Before there was a radio show called Taste the Floor, there was a fanzine of the same name. And before there was a fanzine, there was the song: Side 1, Track 3, of the Jesus & Mary Chain’s debut album, “Psychocandy.” And now, there is Taste the Floor Radio, a new online music station. The station is like a mixtape podcast of my favorite songs, new things, and other stuff — but now, 24/7. I started building the station in August and it is officially launching today. The station features 132 hours (so far) of previous shows from stations in Concord, Manchester, and Medford, MA, including 12 hours of new shows (with more on the way).
To listen, visit: https://live365.com/station/Taste-The-Floor-Radio-a02189
Let me start by saying this is a hobby, not a new business or job.
It is about the love of the art of old school freeform radio, cool tunes lost in the radio wave ether of the universe, and hopefully some new stuff you’ve never heard before.
The station came to fruition after a seven-year hiatus from broadcasting.
Radio has been a part of my media life for decades, either as a job or a hobby, whether on news-talk or as a disc jockey. As a DJ, the weekly show allowed me to keep up with what the new bands were doing, whether national indies or Boston rock, when I first hit the airwaves in the early 1990s at WMFO at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. When the low-power FM was started in Concord, NH, WNHN-LP, I jumped at the chance to return to the airwaves after a 10-year hiatus. My downloading habit, made reasonable by emusic.com, the cheapest vendor at the time, led to thousands of dollars spent checking out new bands.
A few years later, ipmNation, an online station out of Manchester, NH, picked up the show.
I stopped doing the show in the summer of 2018.
For several years, I have wanted to return to the airwaves, but I didn’t believe there would be a station that would let me do what I wanted to do. I also couldn’t find a process that was cheap and easy to get up and running.
And I wanted it to be music.
While the podcast era has been booming, with lots of people making money, my return to radio would not be about politics (and podcasting has kinda faded; there’s just too many people yakking). In fact, despite my decades of writing and talking about government and elections, I am not interested in talking about politics and government (this may change in the future, but not now).
As an audiophile, I needed to hear new sounds. My show was kind of like the old mix tapes we used to put together in the 1980s to share incredible music with girls or new friends (not unlike the John Cusack film, “High Fidelity,” sans the record store part). I wanted to return to old but be new, too.
During my online search for podcast hosting services for a music station, there were very few that offered music podcasting, mostly because performance rights societies charge thousands of dollars a year in fees to pay musicians, writers, and performers, whether you play their music or not. The running joke has always been every time you hear “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on the radio, Mick and Keef get paid a nickel. Those companies that did offer hosting music services required you, as the host, to pay the performance rights companies, whether you made money on your podcast or not, or request permission from each artist before playing their music, even if you paid for the song or album! With the demise of the most significant driver of profit for record companies and musicians — $10 albums or $15 CDs, everyone is clamoring for pennies (not unlike online news, like I always say). Someone must pay. And no one wants to get sued for playing something they did not have permission or compliance to play.
At the same time, I didn’t really want to spend a lot of money to host a one-hour podcast. The previous radio show cost me around $1,200 to $1,500 annually, mostly in downloads. I also wanted songwriters, performers, and musicians to get paid (having to pay to expose that song to another listener, though, is another argument, one with which I’m not in complete agreement with the performance rights societies).
In April, I traveled to Las Vegas to attend the NAB 2025 show, spending a small fortune on a personal professional development vacation, wondering what my next thing would be. On the cusp of 60, it was only a matter of time before I departed the journalism racket. But all I know is media. I’m going to get bored, too, I’m sure. I wanted to write a blog post months ago about the NAB 2025 and Vegas experience, but, like so much of life, I never got around to it (maybe I will at some other time … it was an expensive but enlightening). NAB 2025 was, in a word, overwhelming.
Disappointingly, there wasn’t much radio stuff.
And, I was not surprised. I found that out in 2017, when I attended NAB, and VR and “Game of Thrones” were all the rage. A guy on a panel for ESPN didn’t know a massive layoff was going on while he was speaking. The previous time I attended was 2006. That year, there was a lot of radio stuff, including the RTDJA, which hosted several events with radio and television journalists. There were luncheons and dinners, too, as part of the price of admission, which were missing in 2025. Sure, all the gear heads and companies were there, hawking their wares. There was one day of small- and medium-market radio talks, but you had to be an NAB member and prove you currently worked in radio. So, I couldn’t attend.
In 2025, it was AI this and AI that — but I did get to see Triple H talk about WWE’s global programming expansion the last day of the convention, and, too, it was great to see manufacturing companies promoting the fact that they hired Americans and veterans. While I kept to myself, I did meet new people and had a few interesting conversations. And the professional development, on all kinds of levels — from legal compliance to vacationing video shoots and fun marketing ideas, was well worth the (hefty) price of attendance (I’d like to go again next year. We’ll see).
During one “sip-and-speak” seminar, put together by SoundExchange, a nonprofit collective rights management organization (it collects royalties for the performance of the song, whereas ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC collect royalties for songwriters and publishers), Maria Bokel explained the performance rights process and how important it was, even for podcasters who played 20-second bumper music for their intros, to pay the fees and comply. Technically, the writer and the band own the song. Even if you paid for the song, on CD or download, you don’t have the right to play it for others (I know, weird, but we’re in a different world now…). The org has collected about $12 billion in payments to performers.
