Ten years ago, Mushroom FM made the biggest and best decision in its history.
We stopped trying to be all things to all people. We decided that when you tuned to Mushroom FM, you should have a pretty good idea what sort of music you were going to hear and, just as importantly, what sort of radio station you were going to hear.
And so began the format that has defined us ever since: music from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Four decades of magic Mushroom memories.
It feels so much a part of Mushroom FM now that it is difficult to remember just how significant, and controversial, that decision was. I got a good deal of grief for it when we announced it.
It wasn’t simply a format change.
Frankly, it was a decision about whether Mushroom FM still had a reason to exist, and there were plenty of people predicting that with this change, our days were surely numbered.
I am heartened by how much of an appetite there seems to be at the moment for blindness history, so I thought I would chronicle this important change. To explain why it mattered so much, we need to go back considerably further than ten years.
On New Year’s Eve 1998, I was supposed to be working on my Master of Public Policy thesis.
My family had gone away so I could have the house to myself and get some serious work done. Naturally, I did what any diligent postgraduate student would do.
I started playing with Internet radio.
During a break from my thesis, I read on a Winamp mailing list about something new called SHOUTcast. For the first time, here was a relatively simple framework that allowed ordinary people to run live audio streams over the Internet.
Within half an hour, I had a test stream running of the low-power FM station I was operating at the time.
The thesis break had become rather longer than planned.
But I knew immediately that SHOUTcast was a game changer. One particularly important feature for a blind broadcaster was that Winamp could send the music directly to the SHOUTcast server while leaving the sound card available for a screen reader. That removed a significant technical obstacle.
Almost immediately, I started thinking bigger.
I came up with the Hear Today Network. The idea was to create an Internet radio station run by blind people around the world. It wouldn’t simply be a collection of unrelated streams. We would have common jingles, common promotional material, a coherent sound, and ways for listeners to interact with broadcasters through email and instant messaging.
Bandwidth was incredibly expensive compared with today, and I couldn’t find anyone willing to sponsor enough of it to make the idea viable. But some test broadcasts showed that there was real enthusiasm for the concept.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the basic idea behind Hear Today would keep resurfacing throughout my broadcasting life.
Things moved quickly.
My own Internet station, MBSFM, led to Blind Line, an international talk programme specifically about blindness. That in turn brought me into contact with the American Council of the Blind.
By the end of 1999, I had been hired to establish and manage ACB Radio.
At exactly 0 UTC on 1 December 1999, broadcasting from a spare bedroom in Wellington, New Zealand, I pushed the button and ACB Radio was born.
The technical specifications sound almost comical today: 16 kilobits per second, 11 kilohertz, mono. We chose that deliberately because many blind people were still using dial-up Internet connections. Audio quality was secondary to making sure people could actually get connected.
And connect they did.
They were hearing conversations that simply weren’t happening anywhere else. Blind people were discussing technology, employment, discrimination, politics, advocacy and everyday life with other blind people around the world.
Before podcasts.
Before social media.
Before smartphones.
It really did feel extraordinary.
There was a genuine novelty element to it.
Today, hearing someone broadcast live from another country is utterly routine. Back then, the fact that a blind person in New Zealand could broadcast to another blind person in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia or anywhere else with an Internet connection felt revolutionary.
And for blind people in particular, something significant was happening.
We weren’t merely consuming media.
We were making it.
We were presenting current affairs programmes. We were interviewing major figures in the blindness field. We were broadcasting conventions. We were reviewing technology. And increasingly, we were making music radio.
ACB Radio eventually expanded into multiple streams, and one of those was ACB Radio Interactive. In many ways, Interactive finally fulfilled my original Hear Today vision: blind broadcasters from around the world, each bringing their personality, musical knowledge and life experience to the microphone.
But I was adamant that it couldn’t simply be a server where a succession of people turned up, did their show and disappeared again.
A radio station needs a personality.
It needs glue.
