Back To Where It All Started…

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When Second Shifters first started, when the thought of it was still just a foggy idea, one of the first things to come into focus was the idea of working directly with the artists.

As a radio station, and as a site that focused on a darker theme, that meant interviews with groups that fit the genre. One of the first bands bands we played on the station was a perfect place to start.

Merry Widow had been recommended by a long time friend1, and they couldn’t have been a better match. The band had been around long enough to have released their first album and to have gained a following that was starting to grow beyond the borders of Jacksonville, but they were still at a place where they could find extra time to devote to an interview with an unknown online station that was just starting to find its bearings. And most importantly, they were willing to see if it led anywhere.

Florida… wasn’t exactly close. It was twenty hours of driving away from that little town in Illinois where Second Shifters was born. This was important though. It was the first time… the first interview… and it was worth doing everything possible to get it right.

Except bringing a microphone…

So much had been planned for. Interview questions memorized – Check. Software that could handle recording a full interview in the best quality possible – Check. A custom-built computer, a monitor, a keyboard, mouse, and speakers – All check. (Why not just bring a laptop? It was 2003 – Those were way too expensive.)

Up to this point, though, everything spoken on Second Shifters had been with a headset, because there was never anyone else in the room. A normal microphone that could be passed around between people in the same room – it hadn’t ever been needed.

Luckily, Merry Widow had one they were happy to bring along.

The interview started out great. Everything was flowing smoothly. Until looking over to the screen to see that the audio had stopped recording after a minute because of forgetting to enter the license key for Cool Edit Pro.

Son of a bitch…

Round two.

Everything went perfectly this time. The band had a good story to tell for almost every question. And the 45-minute recording saved successfully. Thank fucking God. (Or Goddesses, or Allah, or Satan, or Syntrillium Software. Whoever is responsible – They deserve praise.)

When it came time to debut the interview on air, there were some decisions to make about the best way to present it for everyone to hear, and to help bring a focus to the music, and most importantly, the people that made it.

The more and more that thought rolled around, the more and more it became clear that there was a big part of that 45-minute recording that was important to make it all happen, but that wasn’t needed in the final form of what went on air.

It was the questions.

In every answer that they gave, and in every story that they told, Xelana, Georgie, and Sketch had given a self-contained something that spoke entirely for itself. The interview didn’t need the interviewer’s voice. It needed the music that the band was speaking about, to make it complete.

So, that’s what played on the station – the artists that made up Merry Widow, mixed with the music they had created.

It was stumbled on by accident, but it focused on exactly the right thing – them.

As Second Shifters starts over again, the direction we want to face is the same one that we were facing back at the start. We want to focus on the artists, and on what they create.

…And we hope that you’ll join us for where that path leads.

  1. Thank you Adria. ↩︎

Returning to Second Shifters: Music

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It begins with a sound from out of the silence…

Discord Chat

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We have a new Discord chat for anyone that would like to join in. It should let everyone keep up a little more easily, and you can even use it on your phone. You can follow the invite link or use the ‘Chat’ link at the top of the site to get there. We look forward to seeing you there. We’d promise not to bite too, but…

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

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Last week, online radio died for small broadcasters in the U.S… Barely anyone noticed, because the recording industry has been inching them closer and closer to that fate for years. It’s a sad thing… not just for for the people devoted to running their own stations, but for the independent artists that they helped introduce to the world too.

Back when Second Shifters first started, we began by doing everything we could to make sure we were staying legal with the way we did our broadcasts. We paid ASCAP and BMI for performance rights, the same way that AM/FM stations do, but then we realized that online stations (unlike regular radio stations) also needed to pay the RIAA, thanks to new laws that treated broadcasting on the internet as if it was giving out free CDs to all the listeners who tuned in. It was extremely costly to handle, and after a lot of debating and a lot of late nights trying to figure out the best thing to do, we decided that joint licensing was the only real option that we had.

With joint licensing, smaller stations could pool their resources and split the costs of royalties between each other. Since most of the licensing was based around how much profit a station made, being a station that wasn’t centered around making money was suddenly a benefit. The minimums for all the licensing agencies together were enough to stop most independent stations from even starting if they were by themselves, but grouped together, the stations could split that $3,000 much more easily. It worked out pretty well.

What we didn’t see coming though, was just how hard the RIAA wanted to fight anything and everything that involved music broadcasting online. Napster had come and gone before we started broadcasting in 2003, but Kazaa and BitTorrent were there to take its place, and the recording industry was out for blood at any mention of the internet.

Even though iTunes and other online music stores did help to calm their rage a bit as they grew, there was still no stopping the rise of free downloads, and that meant a lot of legitimate sites and devoted music fans getting caught in the crossfire.

It didn’t matter that streaming radio wasn’t giving people the ability to download what they played. It didn’t matter that the people who ran those smaller stations were some of the most dedicated fans the music industry could ask for. And it didn’t matter that quite a few of the online radio websites were doing everything they could to give people links to buy songs from the artists they loved. They could play by all the rules, follow all the regulations, and spend their last dimes paying for the royalties to keep going, but those stations were something the RIAA didn’t have full control over, and they didn’t have private deals with them the same way they did with Apple, and with Spotify, and with the select few others that had the resources of millions in venture capital funding to make those behind the scenes deals with the recording industry.

The smaller stations just weren’t worth dealing with for the RIAA, no matter how hard they tried, so the recording industry did what they do best, and they decided to toss them away to join the many artists who had spent their life’s savings trying to get the attention of those larger labels, only to end up either turned away or signed to contracts that took every last penny of the money they made.

One after another after another, every joint licensing program that’s popped up over the years has been forced out of business. It started with SWCast, and then with their end came LoudCity. After LoudCity stopped, StreamLicensing.com came along to try to give those small online stations a home. And then, on June 14th, StreamLicensing.com sent out its goodbye letter, with the only place left to turn to a site that charges so much, very few small webcasters could even afford it, but then with a listener hours cap added on top of that, that won’t let them go over an average of 9 listeners at a time, even on the most expensive plan that they offer.

Year after year, the royalties that the joint licensing programs have had to pay have gone up and up and up, and the costs they’ve had to pass on to the stations that were with them have slowly strangled the life from all but the very last few. It’s one of the reasons that led Second Shifters to stop broadcasting at the end of 2015. Sadly, it looks like the final nails have been driven into the coffin of the ones that were left.

With that end though, maybe it’s a chance for new beginnings too. Keep an eye out for some more announcements that might just be on the way from us.

(Image Credit: Simone_ph on Pixabay)