Rusty Hodge had a dream from the time he was a child. He wanted to create his own radio station. Even years later after graduating from high school, the dream persisted, never fading. During his college years at Cal Poly Pomona, he began to flesh out his childhood wish when he had an opportunity to manage his college radio station. Hodge’s fascination with radio destined him to make his own imprint on the worldwide stage.
Raised in Southern California, Hodge was surrounded by the pop culture and technology that was spreading along the West Coast. With his mom being a piano teacher and his father having an interest in radios and electronics, music was always present in his life and home. Some of his earliest memories from the age of three or four revolve around listening to the radio.
Another significant influence on his lifelong radio fascination was his grandfather. He would give Hodge the latest radio device for every birthday or holiday, feeding his growing interest. Southern California, the
home of Disneyland, has always been seen as the entertainment capital of the world. Growing up, Hodge lived very close to the Magic Kingdom so he enjoyed frequent trips to the park. The most memorable part for him was seeing the radio station inside the Disneyland Hotel. One of his father’s tricks as a local was to park at the hotel rather than the car park because it was cheaper. When walking through the hotel to the park he always passed the studio for the station KEZY, stopping to admire all the equipment, tape recorders, and mixers. It was after
seeing the Disney radio experience the seed was planted that someday he wanted his own radio station. Now, fifty years and untold iterations of radio stations later, Rusty Hodge is living out his childhood passion as the owner and operator of SomaFM, an internationally known and successful internet radio station. Many music lovers feel that mainstream radio is repetitive, boring, simplistic, and lacks creativity—not to mention it’s overrun with advertisements. People tune into radio stations to listen to music, not to be sold things that they don’t need. Hodge and SomaFM are proving that there is another way to experience radio rather than simply putting out traditional mainstream pop music with commercials between every song.
Rusty Hodge’s brainchild, SomaFM, runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and provides content from over 30 channels to 200 different countries, all from a converted warehouse in the “Dogpatch” neighborhood of San Francisco. The name itself invites consideration. Its inspiration is from one of the most discussed and thought-provoking novels of our time. The word Soma was always a fascination for Hodge: “If you’ve read Brave New World, Soma was the name of the drug that they took when they danced to the electric music box” (Hodge). He also happens to work south of Market Street, often referred to as SoMa, and had a small internet company aptly named soma. net. The “About SomaFM” webpage states,
With over thirty channels, the station is primarily managed by Hodge with a few employees pitching in to support various channels. On
the daily, the most popular channel is Groove Salad which delivers downtempo music with little or no lyrics. Some channels consist of ambient music that is commonly used as background music. Regular listener Toby McDonell explains what he enjoys about the SomaFM experience : “It’s just very relaxing. It’s good if I’m trying to draw or paint. It just sets a nice background.”
A determining factor that comes into play when curating music for the channels is that listeners don’t want to hear the same songs. “If we played that song at noon on a Monday, we’re not gonna play it between 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM for another
eight days,” Hodge explained. Having a listener-supported radio station means that you need to satisfy your listener’s needs to remain financially solvent.
Another innovative way the listener experience is enhanced by SomaFM is their inclusion of what they call “Spice Tracks”. These tracks are songs that everyone has heard and loved at one point but if they heard them repeated daily they would revolt. “But if you heard it like once every six months, it’d be kind of fun to hear it again” (Hodge). For example, “Never gonna give you up” by Rick Astley is a Spice Track option even though it is now notoriously known as a meme or joke.
The SomaFM office is a snapshot straight out of Hodge’s mind. As you enter the space you’ll see a shelf covering the entire back wall filled with CDs. According to Hodge, “There’s at
“we started broadcasting from San Francisco’s South of Market underground club area, also known as SoMa.”
least 8,000 last time I did a rough count. There could be more, cuz there’s like some walls up there that are just piled with them.” The adjacent wall displays colorful plaques of all the different channels offered by SomaFM. Just below the wall lounges a big purple couch where most of the interviews and podcasts take place. One of the workstations is situated right in front of the couch where there are microphones and all sorts of equipment.
Before Covid-19, artists would actually come
into the studio and do live performances. In the farthest corner of the office sits Hodge’s main computer and control station. It stands out with its large monitors and soundboards. One monitor has a live video feed of the data center which is located downtown. Another monitor displays the Pro Tools station, where all the audio editing is done in order to make the jingles for the live broadcasts.
After only seven years, Rusty was able to turn SomaFM from a hobby into a full-time profession. The process of building and promoting a new business was strenuous, to say the least. His business’s growth had many problems and setbacks, the first notable one being limited bandwidth. In simple terms, bandwidth is the maximum amount of data transmitted over an internet connection in a given amount of time. The amount of bandwidth it took to stream audio was pretty high and it required a strong internet connection. There was not a lot of available bandwidth so the number of listeners at any given time was fairly limited. As Hodge noted, “I think it was like less than fifteen listeners before it filled up and couldn’t handle anymore without skipping or dropouts or whatnot.” In other words, greater bandwidth was a top concern. It was possible to purchase chunks of bandwidth from providers but it was very expensive compared to today.
According to the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the price per megabit per second (Mbps) was 98% more expensive in 2000 with the price per Mbps at $28.13 as opposed to the current cost of $0.35 or less per Mbps (NCTA). The solution to their limited bandwidth problem came from one of the most prominent internet providers at the time, AOL(America Online). The company realized that it had tons of excess bandwidth that was not being used. The AOL users were pulling data in but not pushing it back out. It was determined that AOL would save money if they were able to equalize the data being taken in and the data being sent out. Since SomaFM was using a service that was owned by AOL to broadcast their music they started relaying all of this extra bandwidth to them. Their once very limited listener count was now able to increase exponentially. It took them from having around fifty concurrent listeners to, suddenly, a thousand or more.