So ACB Radio Interactive put enormous emphasis on the relationship between broadcaster and listener. Presenters checked email during their shows, read messages on air, took requests and signed into MSN Instant Messenger so listeners could have an immediate conversation with the person behind the microphone.
On Blind Line, BuddyPhone, affectionately, and sometimes not so affectionately, known to us as “BuggyPhone” meant people no longer had to pay for an international telephone call to New Zealand to take part. A computer, a microphone and an Internet connection were enough.
These things seem mundane now.
At the time, they were transformative.
Sighted people listened too. And why not?
Much of what we produced was simply good radio that happened to be produced by blind people. When I eventually left ACB Radio in 2003, I reflected on the fact that much of our programming had appealed to a wide audience and, in doing so, had helped change some sighted listeners’ perceptions of blindness.
By then, the operation had grown to more than 60 volunteers in nine countries.
There is something powerful about changing perceptions not by lecturing people about what blind people can do, but simply by doing something well.
Then along came the Mushroom
I left ACB Radio in 2003, but I never really lost the Internet radio bug.
The Mosen Explosion, whose name dates back to 2002 when my old Sunday Smorgasbord moved away from Sunday and therefore urgently required a less ridiculous name, remained an important outlet for me.
Then, in 2010, Mushroom FM happened almost by accident.
I was setting up my own server because I wanted somewhere to host the Mosen Explosion. I wasn’t setting out to build another international Internet radio station.
But as word got around about what I was doing, people started asking whether they could join me.
One thing led to another, as things have an irritating habit of doing, and Mushroom FM was born.
By then, Twitter had transformed the way a radio station could interact with its audience.
In the ACB Radio days, we had BuddyPhone, email, MSN Messenger and chat rooms. Now we could have an ongoing public conversation with listeners before, during and after a show.
Mushroom FM embraced social media enthusiastically, and in those early days we generated a considerable amount of excitement around the station. We were using social media in ways that similar projects had not.
It was tremendous fun.
But technology doesn’t stand still.
And neither should a radio station.
There was a time when the very fact that blind people were broadcasting globally was unusual.
By 2016, thankfully, that was no longer true.
There were plenty of places where you could hear blind people broadcasting. Streaming technology had become much easier to obtain and use.
That was progress.
At the same time, the way everyone consumed audio had changed dramatically.
Music streaming services had put millions of songs into people’s pockets. If you wanted to hear a particular song, you no longer had to wait for a radio station to play it. If you didn’t like what you were hearing, you could skip it.
Podcasts meant you could hear spoken-word content whenever you wanted and, if you wished, at whatever speed you wanted.
In the message I sent to the Mushroom FM team in 2016, I acknowledged that fundamental shift. People had access to vast music libraries and could consume content entirely on their own terms.
That raised an uncomfortable question.
What was Mushroom FM for?
Being able to stream audio over the Internet was no longer enough.
Being a station featuring blind broadcasters was no longer enough.
And increasingly, Mushroom FM itself didn’t have a satisfactory answer.
We had lost our way.
At the time, Mushroom FM’s music format was all over the place.
Depending on when you tuned in, you might hear one decade, another genre, something completely different an hour later, then something else after that.
There was plenty of good material in there.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that there was no compelling reason to make Mushroom FM a habit.
We had also been very open about accepting broadcasters. In many cases, if someone wanted to do a show and could get themselves on the air competently, we found them a slot.
Often that meant someone doing one live show a week. Maybe two.
Multiply that across a collection of presenters, each doing different styles of music at different times, and you had a schedule that was virtually impossible for the average listener to keep in their head.
Who was on Tuesday afternoon?
What happened Thursday evening?
Was that show weekly?
Was that person on at this time yesterday?
There were some loyal listeners who kept track of all this, of course.
But you cannot build a large regular audience on the assumption that everyone is studying your programme schedule.
Great radio becomes part of someone’s routine.
People turn it on while making breakfast.
They listen while working.
They put it on in the car.
It accompanies them through the afternoon.
