Episode 768 Transcript

FLOSS-768

Jonathan Bennett: This is Floss Weekly, episode 768, recorded January 31st. Open Source Radio. Hey, this week we're talking with Tony Zioli, the founder of NetMix, and the guy behind the Radio Station WordPress plugin. We talk with him about open source radio, the history of internet radio, and more. You do not want to miss it.

So stay tuned.

Well, good morning. It is time for Floss Weekly. It's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we've got a real treat today because our co host is the, the venerable Doc Searles.

Doc Searls: Venerable, but not venerated, I hope. Yeah, yeah, I was the, the, the last host for the Old Floss Weekly, which is, I guess, like a 14, 15 year old podcast, you know, from back when there were dozens of podcasts.

Literally dozens of them. It's really taking off. There are dozens of them. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I rode that one to the end. No, no, it's not the end. And now you've picked, you've jumped on that horse and the express continues.

Jonathan Bennett: Yes, and Doc, I'm, I'm happy to have you back. We were, we were talking about in email, but ahead of time I haven't really got to talk to Doc since the end of the show.

And I miss it. I miss it. I miss Doc. So I was, I was thrilled when he was I miss Jonathan too. Yeah, it's true. I was thrilled when Doc was willing to come back and I think that'll be great to have him from time to time as one of the rotating co hosts. So today, today we're talking about radio. Surprise, surprise.

I mean, that's why we have Doc on and we're going to talk with Tony Zioli about NetMix and essentially about internet radio. And Doc, you're sort of all over this, aren't you?

Doc Searls:  Yeah, I'm an old radio guy. My nickname, Doc, is a fossil remnant of a character I had on the radio called Dr. Dave. There are too many Davids in the world, so I got this nickname.

And it's back, I mean this is old fashioned radio, so Duke University had a a commercial radio station, a student talked the president of the college to, into buying a local FM station because the owners thought that AM was the whole thing. And they had a little AM daytime station and they let this thing go.

The station is now by far number one in the Raleigh Durham market, but. Back then we were totally freeform college radio. We were also commercial and we had ads that we couldn't sell. So I made made up ads for things that didn't exist. I conducted inter, and that, that was a hit. And so I, I, I started, you know, you know, we had the mumbling pines apartment village and, you know, we have very long instructions on how to get there and end up only yards away from the interstate.

That's great. Anyway, so. And that was not for very long, but it, I, I, I became notorious that way. And then and then I started a business with another guy named David and and cause there are too many Davids, and, and he was possessive of it. So they started calling me just Dr. Dave and that turned into Doc.

But anyway, I've, I've been, I've been obsessed with radio since I was a kid. I, I lived with the radio under my pillow growing up. I listened to everything. I still try to, when internet radio took off, I was on top of it when the very first station, WXYC in Chapel Hill came on, and then when KPIG came on in California, you know, using you know, streaming, I guess MP3s at the time, I don't know what, but that was a thing.

And so I've been all over it, and I follow what Tony's been doing, because he's very active on the same list that I'm on, called Fo, or Fa. which is the correct pronunciation, but close enough anyway. Yeah,

Jonathan Bennett: so I, I do, I, I have been around, it feels like to me, I've been around internet radio for a long time.

It was early 2000s for me probably around 2002, 2003, somewhere in that era, maybe, maybe a couple years after. But I got hooked on WCPE, the classical station. And they were also one of the first, maybe the first, I don't know, classical stations to have an internet stream. But the thing that was so interesting about them is that they had an AugVorbis stream.

So I've been, I've been Linux only for a long time.

Doc Searls: And for those That dates you, because Aug was just The thing back then. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett: But in the early days of Linux, there were still patents on mp3. And so you just couldn't play mp3s on Linux, particularly if you used a distro like Fedora. And so, you know, it was really, it was really useful back then to finally find, you know, somebody doing internet radio music that I actually liked, classical music, and they had an Augstream.

And I'm curious. And let's go ahead and bring Tony on. I'm curious, how many of these different things that we know about, did Tony actually have a hand in? Cause he's been doing internet radio since like 1996. Tony, welcome to the show and give us. What, what's, what have you been doing since 1996? How have you been plugged into this thing?

Give us

Doc Searls: the background. Among the too many things you've been doing.

Tony Zeoli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So many things that I do. Right. I so thank you very much for having me on the show today. This is awesome. And I appreciate, you know, that, that I'm here with Doc who I share a listserv with and, and when Doc. I said pho or pha, it's because the list serve is really an ode to the actual bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup that some Phosters or the pha group like to get together in different cities and and talk about internet, copyright, streaming, music, royalties.

And all these kinds of things, and we get together and do that in different cities around the country, around the world, if somebody's in the city, say, let's meet for pho, let's meet for pho, and we might have four or five guys or, or, or women you know, meet at a local Vietnamese restaurant. But what happened for me is, I actually have been involved in the internet since 19, I'm gonna even go back further to 94, 93, 94.

My father had given me a compact computer desktop and I was playing around with it and I was on Prodigy and CompuServe early but then I saw AOL Beta come out and I got onto AOL Beta. And when I was on AOL Beta, I was also a DJ in Boston. I was a club DJ, a Billboard Dance Chart reporting DJ at some of the major clubs in the Boston area.

And, you know, I, I just said to myself, well, where are the, where are the DJs? Where's the streaming? Like, where's the music? Because there was no streaming back then. Right. You know, it was like, you could talk about it, but you couldn't hear it. And I think that Jim Griffin Had done a MP three distribution in 1991 of, or 1990 or 91 of a, an Aerosmith record.

And Jim Griffin is a, a long time music industry I'm gonna say legend. Basically, he, he was at Geffen, I think, and Aral works before that or something like that. But he did something with Aerosmith. But then when I was looking to the, you know, to the, to the worldwide web at the time, which was only a OL to me.

I didn't find any audio, so I had, I had to go out and look for it and I had to say, well, where is the audio component here? And I didn't really know anything about open source at the time. So forgive me. I had to look to a technology called real audio, which was coming out of Seattle, right? Real audio.

And I then said to myself, okay, well, if I want to put myself, I want, I want to put my mix, this is on the internet, or maybe mixes of my friend. In the industry. And I also, I also worked for a record label and I was working in the dance and electronic music industry at the time. And I really knew some of the world's most influential DJs because I had to work with them promote, market them, sign record deals and these kinds of things.

So you know, I just, it just got into my head. I'm a local DJ. How do I get international? And I found real audio and I went to internet, internet world. I remember internet world. It was a. Big giant conference where all the internet new internet companies would converge You know in new york city at the javits center or in boston at the world trade center And so I went to internet world, I think Maybe 94 95 And you know, I had gotten that computer.