Quick sidebar: A week after the NAB 2025 show, SoundExchange and NAB, which labels itself as the “premier advocacy association for America’s broadcasters,” reached an agreement on “non-subscription rates applicable to Commercial Broadcasters and other royalty payment details,” to avoid litigation. The annual $1,000 fee (I’m presuming that is per station) will go up to $1,250 by 2029 and then stay flat after that, while the royalty rate will go from 0.0028 cents in 2026 to 0.0032 cents in 2030.
There were only five or six of us attending the talk, so I explained my situation to Bokel: I had this radio show before, I really miss doing it, and there is a long-lost art of doing radio, but I’m not going to pay thousands of dollars to performance rights societies for a fucking hobby. Bokel pointed to another woman, kind of punkish, with tined hair, sitting in the audience, and said, Speak to her after. She can help you. The woman (I thought I got her card, but I couldn’t find it, which is why I am not mentioning her name, but thank you anyway for helping me) told me where the Live365.com booth was on the convention floor, and I headed right over.
Live365 started as a webcaster in the late 1990s and then closed in early 2016. But about 15 months later, it relaunched and has been up and running ever since. I met with Abel Rodriguez and got the pitch: I could produce a show or station for an annual or monthly subscription fee, and they will pay all the performance rights societies, and I can do what I want.
I had my youngest son whip together a cool log and Taste the Floor Radio was born!
Screeching halt. That was it? It was that easy? Well, no, not exactly. It was not easy. In fact, it has been hard. It has taken me months to launch. More on that in a bit.
First, let’s talk format concepts.
There were some ideas I wanted to noodle with — Gen X Classics was one (the FM classic rock format with a new wave, post-punk generational bent). I have always thought our generation deserves its own classic rock radio station. But unfortunately, several entities were already doing something similar at Live365. Damnit! While they weren’t doing it the way I would — most of them did not have any talking, as an example, and were really spinning the “hits,” not album tracks, remixes, or live tunes, it seemed defeatist to try and compete (I have one other concept I’m not going to speak about now because I’m still toying with it).
And then I thought, how am I going to fill up 24 hours of airtime? Oh, wait, I have hundreds of hours of past radio shows I can upload! I know I backed them up somewhere. Wait, there they are! Dozens of hours of shows between 2013 and 2018, and more from 1993 to 2002, too. And I can play what I want.
And the Taste the Floor Radio station concept, not a show, was born.
The company has various plans, up to $499 per month. I picked the cheapest plan — $59 a month, allowing 1,500 broadcast hours a month and 60 gigs of music or programming hosted.
Noodling with the product demo, I realized it was much more complicated than expected.
Live 365 offers AutoDJ, Playlist, and ClockWheel modes. The company also hosts radio station feeds. AutoDJ requires the upload of songs and live talking; the Playlist mode, which is what I’m using, allows me to upload full shows and bracket them with my own ads (which I’m not doing, at this point, since it will become a business and not a hobby) or Live365 ads (any residuals I get from Live365 goes against future fees for the creation of an app or next year’s subscription). I will also figure out how to use the other modes, too, at some point.
The system is clunky, requiring metadata markings when, at this point, AI should be able to read the songs and mark it off for you, especially since the system knows when you have violated Digital Millennium Copyright Act rules and provisions.
As Live365 explained:
“The DMCA is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). For our purposes, the DMCA is the rule-maker of what can and cannot be legally broadcast on Internet Radio. The DMCA is concerned with digital rights management (DRM) and it must be upheld. The DMCA criminalizes the production and distribution of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works.”
While experimenting, I immediately ran into DMCA issues before I knew the rules were built into the system.
The system flags programming that violates the following: No more than three songs consecutively from the same artist (so a tribute show, acknowledging the 30th anniversary death of Michael Hutchence of INXS, can’t be played); no more than two songs consecutively from the same album (so, no tribute shows like the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s or 40th anniversary of Cheap Trick’s fantastic “Heaven Tonight” album or 30th the Psychedelic Furs’ “Midnight to Midnight,” or the Brit Pop Battle, Blur vs. Oasis, 20 years later, as examples); no more than four songs from the same artist in three hours (so, my two previous intro songs, before I had Jeffrey Hutchens of RadioVoiceImaging.com create the Taste the Floor promo, can’t be played back to back to back to back to back even if I’m trying to do chronologically programming of old shows) and no more than three songs from the same album in three hours (so no partial tribute album shows spread out either).
I understand this, to a point. But it defeats the purpose of remembering old albums and why they were important — it cannot be done in a few songs, at least to get the full effect, IMHO. It’s the complete package, often, with an album.
But this also dragged down the metadata tagging process required for the performance rights societies and the programming. Initially, I hoped to launch on Labor Day Weekend. I then pushed it off to Oct. 1. Then Oct. 15. Finally, the moment has come.
The plan is to continue uploading old shows and producing new ones in 6-hour increments, which is easy to program, until I have about 30 gigs of audio in rotation. After that, I’ll start removing the older shows as new ones replace them. I may also experiment with all the other settings. Please let me know what you think and do listen.
