Radio KA-POW - Strikers getting a Spin - with Ben JahMin

Hi Folks, in this game the object of the artist is to get ones art out to as many interested ears as possible and to also get your music in front of as many new people as possible. It's and has always been a numbers game, a jungle telegraph that allows a band to grow and prosper. While the bigger stations are crucial to any bands long term survival, so too are the many smaller community stations and increasingly the internet podcasts with a good listening base. It's an amalgam rather than a specific listening audience that keeps you out there. As I ( and many like me ) predicted in a prescient statement made many years ago, it's the pirates of the podcast that are feeding the voracious appetite of the new music elites. These listeners aren't the type to be spoon fed their music, they're far too savvy to have their tastes dictated to them. There's too many ways to find music now and whilst this transition has been difficult to digest for some, for others, such as ourselves it's been embraced and contributed to our motivation to keep on making music. Look, in Adelaide as in any other limited population base, you can only really play four times a year as an original band, anyone who knows music and audiences and punters to bands ratios knows this. To play anymore in a static market and a small population with limited venues is only going to ensure that you play to empty rooms, have to dry hump your social media and generally bore the shit out of people. It's just a fact. When times were good, you could base yourself in the east and cruise up and down the coast and find enough fresh turf to justify playing every week. These days have disappeared for now so you must have airplay in conjunction with selective gigging. This is where the blunderbuss approach comes in. If your'e getting a good spread of plays across a broad section of platforms your'e going to succeed. Anyone can access the stats of a brands/bands site now so bullshitting isn't an option anymore. To have traffic you need to be in peoples ears and what's more important, you need it to get there not from you shouting about yourself, rather from other people to whom people know and trust as educated purveyors of decent product. So for this we are thankful for the guerrillas such as Ben JahMin who have been around the block and have a healthy listening base that is growing weekly. ( don't take my word for it, use Owler or something similar to see stats ). Anyhow once again i'm here and thanking old possum scratch for the often thankless task of manning a desk and running a weekly show, it can be a lonely job but without people like BJM the current musical landscape would be very denuded.

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