I went, let me just step back, got that computer, went on AOL, started looking around, my girlfriend at the time in 92, 90, 92, 93, brought me to a friend's house at Harvard University. And he was on Telnet before before Netscape, you know, Navigator came out, right? Before Mosaic came out. And all that. So he introduced me to the internet, to the concept that it was there and you could share, you could share files over the web.

But I took that away and didn't do anything with it until I went to Internet World and saw the Real Audio booth. And Real Audio was simply just at a basic small table with a small banner. You know, now they're a billion dollar company, right? But they were just two guys and they were like, this is what we're doing.

And I was like, oh, that's super cool. You know, they showed me, oh, here's a baseball. Broadcast that we did with Major, to test with Major League Baseball. Oh, you can stream over the internet. Oh, this is how you can do it. So I went, I still didn't do anything with it yet. I went back to DJing. Was in a nightclub one night.

One of the guys I knew started one of the first internet web development companies in Boston. This guy named Jason Mayo. And he came up to me and said, Hey, do you have any ideas for the web? And I was like, yeah, I really want to put DJs online. And I saw this thing called Real Audio. But I guess it's a game.

Expensive. There's, you know, it wasn't open source at the time, and it was, it was like 10, 000 just to buy the server technology, right? So he said, well, if you have some ideas, you know, write it down on paper and, you know, come in to see me and we'll chit chat about it. So I did some mock ups on some just basic blank paper.

Now, now I use OmniGraffle, right? Or any, you know, any kind of, you know, information architecture software to, to, to present. You know, web layouts, but back then it was just paper and pen, right? So paper and pen, drew up my ideas, brought it to Jason. He was like, that's cool. Well, let's check out this real audio stuff.

So he ended up investing in the real audio platform. They had the money to do that. He ended up investing it. And then I paid a monthly fee and I built my website. And then I started putting the first DJs myself and other DJs like Paul Oakenfold, online Van Helden, Tony Humphries, Carl Cox. You know, from from the start of it 1996 through 2000, I moved it from Boston to New York in 1996 and partnered with a record promotion company, a music promotion company down in Soho, and I just kept kept it going and grew netmix dot com to a million unique visitors by by June of 2000.

When we exited with another company that acquired us, it was a youth aggregator. And so I really took it from 2000. You know, from my bedroom in Brookline, Massachusetts and Boston to, you know, to New York City. And then was part of that whole Web 1. 0 startup doing streaming music and, you know, then Napster.

I was even pre Napster. You know, I was, I was 1996 and Napster didn't come out until like in, I think 97 or 98. So you know, I was really the world, one of the world's leading websites, streaming DJ mixes on the internet. At the time. So that's how, that's how I really got started.

Jonathan Bennett: Yeah. So there, there's, boy, there's several things there that it's really fascinating.

One of the first ones that comes to mind is, you know, I was, I was kind of aware of I'm, I'm fairly young. But that was about the time when I was really coming to start playing with computers too. And thinking back to those days Trying to play music streaming was about all that a poor, a single poor computer could do.

And, you know, we compare it to nowadays. We have our, our, our beasts of desktops. You can have three or four different YouTube videos playing at once. All of them with 1920 by 1080 video as well as the audio. And

Tony Zeoli: We can do this. What are we doing

Jonathan Bennett: right now? We can do this. We can do, we can do a, you know, a live interview with video.

It, it's really, it's pretty interesting to me that pretty much as soon as computers got powerful enough to do live audio, there were people out there like, like you, Tony, and like the real audio guys that went, let's make this happen. And it, it's just, it, it, it, it kind of tickles my my geek bone, I guess.

That, that we've turned to using this tool for music as quickly as we did. It's, it's pretty fascinating

Tony Zeoli: to me. Yeah, it is amazing in Boston. Is really, you know, MIT, MITRE, is really where the internet started, so it was in my backyard where they started building, you know, there's that book, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, I don't know if you've read that, but it's a really great history of the internet, how it started at MIT Research and Stanford, and connecting the dots, and through ARPANET, and stuff, so yeah, somebody taking on me just being a DJ, I didn't go to call, I didn't really go back to school until I was in my late thirties, so I didn't come from a collegiate.

I was just a local guy, local dj, just trying to do something big and innovated on my own, given the impetus of Jason building a web development company. Mm-Hmm and given the real audio guy showing up in my backyard at at the World Trade Center. You know, and help me see the vision of the future. And you know what's funny is, I used to walk down the street in Boston, Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna put DJs on the internet.

And you know, all my other DJ friends were like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'll never, that'll never last. The internet, what's that? I was like, you gotta be kidding me. You know, and I have a really quick funny story about that, Is that in New York City in 2008, Travis Kalanick from Uber, was launching Uber. So I was at a tech meetup, and he hands me his card, I didn't know him.

I was at a tech meetup, there's like 200 people in the room, he hands me a card, and and I should know better, I should know better, but he hands me a card, and he says, here, you should try my new service, and I looked at the card and it said Uber. And I was like, nah, I live in New York City, there's taxis everywhere.

What happened? Why would I want to take They take this car service, and it'll probably be more expensive, and it'll never last, and now, you know, it's, I, I get in Ubers all the time, it's the funniest thing. So you can't sleep on new technology as the, as the, you know. It's the theory there, like you just can't sleep

Jonathan Bennett: on it.

And I think, I think the other half of that is it's so hard to tell which ideas are going to take root and take off and which, and which ideas are just not going to. Right. So many, so many times I've seen or even had some scheme and it's like, oh man, this is going to be huge. And it's not, nothing ever happens.

You know, it's so difficult to figure out how to. You know, get the lightning in the bottle. Well,

Tony Zeoli: let's go into that. Let's go into open source, right? Yes, that's right. Yeah, I was just waiting to get on that one. Yeah, so that's a perfect segue. Because in 1999, 2000, when I was trying to, you know, grow NetMix, I looked at my developer and said, there must be some kind of platform, some kind of software that we could use to automate.

Netmix and allow DJs to upload themselves and at that point I saw a typo three and then I saw Mambo in the open source world of CMS's and I kind of pushed him and he He may say that maybe because he didn't feel like doing it or whatever I didn't understand it all at the time, right, but I started hearing about Content management systems and I was like, well, how can that help netmix?

And we didn't get to that, and that was the death of us by not getting into content management, by not adopting open source. So now fast forward to 2004, I'm working at the Associated Press, and I'm looking at Movable Type, which was a proprietary CMS for blog publishing. And I'm looking at WordPress, which just launched.

In 2003, 2003, 2004, and I then, like I chose real audio, even though that wasn't open source, I chose WordPress in 2003, 2004 to latch onto because of the user experience and how they had laid that out and actually going through Mambo Jumla and Type 03 and seeing how difficult that was to utilize for someone like myself.

So that is where innovation happens. In the open source community, you know, how someone like myself takes that on and then brings it into my world. And that's what I've been using, you know, for the last 20, 20 plus years.

Jonathan Bennett: Yeah. And, and so there was There's kind of a phoenix from the ashes. I don't know where that, where that fits into this because you sold out of NetMix just before the dot com crash.

