Listener email: Why do we expand our channels?

An anonymous listener from Germany writes:

i really enjoy the music you play at your station. Drone Zone, Groove Salad, Space Station, Cliphop and Doomed is the best mix for people FAR AWAY FROM MAINSTREAM. i think that was your original idea to launch this project, and i think many people will thank you for that great idea. BUT if you're not able to meet your budget why do you expand your channels? Is "getting bigger and bigger" the goal of a "underground station"? Does any one of the listeners from the beginning need christmas music? Please think about it and go back to the roots.

First, to set the record straight, Xmas in Frisko has been around longer than Doomed or Space Station Soma. I think it's unlike any other holiday broadcast out there, and very fitting for SomaFM. Christmas Lounge was an offshoot of holiday programming we did on Groove Salad - many people asked that we not play any holiday music on Groove Salad and instead start a dedicated channel for it, so we did.

Our mission has been to provide music programming that's "outside the mainstream"; music that you won't hear on FM radio. That doesn't mean every song we play hast to be unknown, it just means we're trying to play songs that you are far less likely to hear anywhere else. So yes, there are a few Christmas songs on Christmas Lounge that are by artists many people have heard of... but they're the songs that fit the theme, and they're less than 10% of what's played on that channel.

While it is true that SomaFM is slowly expanding, we're not expanding nearly as fast as the total online audience for internet radio is. Below a certain size, we'd be lost in the noise and gradually our audience would disappear. In fact, our listener growth in the last 12 months has been only a few percent. I'm sure a lot of the reason for that is there are no so many different options for listening to music online, and as people have more choices, they spend less time focusing on a single source for their music.

That's why we expand. And we expand into formats that are related to our existing formats. Illinois Street Lounge grew out of Secret Agent - bachelor pad music and easy listening but without the "spy" vibe. Digitalis grew out of Cliqhop and Indie Pop Rocks; Lush is a vocal-alternative to Groove Salad which most listeners prefer we keep instrumental.

When I audition music (and this is true for all the other music directors), we find a lot of good music that doesn't fit our normal channels. We start building up playlists for these new styles, and after a while, we sometimes find that we're getting tons of music that's really good but doesn't fit into an existing channel. That's when we launch a new channel.

The best thing about these new channels is that it gives our supporters a chance to hear something different yet still stay loyal to SomaFM. My goal is to be able to provide a variety of different styles of really good, hand-chosen music for our listeners no matter what kind of a mood you are in.

Hopefully that answered your question!