Melissa Etheridge "Lover Please"

It's kind of hard to image now, but it really wasn't that long ago, that it was pretty rare to be a radio station that streamed live on the web.

mvyradio was among the first stations in the country to embrace the concept, and on the one hand, we have been better for being early adopters, because we had a jump other stations, and were quick to grow our online audience.

The downside of being a trailblazer, is that there is no trail . . .

We literally had to invent a set up to do the things we needed to do, to properly get our station online.

One hurdle we had to leap, was the blocking out of commercials.

When radio stations started sending their signal over the web, to a larger audience, the Unions who do voiceover work threw up alarms. Because the voiceover folks who do commercials get paid based on how widely their recordings are being distributed, if mvyradio was webcasting the spots, the talent wanted to be paid extra.

And there was no F-N way we were going to pay extra, to air commercials!

So our engineer came up with a system. When a commercial break started to play on the broadcast, it set off a tone. That tone fire up a computer down the line, that played filler music over our web feed, blocking out the commercials. When the last commercial ended, another tone played, and that stopped the filler music, and returned the web feed to regular programming.

Or, at least, that was how is was supposed to work.

Being a trailblazer, means cutting away as brush and debris, before moving forward. Lots of trial and error.

The distraught emails and phone calls started coming in.

"What are you doing?" "Why!?!?!" "Please stop." "What's up with the Melissa Etheridge?"

Well that last one was specific enough . . .

Further investigation revealed that the tone to start a filler song was working, but the tone to stop the filler music was not.

Not only that, but there was only one song in the filler music rotation. Melissa Etheridge's "Lover Please."

So when a commercial break started on the air, "Lover Please" started on the web. But when the commercial break was over, the one song didn't stop---it just started over.

And over. And over. And over.

Apparently, "Lover Please" played repeatedly for a good hour, before we figured out what was happening and how to stop it.

People thought we were torturing them on purpose.

Sorry!


See the video on Youtube.