Right. I don't know if that was luck or if you saw, if you were able to read the tea leaves. But

Tony Zeoli: we were working on that for, we were working on that deal for about eight months. Okay. So it was, you know, they had raised about a million and a half. And they were acquiring companies with some of that money.

So we were working, so the deal closed. It was, you know, the deal closed on June 1st. So I got out because I needed support. I, you know, I knew I couldn't do it myself. I needed more people. I needed, I needed investment. They were gonna buy the company, employ us, invest in NetMix, and keep on growing it. And they did, but they couldn't survive the dot com 1.

0. Nobody could survive. I mean You know, I was at the last great party though, in New York City on , on, on Ellis Island. It was like two massive sound stages. We all took, it was bo I think it was box.com or box.net, I think back at the time. box.net. Mm-Hmm. . And they took everybody over on, on Harbor Cruise ships.

There was like 2000 people went over to Ellis Island. And we partied until like 2 a. m. and took boats back. And that was, those were some good times. Yeah,

Jonathan Bennett: I believe it. I believe it. Yeah. And so we're, we're in this net mix coming back. You were able, you were able to get the, the name at least going forwards.

Where does that fit into this story?

Tony Zeoli: Yeah. So in 2019 I was putzing around at a radio station here in Asheville, 103. 7. It's a local LPFM and I was working on their website and I bumped into this WordPress plugin called Radio Station that was developed by a woman named Nikki Blight out in Colorado.

It was modeled after Drupal, a Drupal plugin. Sort of the same type of opportunity, but no one had advanced that Drupal plug in and Nikki took over, took it, took over the concept, applied it to WordPress, built the plug in. I found the plug in, thought it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do, contacted her.

She said it wasn't something that she was interested in sustaining any longer. And so she asked me if I wanted to take it over. So I said sure I jumped at the chance because always an innovator always an entrepreneur I saw an opportunity, you know working with lpfms where this could benefit you know this this free and open source plugin could benefit these lpfms and I could potentially turn that into a freemium plugin which we did into radio station radio station pro and I say it's by netmix because I wanted to utilize the Netmix brand in some way since I still had control over it, and I own the IP, I own the patent, I mean, not the patent, I'm sorry, the trademark for Netmix and for streaming audio over the internet streaming audio and video over the internet, so I need to use The sur the the name to apply to the trademark, right?

That, that now you know, is the parent company of Radio Station Pro and, and radio station free. And that's how it all plays together. You know, I hadn't really been doing anything with Nimex since the early two thousands. I tried to do something here or there, but then I got busy working and, you know, trying to go back to school and all those kinds of things.

So now I saw the perfect opportunity. So now what Netm Mix represents is netm mix.com. Is the radio station aggregator. It's it's the, the directory. So it's a directory for anyone who's using radio station free or pro plugin can get listed in the directory. So it's anybody that's in the WordPress world.

It's not all stations. It's only WordPress stations using our software. So I thought that was unique and a nice way to use netmix to highlight those stations that might opt in to want to ping the directory and feature themselves. The feature themselves there.

Doc Searls: So, so, Tony, I have a question about copyright and handling, reporting, and paying for playing on, on internet radio.

And, in part because I was, I paid an awful lot of attention to this back, oh, as far as 1998 when the DMCA came along. Mm hmm. And, and basically said, okay, you guys have to work to, we're not going to set any rates or anything like that. We're going to work this out for ourselves. And the RIAA and the record industry had really seen the internet as a threat very early on, as early on as 95.

And they made sure that the DMCA, starting in October of 98, had this category called webcasting. That's what they call it. Very familiar. Internet radio webcasting. Right. Yeah. And, and, and, and actually came up with some. some rates which amounted to, you know, a few thousandths of a cent per, per play, per listener.

So there was a level of accountability that was not even contemplated by over the air radio. And over the air radio never had to pay any of this kind of stuff. They still don't want to, and it almost doesn't matter anymore because over the air radios is in trouble and and, but in the meantime, I'm, I'm wondering if, if the software you're, You're providing takes care of that.

I remember there was an open source thing called Riverside River something. It was done by Salem. Mm-Hmm. , the Salem Broadcasting group, religious broadcasters. But they had good open source. And, and that handles some of that for your, the more major stations. Right. But I don't know if is, does that, does it handle some of it, does it handle reporting and does it handle well?

Tony Zeoli: That's a good question. Yeah. That's a good question. So radio station free has an audio player, but WordPress has an audio player. It's just an audio player, right? Any embedded audio player that you can get, whether it's open source or whether it's proprietary, it's just a functional software. If the person chooses to use it to stream music, then that's on, that's their responsibility because I can.

I can embed any audio I want in a WordPress, using the WordPress player in a WordPress page. I'm responsible as the streamer for signing up for that, that licensing with ASCAP, BMI, CSAC, Exchange, right? So we just provide the, the software to allow you to stream, and we have it in our terms and, and conditions, and we don't, we don't host the streams either.

We hosted the streams, we'd be responsible, so the users of our software may use Live 365. As a matter of fact, we're talking about Right to Live 360. That's a distributor, essentially, right? A distributor essentially of of, of webcast, of webcasting of. And you know internet broadcasting right they charge a certain fee maybe it's three hundred dollars a month or five hundred dollars a month per Number of streams, you know that you incur over the over the monthly period so someone could use a live 365 Audio feed in our player and then live to 65 in that and that that's that customer of life to 65 would then be responsible because they're the ones who are activating the stream outside of radio station and radio station pro and stream player pro.

We're breaking off. The player itself has its own, you know, individual software that and I'll speak to that again in a minute, because there's another point there, but we don't host the stream. So it's when you're hosting the stream, like you know, Grooveshark or any one of these, Napster, right?

They they provided a mechanism to kind of like, you know, host the parts of these files or. Or whatever it was, right, that the industry looked at and said, no, you can't do that. So it's the hosting component that we don't do. Will we do it one day and, you know, and have that licensing component in place?

Well, I think about that, but I look at radio. co, I look at Live265. I look at MixAlert, I look at some of the other platforms, whether they do offer licensing or don't offer licensing, they're the stream hosts, and people take that feed URL, and they can just use it in our player just like they would do in WordPress with an MP3 file.

So, we don't see ourselves as responsible for someone's usage because they need to bring that licensing with them, and we're not, we're not activating their stream. We're only giving them a vehicle. To play the stream, just as they would on their own, on live 65 or in any other service that provides the technology to do that.

So,

Jonathan Bennett: so I want to jump in real quick. You guys are both. Radioheads and you understand all of this very well. I've got a question because I don't understand exactly how this works What is the the difference between? licensing and licensing fees for say an FM radio station and playing music on an internet radio station and Is there a difference if you're just?