They don’t necessarily think, “At 2 PM on Wednesdays, person X has a show I enjoy.”
They think, “I’ll put Mushroom FM on.”
We weren’t giving enough people a reason to do that.
I described the station at the time as “too fragmented, trying to be too many things to too many people.”
Listener behaviour was backing that up.
Our new format changed all of that.
The programmes performing particularly well gave us a clue.
The Mosen Explosion, with its older music and substantial helping of chat, was doing well. So was the Snowman. The show called Only the 80s was also strong. Our 1950s programming was performing well too.
There was a pattern there if we were prepared to see it.
But adopting the new format did more than solve a music-programming problem.
It raised the bar.
Instead of Mushroom FM being a platform where a collection of people happened to do individual programmes, we became much more emphatically a radio station.
One station.
One identifiable format.
One consistent sound.
Individual presenters still had plenty of freedom to bring their own personality and musical tastes to what they did. That is essential. But they were doing it within an identity listeners could understand.
If there was no presenter on air, the Mushroom Pot delivered the same basic promise.
The result was that Mushroom FM could become part of someone’s day rather than merely being the place where a particular programme happened to live.
That distinction is fundamental.
This part of the story is easier to tell ten years later than it was to live through.
At that point, I had assumed full responsibility for funding Mushroom FM.
I had to decide whether I believed in the station enough to keep putting money, time and energy into it, particularly since I was making my living as a consultant at the time. That meant that it wasn’t just the financial cost I had to think about. There was an opportunity cost. If I was investing time in Mushroom FM, it was time I couldn’t use to do something that paid the bills.
And if I was going to keep investing time and money, I had to be prepared to change it.
That can be surprisingly difficult.
When you create something, you accumulate history.
People have invested their time in it.
Broadcasters have shows they care about.
Listeners have favourites.
Over the years, we made decisions for perfectly understandable reasons.
Changing course can feel like repudiating what came before.
But nostalgia is not a strategy.
Sometimes respecting what you have built means being willing to change it so it can remain relevant.
So I made the call.
Mushroom FM would transition to a station playing music from the 1950s through the 1980s. So, I guess in that sense, nostalgia was indeed the strategy. We became a station defined primarily by an era, giving us enormous freedom within those four decades.
That distinction was important.
The format could encompass rock and roll, soul, Motown, pop, country, disco, new wave, singer-songwriters, novelty records, huge hits, forgotten gems and songs you hadn’t heard for years but somehow still knew every word of.
When no presenter was on the air, the Mushroom Pot would provide a broad mix from all four decades.
Most importantly, when someone tuned to Mushroom FM, they would know what they were going to get.
In my message to the team, I wrote that I wanted Mushroom FM to be “relevant to more than a tiny handful of people.” I believed a consistent 50s-through-80s format gave us our best chance of growing, and it was the basis on which I was prepared to continue investing in the station.
Ten years later, history is a testament to the rightness of that decision.
Over time, the description became part of our identity.
Four decades of magic Mushroom memories.
I love that phrase because it captures something this kind of music radio can do that an enormous on-demand music library cannot necessarily replicate.
A song is rarely just a song.
It can be the record that was playing when you met someone.
The single you saved up to buy.
The album you played relentlessly at university.
The song from a school dance.
The record your parents loved that, to your considerable surprise, you eventually discovered wasn’t half bad.
The summer hit that instantly transports you back to a particular place.
And sometimes it is simply a cracking good song you had completely forgotten existed until Mushroom FM played it.
That is where radio can still work its particular magic.
Of course you can construct your own playlist.
You can tell a streaming service exactly what you want.
But sometimes the whole point is that you don’t know what you want.
You want someone else to choose.
You want the surprise of hearing a song you would never have thought to request.
You want a presenter who knows the music and can tell you something interesting about it.
And sometimes you just want another human being there.
The familiar voices matter
That last point has become clearer and clearer to me as the years have gone by.
People may discover Mushroom FM because of the music.
