Mom fills empty nest (and living room) with radio stations
MONTE VISTA, CO-Dianne Lockhart dreamed of being in radio at an early age. “My parents met at a radio station in Seminole, Texas. When I was a kid, when the other kids were outside riding bikes and stuff, I was in the house in front of an old console stereo- it looked like a big box with legs and lid that lifted up, playing records and recording to cassette tapes. I was playing deejay,” said Lockhart. Now, a new ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board threatens her dreams and those of thousands of other internet broadcasters.
When Lockhart's youngest child graduated from high school, and left for college, she started looking for creative avenues for her talent, to fill the home that once housed laughing young people, left silent at their leaving. Having spent more than 35 years in radio, television, and newspaper, media was a natural course. She had no idea, however, how a little comedy radio station, in the middle of nowhere, would immerse her living room with the laughter of thousands, and would grow into a giant within one year.
From her home in Monte Vista, Colorado, in the heart of the rural San Luis Valley, which is surrounded by fields usually growing barley, alfalfa and potatoes, snow-capped 14,000-feet-high mountain peaks, Dianne Lockhart had a vision that would grow into a worldwide business in just twelve months. Her goal? To be the laughingstock of the world.
After leaving her last radio station job, she looked for ways to make a living from home. She taught herself how to build websites, and launched MeanderMagazine.com in the spring of 2005. She said that even when her children were growing up, she tried to arrange her work schedule so that she could be home with them, sometimes working late into the wee hours of the morning, producing commercials for a television station where she worked. She had built a video production suite in her home, to be able to work there. Ten years later, that knowledge would come in handy, building an internet radio station. Make that two radio stations, in the living room of her southern Colorado home. She had looked into ways to broadcast from her home, as she had always wanted a home-based business, but until November 2005, it looked impossible because of the cost of start-up. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but $299 was not in the budget for a project that could fail. When the Live365 Network made it possible, in their autumn promotion, to start up a pro station with no fee, she jumped on the opportunity.
After signing up, and a crash self-taught course in Internet broadcasting, she spent the entire night into the early morning hours on December 2, 2005 uploading music to her new station. She watched a bright red sunrise as she listened to her station on the air for the first time. The station format was originally a mixture of alternative, classic rock, and pop- more or less a freeform format. The station rose in the Network rank to #2866, out of approximately 10,000 stations, but she determined that was not good enough. She decided to change the format to all stand-up comedy. "Laughter helps people. It helps them heal. It helps to eliminate stress, and gives listeners a way to escape a difficult lifestyle, such as a boring job, stress at work or home, and just makes life better," she said, referring to her years as a news reporter, salesperson, producer, and on-air talent. "I've been there, in the stressful job situations, in sales or dealing with the public or co-workers. It's hard." She changed the station name from Meander Radio to Meander Comedy Radio.
On February 2 she completely emptied her broadcast library of the music and replaced it with stand-up comedy. The artists ranged from classic comedy to the very latest artists, such as Dane Cook, Bill Cosby, John Heffron, John Bowman, Lewis Black, Kathleen Madigan, Margaret Smith, Jeff Foxworthy, Ron White, Harland Williams, Mitch Hedberg, Steven Wright, and numerous othe
rs. Her goals in life have always had something to do with helping others, and Meander Comedy Radio is no exception. "I now have the opportunity to help emerging comedians get the exposure they need," said Lockhart. "Paul Virzi is one who had already been doing the circuit, and who was extremely talented, with writing material and performing. I actually discovered him on MySpace. I found out most of the big comedians promote their work on MySpace. Paul has just been an angel, really. He's called and we talked about his goals and what makes him want to do comedy. Just a great guy. I've found that most comedians are that way, great people. But, of course they would be, because they have found a way to look at life with a sense of humor, and from a different perspective. Yes, they have struggles and hard times like the rest of us, but they just look at it differently." She said she imagines when a comedian goes through a rough time in life, that they look at the ordeal and say to themselves, 'I could use this in my act.' "Comedians know how to find that common denominator, and move it up into the light," said Lockhart, “where it can touch people.”
By looking at her normal, white, frame house just outside the city limits of rural Monte Vista, Colorado, you'd never know it housed two radio stations, and one of them among the most popular comedy radio stations in the world. "It's kind of amazing, even now, after broadcasting more than a year, locals still don't know I'm here. They know about us in India, the UK, Germany, and Canada, but the locals just give you this look, when you try to talk about it to them. I opened the station as a "pro" station so that I could sell advertising and bring in income that way, but that's been a really hard egg to crack around here. I've found that, in rural areas, you're lucky if people know how to use their email effectively to market. But that's changing, slowly," said Lockhart. When the cost of operations for a pro station became too much, she decided to not renew the Pro contract, and instead change the station to a "personal" station, which aired the Live365 Network ads instead of her own. She has since upgraded to a pro package that also runs the Network ads.
