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It 's Been A Year Since Landow, His Stable Of 25 DJs And Pussy-Cat Mascots Hugo And Starla, Started Broadcasting Y-Not Over The Net From His West Philly Home.
It's been a year since Landow, his stable of twenty-five DJs and cat mascots Hugo and Starla, started broadcasting Y-Not over the Web from his West Philly home. "Or, the Bunker, as we call it," Landow claimed.
His goal is to keep on the legacy of Y100, playing similar music without the restraints of corporate playlists, allowing the DJs to play deep album cuts or indie bands, so long as they fit with the station's identity.
Since Y-Not started broadcasting at ynotradio.net, Landow has paid all fees -- about $1,000 a month, including streaming, royalties and promotion -- out of his own pocket, supported by a part time job at radio trade mag FMQB. He earns no income and all the DJs work for free . Ideally, Landow would like to get sponsors or partner with another organization, but doing things like selling ads isn't part of his DNA. Latterly the station has began to take donations to defray costs.
In a perfect world, Landow would be back on earthly radio. He still has a soft spot in his heart for the FM dial. Not to mention, the FM listeners.
The amount of folks tuning into Y-Not fluctuates, but on a recent Wed. morning, 93 were listening. He admits it's not a huge number and it's a far cry from the average 384,000 weekly listeners logged by Arbitron in Y100's final years. But Landow is philosophical. "It's just pleasant to know somebody's listening." Y-Not broadcasts through Net radio network Live 365, which works out the approval for a station by measuring listener hours. As of Monday, Y-Not had logged 21,361 total listening hours.
"To get a station over 1,000 or two thousand is pretty difficult," claimed Chris Houghton, online-marketing executive at Live 365. Y-Not is the fourth- most-popular alternative rock radio stations that broadcasts through Live 365. And Y-Not differs substantially from the three more favored stations because it deals with a Philadelphia audience, not a worldwide one.
Landow mans the mic Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. Till he's relieved by another DJ. Y-Not is on air twenty-four hours per day with a live host curating and introducing music from 9 a.m. To ten or eleven p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. To 4 p.m. On Saturdays. On Sundays and the off hours, Landow puts the station on auto-pilot.
"Realistically, I want to have my living room to myself one day a week," he claimed.
Sound salvation When most radio stations go offline, DJs scatter to available jobs and listeners find new buttons on their radios. But the former Y100, once called Y-Rock, has declined to go down quietly.
Its first death was Feb 2005, in a wave of format-switches away from alternative rock, when owners Radio One made a decision to switch to a popular hip hop sound. Programme chief Jim McGuinn led the troops to a spare room in his South Philly house and Y100 Rocks was born. "I thought that if we kept the audience together in one place and we kept some semblance of a staff, that someone with an FM frequency could be entrapped to re launch the format," declared McGuinn, now a programme director at the Current, a public-radio station in St. Paul, Minn.
The liberty of Web radio was exciting for McGuinn and Landow, especially after the increasingly company management of the final years of Y100. "For the people who worked at the first Y100, doing the Web thing was getting back to why we got into the business in the first place," McGuinn announced. "We were the people that wanted to come over and sit on your couch and play you some really cool record that we found.
The Web enables us to get back to that initial impulse that brings the general public to radio, or should." With almost no competition in the alternative market at that point and a contact list of fifty thousand email addresses, Y100 Rocks flourished. "It incidentally turned into a business and a thriving Web radio station," McGuinn expounded, who credits volunteers for helping the station file for taxes and ensure everything was legal. "We were blown away when listeners and members of the community wanted to join."
In July 2006, McGuinn recounted to his volunteer staff that Y100 Rocks would become a part of WXPN as a new service that would appeal to a younger audience, Y-Rock on WXPN. Until last year, Y-Rock was broadcast over the airwaves for ten hours each week and around the clock online on XPN's HD-2 channel,writes tagza.com.
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