Rick Wrigley Envisions a New Golden Age of Radio
Interview by Joe Montague
FM
radio DJ and internet radio station owner Rick Wrigley is predicting that a new
Golden Age in radio is about to dawn and he and his fellow DJs at Our Generation
Radio, which has its head office in Columbia, South Carolina, but has DJs in
other cities, fully intends to be part of that new defining period in radio.
Wrigley, originally from Jacksonville, Florida, has been a radio personality for
several decades, getting his start while attending the University of South
Carolina, also located in Columbia, where he took to the airwaves at WUSC, now a
FM station. In fact, even though Wrigley has appeared on other radio stations
over the years, he has returned to WUSC on Wednesday mornings between 9 am and
noon, where you can hear him broadcasting his Blues and Soul music radio show.
His show can also be heard streaming
online.
“I got a chance to learn it all there (while a student), DJ, news reader,
Program Director, Chief Announcer, Music Director and Chief Engineer. After
college, I was hired as a DJ at WCOS AM / FM.
The highlight of the show was doing the
Nightbeat Show live from a small
radio booth at a local drive-in restaurant right in the middle of the action,”
says Wrigley.
From WCOS, Wrigley went behind the scenes at WIS television, working as a
broadcast engineer, before eventually becoming the chief engineer for WIS Radio.
He entered television broadcasting again, this time working for The South
Carolina Educational Television Network, which at the time was a major content
provider to PBS. He was part of the production team. PBS programs that he worked
on included, Nature Scene and the
William F. Buckley show Firing Line.
Rick Wrigley was later involved in sports broadcasting with ABC, NBC and CBS.
Now he finds himself on the leading edge of a new age in radio.
Rick Wrigley is not just a music fan who decided it would be a great hobby to
have a two or three hour radio show broadcasting on the internet, Our Generation
Radio is on the air 24 hours each day and broadcasting seven days each week and
in addition to Wrigley, each of the on air DJs have prior experience in
commercial radio and / or as performing artists.
“There have been three Golden Ages of radio and the next one is coming. There
have been some articles out there in the trade magazines that are referring to
this upcoming age and it will be internet based.
We have to get internet radio listeners weaned from their computers. It
is almost like the first Golden Age of radio, when in the 1930s (actually began
in the 1920s) people listened to radio by sitting around it and staring at the
speaker. When I was a kid I did that by listening to the Lone Ranger and
programs like that. Now the radio is off to the side and it is on, while you are
doing other things. When we can get people used to the idea that they can still
listen to the station, while doing other things then we will become very
ubiquitous and we will be able to reach out and penetrate the audiences,” says
Wrigley.
Wrigley sees a lot of similarities to the new Golden Age of radio and the way
things once were for terrestrial or if you like, brick and mortar AM and FM
radio stations. “The interesting thing to me is this new Golden Age of radio is
going to be a lot like the previous ones where we had mom and pop radio stations
that existed in the 1950s and 60s, before everything happened that allowed
corporate radio to become a reality. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission)
allowed the ownership of multiple radio stations in the same market and they
allowed more than seven radio stations to be owned by the same company, which
was the limit that we had back in the 1960s and the 70s. Now there aren’t any
limits.”
By comparison, Wrigley notes, “Now we have all of these small internet radio
stations. It has gone back to mom and pop type of operations. Our Generation
Radio is a mom and pop station that is operated by a very small staff of people
who are interested in doing this for the love of the music and the love of the
experience. It allows them to play
the music that they are interested in playing and to appeal to the type of
audience that they are interested in appealing to.
You will have lots of folks doing this with smaller audiences, operating
a lot less expensively than things used to be and it will make for a very rich
environment. As a listener you will be able to find your niche and you will be
able to find people who are similar in terms of their choice in music. (It is
coming back) to where it was in those old days. Each station has a unique
experience. It was different. We will bring it back to where it was in those
days. Each station had a unique experience. It was different. There were no two
stations in the country that were exactly alike. You didn’t have corporate
giants in Las Vegas or Atlanta or New York, deciding what every radio station in
their organizations was going to play.
Every one of these radio stations was a little bit different and every
one of OGR’s DJs’ shows is a little bit different.
Back in the fifties and the sixties the morning DJ and the afternoon DJ
were still playing top forties music, but the mix was not the same.
The opportunity to find a DJ that mixes what you want to hear is becoming
stronger and stronger (once again on internet radio).
It is the opportunity to have that personality out there again.