Taking that conventional radio station and playing it on the internet. I remember back several years ago, some of the internet, some of the online radio stations I was listening to were talking about some changes to the law that were coming, potentially coming, that was going to shut them down because their licensing fees were going to change.

And that's what happened. I don't, I don't understand. I don't, I don't know much about what actually happened there. So I, I, I leave it to you guys. Give us the, for those of us that don't know, that haven't been following this, what, what is the history

Tony Zeoli: there? I'll defer to Doc to explain the licensing models and the jump between the past and today and the difference in cost.

And then I'll give you an example of a company I used to work with that was affected by that.

Doc Searls: Okay, at the risk of being wrong in the particulars, but right in the general thing the way broadcasting worked the, the artists, the recording artists themselves. And, and the people who produced the music didn't think to get the royalties for that.

It was the composers. So, so, all, everything played on radio, it, the, the, the royalties go to composers, they don't go to the performers. Right. And that's still that way. So when the internet was coming along, the record industry looked at it and said, wait a minute, this is digital, this is accountable, we can put accounting in this thing, and we can.

These are, I mean, because they, and this actually goes back to the early 1900s when And when the composers especially a guy named Victor Herbert, I think it was, heard his music being played in bars and said, wait a minute, I'm not getting paid for that. And, and then when, once records came along, he said, I want to get paid for that.

I want it as a composer, I want a piece of the action. And so the composers got in early on this thing, but the performers got in, didn't get in right away. But once, once the RIAA and the record industry in general. Saw the internet coming along, they said we could, we could make something with this. And so, the, the original, the original language said, in the absence of a, a market with a real buyer and a real seller, we're just gonna set some rates.

I happen to believe we could have real buyers and real sellers. I think, I think listeners would be willing to pay more for music than their, than the Distributors are charging and, and, but basically what happened was that it went from a few thousands of a cent per play per, per They used to call them needle drops, but, you know, from, from the, for, for the, for the play of a song from a few thousands to some larger number.

And by the way, Deals with Apple and Amazon and Spotify, they're all independent. Okay, they're, they're made directly with those giant companies. And one of the reasons you don't hear familiar music on podcasts and podcasts are almost all talk is because you have to clear rights individually for every damn thing you play.

So it's hard to do.

Tony Zeoli: So yeah for every song, but you can't there's no There's no overarching royalty that's only on streaming, but not interactive

Doc Searls: performance. Yeah, so it's, and there's a bunch of arcana in there, you know, mechanical rights, all kinds of stuff, but but what happened was that the, the, the register of copyrights with the, with the feds with the copyright office sort of arbitrarily said, Oh, it's going to be this now.

And it was, it went up and a lot of stations went out of business. Is that close enough, Tony, you

Tony Zeoli: think? Yeah. Especially yeah, that's close enough. The copyright royalty board, the CRB, right? The crb effectively is the board that sets the rates. Yeah. For broad, for, for webcast, you know, for broad internet broadcast.

I

Doc Searls: just a, a real quick interruptive thing. I'm sorry to interrupt, Tony. There was something called the copyright royalty arbitration panel that existed before they realized they, it should be called a copyright arbitration royalty panel. So it turned from crap into Carp Anyway, so. That's a real thing.

Tony Zeoli: Yeah. So I was that's a good one. I was I can't stop laughing. I was I was on the board of advisors for a company called A Tracks whose founder David Porter actually started at Live 365 and he went on to, he works at Amazon Music now in the playlisting division. He started this company called Atrax for all, all playlisting.

Then Spotify came about and the, and the change in the rates basically affected Atrax's ability to, to thrive and survive in that era. I think it was around, I'm gonna say like the end of 2009, like somewhere in the late 2000s, you know, early 2000s, you know, early 2010s, that he was hit by that and he had to take down.

He had to stop operating 8 tracks because they couldn't afford to anymore. So yeah, it definitely eliminated a lot of broadcasters. Which is why I don't host streams! Because, you know, right now you know, Radio Station is really a small company right now. You know, we have Thousands of users across the globe, but most of them are small streamers.

And whether they're Gospel, whether they're LPFMs, whether they're community radio stations in the UK, whether they're, you know, a Spanish radio station in the mountains in Spain and somewhere in Spain, you know, they're predominantly all small webcasts are using the free version, which is something that I'm proud of, of continuing to keep free for them.

And we obviously follow the open source concept of, you know, any feature that we bring into radio station pro, we're gonna obviously offer into radio station free. First, it may be at a limited basis, but it's still going to be in there. And that and that way we can grow radio station free and give people a free and open source tool.

And, you know, if somebody forks us great, that's what it's all about. Right? Yeah. You know, that's what open source is all about. So I'm happy to keep that for you. There's a git, you know, it's on git right now under netmix slash radio hyphen station github. com slash netmix slash radio hyphen station.

Anybody can commit if they want to come in and offer up an idea, they can, you know, issue, you know, do something with the code, issue a pull request. We'll look at it and adopt it. And then, you know, we'll utilize it for, you know, radio station pro, but we may improve upon it. And give it a different look or a different feel or different options that are more pro level.

Because, you know, we need to get paid to support this, so that's why we're doing it as a freemium platform. Because it's something that we love doing, but like some open source projects, and I'm thinking about one of them right now, I won't identify, you know, the guy's really struggling. You know, personally, he's really, really struggling.

And I've been reading reports about it and hearing about it. And, you know, I'm fortunate that I have Digital Strategy Works, which is my web development company. And then my wife has her, you know, small business, too. And we're fortunate to be able to survive and own a house. But, you know, building an open source product and marketing it and responding to support requests and bringing in new ideas, that takes time.

And time needs to be compensated for. So, So yeah, it's really cool what we're doing, I think. And then we're going to be supporting other, other open source platforms like Azuricast, like Libretime to make sure that we integrate with Station. What we, what great at Station really was, it wasn't just the player.

We didn't really have the player at first. We had an A player, but it was a fixed widget player. A widget player means you can embed it in a page, but you didn't have that Spotify or Mixcloud or Soundcloud sticky footer player that persists. We introduced that later on. It's really a show scheduling platform.

If you want to present your show schedule online and you want to say, Oh, here's the dates and times of the shows, here's a show page, here's a playlist that's attached to the show, you know, what we played. So that way it gives radio stations the ability to not have to go into WordPress and configure pages themselves and just slap text in.

It gives them the text and the date pickers and the timestamps and the. And the text field options and all that to, to create a show page with an avatar, with a featured image with the show description that's connected to playlist that's connected to in pro episodes. So we went from, from free, we have shows.

And then in pro we have shows plus episodes. And with episodes, you can then have episodes and you can use. Another open source WordPress plugin like Blue Blue Blurberry or simple podcasting to then podcast a custom post type, which means a custom post types are, I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but in WordPress, you have post pages, media, those are post, those are post types that come with WordPress, custom post types, you introduce Into WordPress that are data sets that are beyond your regular post or your page.