But I know many people stay because of the people.
The familiar voices matter.
There is something comforting about knowing who is going to turn up.
Someone whose stories you know.
Someone whose sense of humour you understand.
Someone who has been part of the soundtrack to your day for years.
Radio is remarkably intimate that way.
A broadcaster may have no idea what a particular listener is doing while the show is on.
Perhaps they are cooking.
Perhaps working.
Perhaps walking the dog.
Perhaps sitting alone.
Perhaps dealing with a difficult day.
Yet somehow this disembodied voice coming through a speaker can become familiar company.
I know from the things listeners tell us that Mushroom FM provides companionship as well as entertainment.
That means a great deal to me.
And that brings me to the people who make all of this possible.
One of the things I am proudest of after ten years of this format is just how remarkably stable the Mushroom FM team has been.
Many of the key people who were here when we made the change in 2016 are still here.
I am profoundly grateful to them, and actually, a bit in awe.
This is a volunteer project.
Nobody gets paid a cent.
People have careers.
Families.
Responsibilities.
Things happen in life.
Yet year after year, people continue to turn up and produce extraordinarily good radio.
We have also had remarkably little drama.
Anyone who has run a volunteer organisation, particularly one made up of creative people with microphones, may appreciate what an achievement that is.
We get on with it.
We get the job done.
And we are bloody good at what we do.
I am immensely grateful to our amazing fun guys who so generously give Mushroom FM their time and enormous talent.
They are some of the most special people you could ever hope to work with.
They know their music.
They understand radio.
They bring their own personalities to what they do.
They care about producing something worth listening to.
And after all these years, they still care about Mushroom FM.
You cannot buy that.
The final reason I am happy to fully fund Mushroom FM myself is rather more selfish.
I love doing it.
I love being behind the microphone.
I love putting a show together.
I love the discipline of doing radio for two hours every week day.
I love finding some obscure musical connection that gives me an excuse to play two records I probably shouldn’t put next to each other.
I love talking with listeners.
And I love having somewhere I can regularly unleash a little creativity.
Radio got into my blood a very long time ago.
Apparently, it has shown no inclination to leave.
Technology has changed enormously since I first fired up SHOUTcast on New Year’s Eve 1998.
The bit rates are better, thankfully.
The connections are faster.
MSN Messenger has gone to the great software archive in the sky.
Nobody has to call New Zealand at international toll rates to participate in a programme, and if they did, they would find me gone.
Millions upon millions of tracks are instantly available.
Yet the things that make good radio good have proved remarkably durable.
Personality.
Curation.
Surprise.
Shared experience.
Companionship.
Consistency.
And a clear understanding of who you are.
Perhaps that last one is the biggest lesson of this anniversary.
For Mushroom FM, 2016 was the year we worked out who we were.
We stopped trying to please everybody.
We concentrated on being distinctive.
We raised our standards.
We made the station predictable enough to become a habit while keeping the music unpredictable enough to be interesting.
And we built something that has endured.
It also taught me an important lesson of leadership. Leadership is lonely sometimes. But if you feel, if you know in your gut, that a change of direction is necessary, if you know the market you serve well, then follow your heart, follow that instinct, be true to yourself, and things will work out.
So on this tenth anniversary, I want to say an enormous thank you.
To every broadcaster who has been part of this station, past and present, thank you for sharing your knowledge, personality and love of radio with us.
To the people behind the scenes who have helped keep the technology working, thank you.
To the fun guys who have been here year after year, quietly getting on with producing superb radio without asking for anything in return, you have my profound gratitude and respect.
I could not be prouder of what we have created together.
And above all, thank you to those of you who listen.
Some of you have been with us for an extraordinary length of time.
Some found us only recently.
You send messages.
You make requests.
You tell us when we get something right.
You occasionally tell us, with impressive clarity and vigour, when you think we have got something wrong.
That is as it should be.
You are part of the station too.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for being part of our story.
Home of the Fun Guys!