Back in the sixties, a station that I worked in was driven by audience
feedback. We had the top forty list
and then we had the top twenty request list. The kids would come on and they
would request the songs that they wanted to hear.
I used to do a show from a drive-in restaurant and the kids would come by
with a piece of paper and they would ask for a song to be dedicated to so and
so. That is happening in the chat room now, and it is happening on instant
messenger and it is happening on facebook.
When I am on the air I am on (all three) and I am getting requests. I am
mixing the show, as I go along. I don’t have a pre-dedicated playlist.
I may have a theme that I am going to do, such as today’s show which was
about (Frankie Valli and) The Four Seasons who were our featured artists, but
people are coming in and requesting ELO or some other artists. The beauty of
this is it gives your audience the ability to interact with the playlist. That
is something that hasn’t been around for a long time.
If you look at internet radio there are different approaches, one of which is
the person who just likes to provide music and they will get some sort of server
software and they will stream songs out to the internet. If people like the
songs that they play they will listen and it is basically an automated station.
There is not any live activity on the station and there aren’t any
personalities. The approach that we take is different. We believe in the concept
of a live DJ and in fact everyone who is a DJ on OGR has been a live DJ on
terrestrial radio or they have been a musician in a band or in some cases they
have been both. Don Baker for instance, who is on Sunday evenings has done both.
Our intent is to present something that is live and what we feel is missing from
radio these days. People listen to or are forced to listen to automated stations
that have a very narrow or limited focus on the music that they play.
For instance Classic Rock stations play rock music of the seventies, or
there are stations that play oldies music, which is fifties, sixties and early
seventies stuff. What we did was to look at our audience and then we decided who
we wanted to program for and we settled on the Baby Boomers, as being our target
audience. After that, we decided
that the Baby Boomers don’t like only one genre of music, but they do have very
definite tastes in all genres. Our
approach has been to do a multi-genre station with multi-genre programming, but
the common thread that runs through it is this is the type of music that a Baby
Boomer would like to hear. It is not
just oldies music. We are playing music that was recorded earlier this year.
For instance we play Trudie Harris’ music and she is an indie artist here
in South Carolina where I am located and she sings music that very definitely
fits the Baby Boomer’s ear. We also play modern artists such as Duffy out of
Wales or Adele who is a big soul singer out of England, because it is music that
a Baby Boomer would like to hear.
That is the measurement that we use, because we feel if a Baby Boomer would like
to hear a song, we will put it into our mix. It doesn’t have to be a top forties
song, because as you and I well know there is a ton of fantastic music out there
that fits what the Baby Boomer would like to hear, but it isn’t top forties or
it isn’t oldies. Another example is (singer – songwriter) Sue Leonard’s music.
Her music is tuned to a Baby Boomer’s ears. We play music from the 1950s up to
the current day. You will not hear Rap or Heavy Metal head banging music, but
you will hear the lighter side of Rock and Roll, but it is not light Rock and
Roll.”
This past spring Our Generation Radio broadcast live from Columbia’s Crawfish
Festival and interviewed local Blues artist Drink Small and the Lieutenant
Governor of the state of Louisiana.
In August the station will be broadcasting a live concert by The Sensational
Epics and it is not the first time that Our Generation Radio has broadcast a
live concert.
To dispel the myths or carpetbagger (our word not his) practices that exist with
some internet radio operators, Rick Wrigley wants you to know that all internet
radio stations are required by law to pay royalties through SoundExchange the
body that acts on behalf of artists and then distributes them appropriately. In
Wrigley’s mind any internet radio station that is not abiding by those laws is
robbing from the artists. Earlier this
year the FCC shut down a host company that was supposed to be paying royalties
on behalf of its subscribing internet radio stations, because that company,
although it had been billing its radio station subscribers for royalty payments,
is alleged to have failed to make the same payments to SoundExchange, so the
artists could receive payment for their music.
The future appears bright for internet radio stations such as Our Generation
Radio, with auto manufacturers announcing models of cars equipped to receive
internet radio signals and portable internet radio devices that can stream
internet radio shows provided they are within the range of a Wi-Fi signal. Smart
phones can be plugged into car stereo systems as well, so you can listen to your
favorite internet DJ. We can envision a time when soon, just like the days when
transistor radios and ghetto blasters dotted the beaches, portable internet
radios will surface. For DJs like Our Generation’s Cassie J. Fox, Gene Lee, Don
Baker, DJ Jitar they can hardly wait for that day. Our Generation Radio will be
celebrating its third anniversary in October.
This interview with Rick Wrigley was conducted on May 7, 2011