So a data set might be shows and shows might have data attached to them. Time, date. Language, you know place in a geographic region, time zone, that sort of thing, right? And so your show pages have all that data. Then we, we said, Hey, let's introduce this sticky player. So we introduced the sticky footer player, which people love.

They can only buy it in pro. They can't get it in free yet. It's coming to free as a, as a basic player may not have all the options of the pro player. But you'll still have that sticky footer player. And we're releasing stream player pro, which is now out, which is just the player itself and not the whole content management aspect of your radio station shows just getting the stream player.

We are in the process of going through. With wordpress plug in review team to get stream player free into the repo. So we're just fixing some some issues that they found that they're very specific about what you need to do And you have to follow the logic of their development rules So they have they had some feedback for us about two months ago.

We've been fixing that now. We're in new review With the plug in team and we're hoping to get stream player free So it's just that sticky footer player out to within the next few months, as soon as they approve us. So that's, that's kind of the process that we've been following.

Doc Searls: So, so I have a question about your, you mentioned some of your customers, or your users anyway, probably both, are LPFMs.

And for listeners who don't know LPFM stands for low power FMs. They can't be more than a hundred watts, which is a light bulb power or more than a hundred feet off the ground. Which means they go out like two, three, four miles. There's some that have more coverage because they're in fortunate locations but for the most part they're very local.

But if they're also on the internet, they're worldwide. You know, so they may have listeners anywhere. I'm also thinking, as you're going over your own process of iterating what you're doing and your offerings as you get the feedback and you get the development going what happened in the radio stations themselves?

I mean, when I started, there were turntables and you slip cued records that were on these big fat turntables with big flywheels underneath, and then those were replaced by cartridges, you know, and so you'd play the radio. the record once, it would go on a cartridge, and you'd punch buttons that played the cartridges.

For the longest time, you could go into a big station or a small station, and the studio looked the same. It was like, you had a board, and the board had knobs on it, and you had cartridge machines over here, and you hear the ads over in this cartridge pile, and there's songs on this one, and, and

Tony Zeoli: now Fortunately, cartridges are

Doc Searls: gone.

Oh, they're long gone, I know, I know, I, I, I, I document this stuff photographically by dropping it on old radio stations. It's a separate thing, but an interesting thing to me, it's a question about where things are going, because you're clearly on top of things. One is as there's so much more optionality now in what somebody can listen to.

Most of the listening devices are actually phones, phones can have an infinite number of apps. And there are some fabulous apps. There's one called radio. garden online and it's radio garden and it's done by, I don't know if it's open source or not, it's done by a guy I think in Holland or somewhere.

But it's basically a globe and you just zoom in on any place in the world and you can listen to all the radio there. And, But even the idea of a station is kind of, it assumes a stationary location, it can only be here. And the sense of geography gets lost when you're online. But the main thing is, there are millions of podcasts now, but none of them have music.

That's the interesting thing. And Well it's because of licensing, yeah. Yeah, because of licensing. So I'm, I'm wondering where you see this going. It's like, radio is like, it seems to be like, Internet radio is where radio is going, because I think over the air radio is, is probably on its way out. AM radio is ending hard, and I think FM's coming down in a more soft way, but the streams matter more.

If you look at the ratings, streams are down there, and the rating is pretty low, but they're coming up. Nielsen shows them coming up. Right. Do you see, I mean, and also I'm interested in, this is almost too much to talk about, what the symbiosis is between the streams that people listen to, whether it's over the air or on a, on a device and where music itself is going at the, on the performance side and how people, what people like and how they share and all that.

What's that symbiosis? I think,

Tony Zeoli: you know, it's interesting that you mentioned this because UMG is pulling their catalog from Tik Tok to force them into paying more money so they can pay artists more for those streams, right? So where you're really hearing music in streaming is on sound, on SoundCloud, right?

On Mixcloud, on Spotify, on Pandora, on iHeartz Apps on there's an old radio bar. Online radio box has a lot of radio stations using their service. You know, I do want to say that while FM, you know, it's interesting because I live in Asheville and I drive around, I don't have satellite radio.

I mean, it's obviously XM has a, you know, Sirius XM has a slice of the market too, as more people adopt and more automobiles adopt Sirius XM in the dashboard. You know, I really think that that the next generation, you know, what five G will really, it just hasn't really effectively transformed streaming radio yet, but I see that as being the catalyst for streaming radio and in my research for my business plan, you know, some of these research organizations that publish, you know, their.

Their market research right year after year suggests that in you know, any Radio itself is going to be is going to grow to a I think they said something like eight billion Or a $10 billion a year business by 2030. So, and right now it's like 4 billion or three, three to 4 billion or something like that.

Doc Searls: So it's like all of radio, all of broadcast. All of radio across the globe. Right? Globally. So streaming and streaming and broadcast over the

Tony Zeoli: year. Broadcast. And the funny thing is, is that we as Americans, you know, we have to think globally. I am married to a person who was in the study abroad industry and she.

And not only did she, but through my history of working in the record industry and working globally and selling records all over the world and traveling globally to to be a DJ and to be in that industry, you know, radio here may be a dying breed, you know, to some extent, most people may think it's a dying breed, but radio effectively in other nations that may not have The types of technologies that we have, or people don't have the incomes, you know, maybe in Latin America or something like that, you know, radio is still a very strong part of their daily life.

So, personally, I have to think globally. I can't just think what's happening in the United States. Obviously, you know, over the next hundred years, maybe that changes, but I won't be here, so I won't need to worry about it. I'll let my kids worry about it. But I do feel that, you know, Blue Ridge Public Radio here in Asheville is plays a really important part and they stream and they're on, you know, multiple stations across the mountains and I listen to them every day for that news and information they may bring the BBC and some of those, you know, the moth radio hour and all those kinds of shows that are very important to me.

So while radio itself may be dying a slow death, Blue If they were, I, I really believe if they were to allow LPFMs to open up to like a 30 to 50 mile radius, you know, that they would be able to be better able to and keep the current format and legal status and not allow them to be acquired by an iHeartMedia or somebody like that.

That we get back to local, because I think people are dying for local. And a lot of the, the LPFMs are quite very local about local, you know, local programming and local artists and local news and entertainment, you know, so I would hope, and I don't, you know, that, that somehow the LPFM industry can push for that, but even still just to get a new LPFM and just to, you know, I tried to look to see if I could get an LPFM here in Asheville.

And there's a process you go through to find a signal that you can broadcast over. And the only one is like up on Pisgah Mountain, which is like 6, 000 feet above sea level. And you have to drive up there, you know, every day, you know, 25 minutes up to the top of the mountain in the winter. That wouldn't be fun.

