By now we’re coming into March and I’m WAY behind on icepicks, general reviews, interviews and so forth. Most of what I’ve been doing has been focused on having to move off my independent style where I paid all the PROs on my own and did what I wanted to do. 2017 saw that die and I had to move Renegade Radio to Live365.
On the last run I would shudder at the thought of having to use a service like this but it’s become more than apparent that many simply don’t want random internet radio to have to deal with. Our own numbers are also not what they used to be in traffic as people move to custom playlists and a simple stream w/o content really isn’t as appealing as it used to be. There has been a move away from standard steaming radio and if you don’t have a specific show to tune into people have moved on. Rest assured however, we’re not going anywhere, however. We’re here for the music we love and believe in and now that the tech stuff is behind us, more will come on the content side.
Which also meant I had to redo the site a lot under the covers, so to speak. I’ve still got work to do in order to increase SEO and who knows what rules will be put in place next but we soldier on and shout out CHECK OUT THESE GUYS!!! when we can, as best we can.
So, what have we been doing? Well we/I (I’ll use these interchangeably through the article so forgive me now) first had to test Live365 to see if it would work as a total solution. Sadly at first we didn’t think so, but the service would allow piping in from another source, so airtime.pro, or normal provider, could still do our scheduling and go into Live365 w/o issue. Well, ‘w/o – without’ issue would be incorrect. We’ve ran into many problems along the way and while both companies have been great in working with us in the end I/we’ve chosen to simplify and just go with Live365. We lose some scheduling and ability to do pre-recorded shows *directly* I don’t really care as most who did that are gone now anyway near as I can tell.
If you’d like to do a show, hit me up but be warned you build your own audience. J
In all these changes, Facebook promo is dead. It never really drove much to the stream, shows, or site, but we’d get a lot of views and if popular news, we’d get a LOT MORE views in the range of thousands. Since the advent of RUSSIANS and the hyper sensitive monitoring of accounts and so forth, we rarely break a few hundred views of a post anymore, even on the socially trending ones we repost / share. The only activity we get in our facebook inbox anymore is facebook saying HEY – PEOPLE BOOST THIS POST AND FOR $20 YOU CAN BOOST IT TOO! and I just can’t take that anymore and have given up boosting. I’ve boosted posts and while I get a great return on facebook views, only a small % came to the site or listened to a stream or show.
Now we’ll be looking to remarket in other areas and find others of interest and seeing how we can be more interactive as a base site vs. relying on external sources such as facebook and others. That prompted my needing to redo the site for better SEO as listed above.
Back to Live365 as I jump around (jump jump, jump around!) and the interaction with airtime.pro. for the most part great but given my own horrible meta-tags in my several hundred gig music library, the way Live365 culled the stream for info and icecast in general, our play history was all over the map and that’s bad for reporting. It also caused a HELL OF A LOT of repeats on songs where they shouldn’t be repeating. A quick shout out to L365 told me to fix my meta.
My last weekend was just that and it was the equivalent of cleaning out your garage. Needed to be done but you never wanted to do it. Magic MP3 Pro however made this pretty painless overall. I did have to break up entire collections into a back up system and edit them, change file name conventions and retag them properly, put the library back together and rebuild my L365 autodj.
And THAT is where we are today. Between the site updates that were needed, server changes for legal reasons, and a loss of some shows along the way we’re once again retrenching but going nowhere as long as the industry will allow us to in some form.
So – look for more stories and reviews coming soon, interviews by all of us at some point (Michael Sweet from Styper to be scheduled!) and me getting out more to do local photography and interest in the local scene to bring different types of content in to supplement the articles and stream.
The world is changing and we’re going to do our best to keep up and keep bringing new and classic rock and roll. We could hit the motherload if we put up some fake news or got political but I’d rather have light traffic and heavy traffic of politics. Most people come to these places to get away from the day in and day out bitching so we want to run with that.
Check out the stream updates as we’ve got classics and even the new Godsmack, Dorothy, Five Finger Death punch and then local Renegade Bands such as Dark Avenue, Blacktop Mojo, Thrilldriver and so much more ready to roll and have you hear. Look, you can even share the Live365 player, so please do. 🙂
iceberg
0