format and that we’re capturing the audience that we want to reach. And when you get somebody like Friends Or Enemies to put you up on their site, you’re getting a huge audience right away … it’s really grass roots marketing.
Do your partners have any involvement in the music process?
TH: We involve them in music calls. AllHipHop is great, they’ve turned me on to a lot of songs. [There are a lot of people leaking songs] in the Urban space, and they’re going to do it to the biggest site in Hip-Hop. We’re able to secure some excellent content that we might not [otherwise] be able to get right away with these partners.
You were able to launch with sponsors from day one. What is the spotload now and what’s the most it will ever be?
RW: We’re running about 4-5 units an hour right now. We’ll never play more than 3 minutes of commercials an hour. We don’t ever want to start running :60s. We want to keep the spots at :10-:15.
Who do you see as your competition? Is it terrestrial radio? Other Webcasters?
RW : This is not a scarcity mentality. This is a growing space with millions of people arriving at the party. The audience today is more than it was six months ago and smaller than it will be next year. On our niche indie rock station or RockIt radio, we’re getting kids that have abandoned traditional radio. On Just Hits, there’s some of that, but also we pay a lot of attention to what’s happening on-line … We just have to provide a service for them and they’ll find us.
TH: [People are finding us through our] partner strategy. The Lollapalooza website gets insane hits. So when people see Lollapalooza radio powered by Goom [on our Indie channel], they’ll check us out It’s not necessarily from FM or satellite or any other online group. We’re not really targeted to take listeners from anybody. We’re doing things slightly differently and hoping people respond to that.
There are almost daily blog posts about the new generation of listeners and how they will never again be interested in anything other than choosing their own music. Can that be true?
TH: No, I don’t think so. We really look at ourselves as audio bloggers and curators. Goom is a twofold process. We have premium stations that are professionally programmed … then you have the user -generated radios [that will be available in the fall], but people still need an avenue to discover new music. The goal is that these premium stations act as a roadmap for the user to create their own station. If you like Tastemaker but you want to put your own twist on it, you hit the clone button, you get our top 200 stations, you can take out what you don’t want and add what you do want. It doesn’t have to be indie rock. You can put a Madonna record on. But it acts as the roadmap to create your user station.
In three years, where do you think the bulk of listening to what we now know as radio will be taking place?
RW: It seems to me that there’s a general trend toward your mobile phone. It could be in-dash [broadband] through your mobile Bluetooth or some other functionality … If you listen to our stream and compare it to Pandora or Slacker or FM, it’s a much fuller sound, that’s the real game changer for us and a disruptive force in the on-line radio space.
I’d been planning to spare you the “how is Goom different from Pandora” question, but since you brought it up …
RW: Pandora is a really cool service. What differentiates us is the combination of professional content and the ability to customize it. It’s a whole positive experience that people have. People really enjoy radio and what they like is the community and shared experience and the feeling of an event happening, whether it’s an artist in the studio or new music breaking. It’s really more of a total music experience than just a playlist.
TH: I’ll take a human being offering me music over an algorithm any day.
RW: We like people.