And

Doc Searls: you have to hike the rest of it because there's not a road that goes all the way up there. And there used to be a funicular, a tram, that ran up there that got overgrown and died. And so Channel 13 is moving off of Pisgah to to Brevard or some other place like that. Right,

Tony Zeoli: right, right. So, you know, I also think, see, you know, some of our customers and our free users are college radio stations, right, which you mentioned earlier, and community, you know, just community stations that maybe not be LPFM.

So, you know, I think there's a bubbling little market underneath that just kind of like persists there and can generate local ads and survive, but they don't have a lot of money to invest. And that's, that hasn't jumped the shark yet, right? They, they're still struggling. Even our 99 a year, I mean, it's 99 a year for RadioVision Pro.

You know, people go out to dinner with a family of four and they spend 300, right? You go out to Starbucks and you spend, you know, 12, you know, six times and you're already at 99. And it's funny that these people look at 99 for a plug in, for a freemium plug in, And they think it's so expensive in the WordPress world because in the WordPress world, and this kind of gets away from radio and into that world, WordPress paid premium tiered system.

There's been this 15 year. Control of pricing sub 100 right that nobody can seem only a few actors can seem to break in all of the larger plugins like all in one seo or gravity forms are all sub 99 dollars a year they're all in the 49 59 dollar range So when someone like me is building something more niche for radio stations that need these tools to survive and grow, for example, we're putting Alexa skills into, into both free and pro.

So if you don't have a developer, you know, you're going to get an Alexa skill builder, and you're going to be able to do that in radio station and radio station pro, right? I'm going to put that for free in both. I mean, I'm gonna put that for free in one and obviously be paid in the other, but it's so important for an LPFM to be able to get on Alexa or to get on Apple, you know, an Apple device or to get on Google where you can ask and have these, you know, and then also the, the AI part of radio.

So where are we going with that? So there's going to be a whole list and I know it, then I think at the broadcasters, you know, a convention in New York city, they had a whole AI panel. Right. So now they're all starting to think about AI and radio and what's that going to do? And we're already there with asking Alexa to field, you know, to field a question.

But in my mind, it's, can you tell me what the song was at four o'clock on this station in Los Angeles, you know, on June 25th? That's where I believe this is going to go, is that we're going to be looking to These you know, auto you know, speak, spoken word response devices to, you know, tell us things that the radio needs to tell us.

And I think, you know, even if it's a news piece or if it's the weather, you know, so if radio stations are broadcasting the weather, how are we going to ask Alexa what the weather, you know, we can ask what the weather is, but maybe you want to hear it from your local radio station. Maybe you want to hear some interesting local aside.

So I really hope that it goes back to local. I can't predict that just like I couldn't predict that uber was gonna be a thing

To my own detriment but But I feel it. I feel that people are constantly asking for more local programming. Yeah, and you know, I I do hear it The death of radio is is due to the conglomerates You know, playing you know, the same cover version of Fast Car 37 times a day, right? By Luke, whatever, Luke Combs.

Which, I tear up to that song, I love it. I really love, and I met Tracy Chapman once, and I absolutely love that song. But, I've heard it every day for the last two years straight. I heard it in a grocery

Doc Searls: store yesterday. Yeah, you heard it in a grocery store. In Kroger, I heard Tracy singing

Tony Zeoli: Fast Car. Well, you heard Tracy, but if you hear Lou Combs, Lou Combs is the later, is the newer cover version that's been on radio here in the South, in Asheville for, you know, for 94.

5 and 104. 3. I mean, you know, and the Nicki Minaj's and the You know, the, the Doja cats of the world. It's like, come on, you know, there's so much more out there. And I think people are really dying for that. And that's why they're tuning into the, to Asheville FM. And that's why they're donating to Asheville FM, and they're donating to Blue Ridge Public Radio, is because they want, you know, that open source philosophy of do what we feel, not by some programmer's decision in Washington DC for the whole East Coast.

of what they think, you know, radio should look like in this market. So, radio in some way is doing it to itself. And you can listen to Lloyd Ford's podcast. He has a great podcast that I was interviewed on. And he really talks about sales in radio, and the, and the growth, and the, and the shrinking of radio.

And you can get a lot of good insight and information from Lloyd on, in that regard. But, I'm hoping, I'm thinking globally. I'm not thinking U. S. I have to think globally. I get. I get support requests from all over the world and I have to go to Google Translate and I have to put Spanish into English and I have to respond to them in their native language.

And I'm okay with that because I just was in Mexico. You know, I lived in, in Cuenca Ecuador for two months. Like, I get, you know, that there's so many people out there around the world who want This audio broadcast because they're not able to look at something visual all day every day, and they need that audio, and I'm hoping that radio station and radio station pro and stream player provide those tools to those webcasters in these global markets that, you know, don't have the opportunity or the investment to grow.

They're not an iHeartStation. They're not, you know, they don't belong to some conglomerate. So there's the. There's the haves and the have nots, and I'm trying to provide to the have nots to help them grow. And I think that they can with our plug in, especially, you know, and I'll, I'll pitch for this now, especially in the open source community, and saying like, I need your help.

If you love radio, and you think it's important, and you want to facilitate that for a global, the global broadcasters who are trying to do this. Under their own volition with in their with their own pocketbooks then contribute to radio station free your ideas and I'll certainly love to hear what those ideas are and love to accept pull requests at any, you know, anytime they come in.

So that's why we're here, right? That's why I believe in WordPress and I believe in open source and I want. I'd rather see free go to 100, 000 users and pro. You know, be used by, you know, 10, 000, right? I'd rather see so many people using free because then that might then fuel the donation, funding, grant, grants, you know, and, you know, and things like that.

And that's another issue is how do I, as a founder of a, of, of, of radio station free, find the grants from those grant providers, which I hear. On the public radio, right? I hear the commercials for funded, funded by, you know, the Diana S. Knight Foundation or whatever, right? How do I, and I've gone to some of those people and they said, no, that you're not actually this, so we can't support you, right?

And then it's also goes back to one of the questions that Doc asked about in the, in the station. Stations are using LibraTime and AzuraCast and these open source station play out systems. So the play out systems exist inside to run your, your, your show schedule and your broadcast. Radio Station and Radio Station Pro are only there to present the show schedule on your website.

They're not a, it's not a play out system that you need an automation system that does all your scheduling for your commercials and your commercial breaks and all that stuff. That's in the open source LibraTime. That's in the open source Azurecast. And I'm sure there are other open source automation systems out there, does radio station become a software as a service automation system with a web component?

Wink, wink, maybe. Maybe. So. I prefer to potentially work with Libertime and Azuricast and other open source platforms to have that interplay, you know, between us. So

Jonathan Bennett: I want to, I want to ask about something real quick. We, we mentioned this idea of, you know, you've got music on the radio and music on these netcasts, but when you get the podcast, you get very, you get a lot less music because of the licensing problems.

And it, what comes to mind is. Creative Commons, and I'm sure you're familiar with Kevin MacLeod of Incomp Tech. One of the, one of the leading guys that makes essentially open source music, you could call it that really, it's Creative Commons music. There's, there's almost this kind of second bubbling ecosystem alongside, you know, your, your regular music labels.