Though both her stations are talk radio, in January she took the plunge and signed the Small Webcaster’s Settlement Act (SWSA) contract with SoundExchange, the collecting arm of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). She was told that the (performance) royalty might go up, but she could not have known the three Copyright Royalty Board judges would throw out the SWSA contract completely. Broadcasting under the compliance of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is very different than the rules of terrestrial (regular over-the-air) radio, now this turn of events left her “devastated.” The DMCA was created, proponents say, to prohibit file sharing and to make sure artists received their royalties. Lockhart is a songwriter as well, “we do our level best to promote and help music artists, including Indie’s, and in my case comedians, to gain the most from their intellectual property. As broadcasters, we’re all for writers and performers getting their share. It should be fair, though. The current laws allow over-the-air AM and FM stations to do one thing and don’t allow us to do it,” said Lockhart. “For example, an AM/FM station can play an entire tribute album, if they want, but we can’t- it has to be broken up into tracks and there’s a limit on how many tracks from that album can be played. Another example is an AM/FM station is allowed to announce the next song or track that will play. We are prohibited from doing that. We can’t even announce the name of a song’s before it plays. So there needs to be parity, not only financially, but in operations, as well.” It's become a huge bureaucracy, I’m afraid, that is hurting the industry, instead of helping it. There's an independent artist revolution going on right now, and major labels, the RIAA, is aware of this, and some believe they're just trying to stop the independent artists from taking a big chunk of their pie away from them. Whatever the reason for the rules as they are laid out, now, the fact remains that you just have to work within the system to accomplish anything. Going into this, there was a lot for me to learn, not just the technical aspect, but a whole new set of laws governing Internet radio. Now, after the March 2 ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board which obliterated my Small Webcaster Settlement Act (SWSA) contract, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Under that contract, my royalty fees were based on my income or expenses, and now it’s based on a pay for play basis. Comedy is different than music- you have a lot more plays in any given month, because the tracks are shorter," said Lockhart. “Even for music stations, this ruling has ruined the hopes and dreams of thousands of broadcasters, in one fell swoop.” She contends that the DMCA needs a lot of refinement in order for the playing field to be level. ”This latest ruling needs to be completely thrown out, and more input from webcasters should be garnered before anything is changed. This is tantamount to wiping out an entire industry. We can’t let that happen, for current broadcasters’ continued solvency, and for future technological developments worldwide. As broadcasters, internet stations serve a global market.”
In eight months, after changing from music to stand-up comedy, Meander Comedy Radio rose from number 2866 to within the top 150 stations in the network, broadcasting to more than 60 countries worldwide. "It was phenomenal," she said, "I had no idea the station would do this well." Along with the huge listener numbers, though, came the added expense. "Each hour of listenership, after an initial, say, 15,000 listening hours, costs extra, beyond the static amount of the broadcast package. It was getting to be more than I could handle financially." The station grew to, at its peak in 2006, more than 38,000 hours of listeners' tuning in each month. "The pro package had 500 free listener slots (where listeners didn't have to pay to listen), and the station, following the CRB ruling, has from 0 to 40 free listening slots available. That change in free listener slots hurt us, and even though it costs very little for listeners to sign up for a 'V.I.P' membership, they just don't want to do it. I'm not sure why not, because it's definitely a lot less expensive than satellite radio, which only gives you 250 or so stations, while Live365 has 10,000 to choose from. Who knows? Maybe it will just take time for the public to discover the difference."
A station survey revealed that her listeners had an extremely broad age range. "It kind of surprised me that so many of my listeners are in the 30 to 50-year-old range, but it runs the gamut from teens all the way up to people in their 70s. Kind of amazing to see that kind of broad appeal for cleaner comedy," she said. Unlike many stations that never do any editing of the material they air, Lockhart spends hours on end with digital editing software, using a "filter" to bleep out profanity. "When I contacted the owner of Uproar Records to see if they would service our station (providing free comedy material), I was afraid he'd say no, since I edit for profanity. Instead, the record company immediately put Meander Comedy Radio in their promotions list and began sending material of established and emerging artists. It was a real blessing, because it can cost hundreds of dollars each month to keep that playlist fresh. Uproar Records is definitely at the top of our favorites list. They're good people."
On November 11, 2006, she launched another station named Solace Radio, also a talk radio station, which is now listed on iTunes.
Lockhart sustains her "radio habit" by freelancing news stories, working as a promoter, doing website maintenance and radio ad buys for a local company, as well as being the current agent for her daughter, a singer/songwriter, who will release the remix of her album this spring. Lockhart designed the cover and helped her with other aspects of the album. Her son lives in New Mexico, and works in the computer field. "It was hard, when the kids left home. So empty. I'd walk into their bedrooms and just cry," said Lockhart. "It was not a good time, but the human spirit can't stay down for long, I don't think. People have to find things to fill up that empty space. My things were writing news, songwriting (two songs were semi-finalists in the Dallas Songwriter's International Songwriting Competition in 2005), my art, and, of course radio."
Looking around her living room, half of which was being utilized for "studio", Lockhart laughed, "I really need a separate building. This is just getting out of hand." Bookshelves and filing cabinets form a ‘wall’, and “we have a Les Nesman (from the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati) kind of door. It's invisible, but it's definitely there." A gigantic gray tabby cat reached a paw up and patted her on the thigh, as she sat at her computer, the lifeline of her stations. "Are you hungry?" she asked, as she left the studio to give him some cat food. "I love working at home. Now if I can just figure out a way for it to really pay." Lockhart said she is looking at expanding her operations, but would not reveal what her plans are. “A lot is riding on this CRB ruling being overturned. It’s killing us, from a business standpoint. Most internet radio stations are Mom and Pop operations. In my case, it’s just a Mom operation. Most of us operate at a loss, so nobody’s getting rich, here. We do have a lot of love, though, for the artists we play, the art, and for the listeners. For some of us, radio is our life.”
Looking toward Mt. Blanca, the snowy mountain turned to pink in the glow of a Colorado sunset, a reminder of the line in a song, “ain’t no mountain high enough.” With the exception of the current CRB “mountain”, there seems to be no mountain high enough to stop an enduring entrepreneurial spirit, nor a dream. “One of my favorite comedy moments is from the late Mitch Hedberg. He said, ‘I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just gonna’ ask where they’re going, and hook up with ‘em, later.’ That pretty much says it all, right there,” said Lockhart. “You never know where they’ll take you.”