By Antony Bruno
VP/headEric SzmandaCSI: Crime Scene Investigation
But Szmanda's music background goes far deeper than your
typical actor-turned-DJ. He's a former marketing rep at music
company BMG, where he met and worked with Harrison; served as a
music consultant on the movie "Life as a House"; and is a
frequent club promoter through his side company Doop.
Billboard caught up with Szmanda to discuss his thoughts on
Internet radio.
Q: Clear Channel isn't exactly well known for letting DJs
do their own programming. Was that a concern for you when
starting erockster?
Eric Szmanda: I was obviously super nervous about working
for Clear Channel. If it wasn't for Evan I probably wouldn't be
doing this. But I always loved the idea of working with the
system to do something cool rather than just complaining about
the system all the time. Even though we work with Clear
Channel, we're not them. We're geared to give artists a chance
to be heard, whether it be talking about music or playing live
concerts or broadcasting multiple tracks off a record. It's not
just playing one single.
Q: How much are you directly involved in the music
programming?
Szmanda: All the music has been selected by me and our
team. For the launch at Coachella (the Southern California
music festival), we had three weeks to build our entire library
from scratch and build out our Web site ... We didn't have any
experience in radio. We don't know how the (radio) system
works. Right now, we're working through some glitches because
we have no idea what we're doing when it comes to programming.
We don't want you to hear the same song every three hours.
Q: How is erockster different from what is heard on Clear
Channel every day?
Szmanda: There are things you're not going to hear on
erockster, which is basically the stuff you've heard enough of.
There are some great hits which are hits for a reason, but
they're going to be spaced out. You're going to hear the
B-sides from them, remixes, mashups, a full concept album
sometimes. We want to always be evolving the playlist. For us,
heavy rotation is like once a day.
Q: Does your celebrity as an actor help erockster at all?
Szmanda: I'm trying to play down my involvement as much as
possible. There are other actors out there who shall remain
nameless who have radio shows out here in L.A. that if I saw
their name on a flier advertising them playing a party, I
wouldn't go. I don't want to be talking on the radio show. I
just want to be the mediator between the listener and the
artist. I'd like to think that all the work I did at BMG 12
years ago was kind of preparing me for this.
Q: Any plans to add new features to erockster?
Szmanda: We're going to be building our on-demand library
by going directly to labels and management and working out
deals where music will be available whenever people want it.
That's the direction Internet radio is going, just like TV.
That's what's going to keep people coming back for more.
There's definitely another step involved in this, but I'm not
going to talk about it yet.
Reuters/Billboard
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