There's this, this second system where people are making Creative Commons music. And we've kind of not seen that break out into the public consciousness yet. And I, I also had this thought, you know, some things, we talked about a, a, a mechanical license, which from what I understand, a mechanical license is just, there's an automatic cost set, you don't have to call anybody and ask for permission.

And I, I wonder whether we couldn't write a Creative Commons license that is somewhere between You know, you can use it commercially and non commercial use, maybe a pay me a dollar to put this in your podcast, you don't have to ask permission, here's the cost. And, and whether that might be a game changer for getting some of this music into people's hands more easily to use it.

I don't know, any thoughts?

Tony Zeoli: I believe that there are creative commons, there is creative commons around images and music. You know, people do give away their music for free. And the mashup DJs, those mashups are under creative commons licenses because they're mashing up stuff and they're not selling it.

They're giving it away for free. So that's already kind of happening in the mashup world of, I create a mashup of 37. You know, copyrighted works, I give it away for free and that's fair use because you're kind of commenting on the works themselves by mashing them up in an or in a, in a unique order and layering that does that didn't previously exist and it can be considered, it could be considered that you're, you're, you're you're commenting on the works by using them as art in an art project.

So, in terms of donating, you know, to a Creative Commons derived work, the artist would need to take the donations but not sell the work, right? So, so you would separate the two and not say, come and give me a dollar, you know, basically share a dollar with me to download this. You would just have to say, hey.

I'm sharing my music for free. If you want to donate to my lifestyle, you know, go over here and do that. So you can't, you can't connect those two dots. You can't say, here's the music for free. Now, can you donate something to me? I think you have to go outside of that and say, I'm giving you my music for free.

It's just a small distinction that, you know, that I've heard is what you have to say to, You know, or maybe, you know, maybe you don't even say, you know, people just donate to you because they love it. I don't know The exact i'm not a lawyer. So I don't know the exact answer to that question in the in the scope of You know of creative commons and giving that music away, but I just know after listening to some npr reports with matchup djs that that's what you can do and how you monetize that you know is different now, here's the thing it's very Interesting.

Radio Spiral is one of our radio station pro customers, and they broadcast all Creative Commons or license free works that people create and share with them and say, you don't need to pay me for this. And they do it in Second Life, the virtual world. So they broadcast on the web and in Second Life as a Second Life radio station, which is really cool.

And I just totally forgot about them until you So I just ran into my head, but they are asking, like, I can't do a mix show for them with major label music, right? They won't allow me as a DJ to do that. They say, if you find stuff in our free, you know, creative commons or free catalog, sure, you can use that stuff, but, and then we'll broadcast it because we're not paying royalties for streaming.

We're asking people to donate their music to us for them. We'll rebroadcast for the promotional benefit. So in that way. Your question is answered by that's the model that Spot Radio Spiral is following in Second Life. Yeah,

Jonathan Bennett: interesting. If we had more time, we could dive into that more because there's, you know, there's things about fair use that play into that and just all sorts of questions.

We are, we are getting down towards the end of the show though. I have some questions I love to ask folks before I let them go, and one of the first ones is, what's the weirdest thing, and you may have just, you may have just told us this, but what's the strangest thing or the most unexpected thing you've seen somebody do with the radio station plug in?

Tony Zeoli: The most unexpected thing I've seen somebody do with the radio station plug in that is such a good question. And I am so stumped. It makes you think. I'm trying to think I'm going around the world thinking, who has done something in this region?

Nothing that strikes me right now as to somebody who's not using it. And it's original intent. What I can say is some people use it and then pick it apart and only use certain features and not other features. They might have their own radio player, so they don't want ours, or they might have their own show pages system, but they just want our playlists or play listing tool or, you know, so I haven't yet seen a unique use case.

That somebody has done something more interesting with it. But I hope that person that asked the question is the first one to do it. So, that'd be cool.

Jonathan Bennett: Alright, is there anything that we, and this is another tough question, Is there anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to cover? Is there anything that we can, we can put in here right at the end?

That you wanted to make sure.

Tony Zeoli: No, I mean, I think I talked about the Alexis skills. One thing I was thinking about that I just saw come down the road, Was putting like matching lyrics because people love to see lyrics and there's a company that I just ran into That's a lyric, you know provided but we'd have to license those that lyric stuff And so yeah, would there be it would be but this it's hard to open source lyrics, right?

Like you can't You know, it's just like audio. It's just like music, right? So you, so you can't, you have to license that content. So I'd like to match up lyrics with some, you know, some, some of our streamers. So they get that as a benefit. And then there are advertising plugins for WordPress. That actually, you know, are open source and can display ads and track them and stuff like that.

So it's really providing advertising opportunities for local. LPFMs, you know but the, the one thing I guess the larger topic is all these LPFMs and college radio stations are so underfunded, right? And so they struggle with Web design, web development. They struggle with making decisions. They struggle with people that come in, the rotating cast of characters who are volunteering, you know.

And until some massive change happens, you're just going to continue to see that issue in local radio. Because people can only commit so much. Like, I had a child. We adopted a child nine years ago and I was on Asheville FM and unfortunately my volunteer schedule got disrupted and I couldn't, I couldn't volunteer as much as I wanted to.

And then they got all snippy, like, now you can't have your show because you can't do that. It's like, dude, I just had a baby, like, you know, come on, right? So, you know, and there's personalities in radio, you know. And I'll be honest, I have re approached Asheville FM because they use the free version! And I just emailed one of the DJs a couple weeks ago and said, Hey, you know, you're using the free version.

You know, I'd love to have, I'd love to give you a donated copy of the pro version. And the guy got back to me and said, no, we don't need your help. And I was like, but do you even know what I'm talking about? Cause you're not, we have a, we have a webmaster. We don't need your help. He didn't, he didn't understand.

He didn't even understand. And he didn't even ask me the question. Like you're offering us something for free that we already use, you know, that you can benefit us. And, you know, but that's the attitude. And sometimes. You know, I think beyond open source and beyond anything, we just got to learn to work together, you know, as people in this time of like, ridiculous, you know, split, you know, Democrats and Republicans and people just.

Whether it's losing job and you see the tech industry laying off 250, 000 jobs in the last so many months and people dying for work on LinkedIn every day, you know, posting, I'm looking for work, looking for work, we even groups happening, looking for, we, you know, we're working together at people, you know, I'm, I'm trying to build something and, and, and if you can't respond and, And, and take the, take the help, then how are you going to help yourselves?

Right? And that's just, that's just a philosophical question. That may have nothing to do with anything, but that's what I'm experiencing. So I'm here giving you something for free, you know, and I'm here to help you. So take the help, you know, cause you're open source cause you're nonprofit because you're a small organization in West Asheville looking for the help.

But when you say no. It just doesn't make sense. So, you know, sorry to out them, but, you know, that's just, it's just the truth, you know? Yep. Understood. I'm a, I'm a guy who tells it like it is. I'm from Boston.

Doc Searls: I had Boston, I had Boston questions too, but we can save them.

Jonathan Bennett: Alright, before we let you go, I've got to ask, what's your favorite text editor in scripting language?

Tony Zeoli: I use bbedit and then I'm only skilled in CSS. I don't have a JavaScript or I can read PHP and know what it's doing and you know, and then like, for example, I was working on a client site yesterday and there was a add function and add action script that's been deprecated in PHP eight. Okay.

I looked at it. I learned it. I saw that that's where it is on line 65. I went to Google, looked it up. Here's an issue. And then I told my developer to fix it, right? So, you know, hey, can you fix it? And that's on a client site, so that's a paid work. But, you know, I'll do that on Radio Station with my developer in Australia.

And I did. Oh, here's the one thing I forgot to mention. Tony Hayes. Tony Hayes is my right hand man. He is my lead developer. He's a partner in the company. He owns a certain percentage that I gifted to him for his participation in his work in, in, in Netmix LLC. And we've been working together for three years since I found him on a WordPress jobs board.

He had been working on radio station free for a friend of his and saw my post. Thought he wanted to get involved and then we got married in a legal agreement and it's contractual and we've never had an argument, I don't think. I think we've maybe raised our tone once or twice, but it's been really good because I understand where he's at, he understands where I'm at.

We work together well, but he's my, he's my Australian based developer for Radio Station, Radio Station Pro and Stream Player Pro. Until I raise more money or bring on somebody else. Where some other people will submit, you know, a pull request, you know, it's he, it's he and I, it's just us two, he's the guy and I really have to thank him from, I mean, I'm going to tear up now, like it's one of those things, like this wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for him and my idea, my impetus of, of product and program management, but his abilities to write this code and put it into play and us to work together to get it out to the world.

I mean, it's two guys, right, doing what I did in 1996 with NetMix, 1995, right, trying to grow something. And contribute and do something good and valuable while taking care of our lives and families. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett: Awesome. Well, Tony, we have, we have a hit time. We've got to let you go, but I want to say first, thank you so much for being here.

It has been a pleasure. It's been great to get to talk to you and we'll have to do it again when, when things change when, you know, the next version, the big news comes out or, you know, whatever happens next over at Radio Player and Netmix we will have you back and we'll chat about it. Thank you, sir, for being here.

Tony Zeoli: Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Good to talk to you. All

Jonathan Bennett: right. Okay. Doc, what do you think?

Doc Searls: I think there's so many things we could talk about. Oh my gosh. Yeah I, I, I love Tony's Boston sensibility. I was going to ask. Next time about, about how, how that plays, cause and is he still a Red Sox fan?

I don't know. We can talk. See you for

Jonathan Bennett: next time. We'll talk about it

Doc Searls: next time. Yeah, we'll see you for next time. But it's, I mean, this is dear to my, the entire topic is dear to my mind and heart. I, I, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'll never stop being an old radio guy, you know, and but, but there's, I think, I think there's an awful lot to the local thing.

I think that's, it, part of it is going to shrink down to local and it's going to grow up from local. I'm seeing that here in Bloomington, Indiana. There's actually a very vibrant local, is it when people talk about the local station here, they're not talking about the commercial station, it's the last one there.

They're not talking about the big public radio station, they're talking about one called Firehouse Broadcasting, which. You know, their transmitter is far enough out of town that they need a translator in town, so they're, you know, to, to get it, but, but almost everybody listens to it, WFHB, and they're and they're online, they have a pretty, a pretty sizable audience outside the area too, but they're very local, they're very, they're very much here, they're very much about music they're very much about local music, but not just that it's all volunteer.

It's interesting to me that when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, there were, I mean, there were, you know, people don't remember this, not many do, they're all old like me, but the first rock and roll stations were always secondary stations in markets, they were not the primary stations. Later, in a few markets like Chicago and New York with WLS in Chicago.

And WABC in New York and in Oklahoma City KOMA, which is now KKOC were, I mean, they were the rock and roll stations for large parts of the country, that the whole West was served by KOMA in those days. And, and, but they played 30 songs at a time and it was it, it was a whole list of 30 songs.

And if you wanted to succeed in radio, you played the same 30 songs as the other wise guys did. And now it's not like that at all. It's like. Everybody likes, the way tastes are changing and broadening out and, and mushing together and all the rest of it, I mean, the hip hop beat is in everything, as it's kind of a a primary beat that's out there.

Something else I want to ask Tony about, as he knows Brian Bellendorf, because Brian's very much in the house and electronic and he co invented Apache. So so again, next time we'll bring him back.

Jonathan Bennett: Yeah. You know, you talk about local. I just had this thought right before we go, I want to make it real quick.

Talk about things going local. I kind of feel like that is one of the inevitable responses to. Artificial intelligence taking over everything because really we don't have artificial intelligence We have large language models and they're impressive with what they do but they're also they kind of drain the humanity out of everything and Businesses are glomping onto it.

They love it. They don't have to have people working anymore. They just have LL Williams doing

Doc Searls: everything Well, it's all spoken by the dead. I mean that that's the problem he's like everything you've already written and everything's been played and everything that's been drawn is out there already.

Yeah. And so it's already like dead in the sense that living entities are not producing this right now. And then this, this automated thing comes in and takes an average of everything everybody's said and puts one word after another or, you know, creates cliches. For, for,

Jonathan Bennett: for, for some, for some maybe large section of the public.

They're going to look at that and reject it and the other side of that is going to be now You move towards kind of the the boutique content creators you move towards the smaller and the more local I think that's that's probably what we're going to start seeing his response to I think it's going to be really fascinating I see tony I can see

Doc Searls: We told him that in the beginning and he forgot it's okay, so But we'll talk about it next time. But don't go away, Tony. We still want to talk to you. Just not on the, on the, on the thing. Alright.

Jonathan Bennett: Well, let's, let's wrap, let's wrap the show itself up. Doc, do you have anything that you want to plug?

Doc Searls: Oh my gosh.

I just, I just go to my blog doc. searls. com. That'll be close enough. Doc. Searles. com, there we go. Yeah, that'll do it and you'll see what I'm working on, so.

Jonathan Bennett: Alright, well, the one thing that I do want to plug is Hackaday. com. We've got the security column, goes live every Friday morning. Make sure and check that out.

And then, let's see, next week, next week we're talking with Matt Ray of OpenCost. And that's all about track, in an open source way, tracking your cloud costs and saving money there. And that, that should be really interesting make sure and check that out for everyone that is, that has been here live and those listening on the download and to doc as well.

And I want to say, thank you. Thank you so much for being here and we will see you next time on Floss Weekly.