Jensen McDonell
Jensen McDonell
I dedicate this book to my uncle Rusty for allowing me to do this project on him and SomaFM. None of this would have been possible without his help. I would also like to dedicate this book to my friends and family who have helped shape me into the person I am today.
I would like to acknowledge Freestyle Academy for making the production of this book possible. I’m thankful for the opportunities that Freestyle gives me and all of the resources that they have provided. I would also like to extend my gratitude to my interviewees, Rusty Hodge and Toby McDonell. This would not have been possible without them.
In the first weeks of February, we started our documentaries with a vague idea of what our subject would be. In our English class, we read Seeing Silicon Valley by Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner. It was a documentary book that used photography and countless personal interviews to give an unseen view of Silicon Valley. From this reading experience, I knew that I wanted to do a profile on someone with an intriguing and unique story. Immediately my uncle came to mind. He built his very own radio station from the ground up, revolutionizing radio.
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.
An old BMW on the streets of San Francisco
usty 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, “we started broadcasting from San Francisco’s South of Market underground club area, also known as SoMa.” 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 down-tempo 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 listenersupported 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 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.
One might wonder, “Where do they get all of the music?” The answer can actually be quite simple and slightly complicated. When Hodge was initially sourcing music for one of the channels, “Secret Agent”, while he was in Italy, he discovered some tiny boutique record stores. “Italy had this huge film industry, and therefore had all these musicians doing soundtrack stuff for it” (Hodge). He was able to find a bunch of sixties and seventies albums in the boutiques that were great additions to his collection. During his travels, a frequent activity was to go check out obscure music stores and see what they were playing in the clubs and to get other suggestions. On the simpler side of sourcing music was the internet. Occasionally using applications like Napster and other music-sharing services. Napster is a now-defunct peer-to-peer file-sharing network that was “extremely popular and provided easy access for millions of internet users to a large number of free audio files” (Harris). Also being “plugged into the underground music scene in San Francisco”, Hodge was able to connect with other DJs to share and talk about music. Prior to the internet, there was a physical mailing list where individuals could communicate about the music they discovered and share where they heard it and what places they perhaps ordered it from. Hodge recalls, “It’s so different than finding music now” (Hodge).
fter finishing up college in Los Angeles, Hodge was able to get a couple of jobs working with commercial radio stations. This was when he found that the radio business wasn’t all that it had initially appeared to be; in reality, the station’s air time was equally divided between commercials and playing actual music, and the hosts were essentially musical salespeople. In other words, “The only people who really got any respect and got ahead in commercial radio stations were the ad salespeople. And I hated the ad” (Hodge).
“The only people who really got any respect and got ahead in commercial radio stations were the ad salespeople. And I hated the ad” (Hodge).
Along with basically spending all of his time doing what someone else told him, he determined very early on that he wanted no part in advertisements on radio and just wanted to host music and quality programming. Typical commercial
radio stations must run ads as their primary source of income. Companies buy airtime to boost product and brand awareness. According to Radiocentre.org, “Listeners are, on average, 48% more aware of companies that have been advertised on the radio and 12% more likely to consider them when buying” (“Grow Your Business with Radio Advertising”).
After abandoning commercial radio for a while, Hodge started to get more involved with computers and desktop publishing. This was when the internet started to take off, which was something that had piqued his interest. He found that there were many opportunities the internet granted, and it was during this period that he started getting back into radio. Rusty sought out some larger and commercially successful radio stations and proposed that he could get them onto the internet by setting them up with their own websites. “And that sort of kind of worked,” Hodge recalls. He had a lot of success with KPIX Channel 5 TV in San Francisco. While they had a lucrative radio station, they really needed help with their TV station. This proved to be a good fit for him as he also liked doing work for TV. In the midst of working
with KPIX and doing small jobs for people, the radio world had become consolidated. Big companies were buying up small local radio stations, replacing programming with more and more ad content. “The songs were getting more boring and the programming was becoming less interesting. The music that was once beloved now sucked” (Hodge).
“The songs were getting more boring and the programming was becoming less interesting. The music that was once beloved now sucked” (Hodge).
The ongoing decline of available quality radio was what finally gave Hodge a clear vision of what could be. While he was doing work with a TV network, he helped them develop some early video streaming capabilities. He figured he could unofficially try something out with radio streaming, operating under the guise of “I’m testing out some stuff” (Hodge). One thing he was doing was testing out the servers to see how things worked. “As streaming goes, the technology doesn’t care if it’s sound or video” (Hodge). He was able to use that as an excuse which allowed him to put together some DJ sets and music mixes. He began to tell some of his friends about it. He would send them a link to listen and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The process, Hodge explains, “took a lot of effort” because this was still during 1997-
1998 so people needed modems and other technology that was newer at that time.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the technology became widely accessible to everyone. People began to get cable modems and DSL which allowed people to have higher speed connections and access to the internet. As defined by the website Ringcentral, DSL is a high-speed internet that allows accelerated access via wifi or an ethernet cable.
At this time, people in workplaces had almost full-time access to the Internet so it broadened the scale and accessibility substantially. Anyone using a computer at work would have access to an online radio station and Rusty determined that this was the perfect time to create a proper radio station according to his exacting standards.
The first step to building a station begins with establishing the station identification. According to the small business website Allbusiness, the station ID is the “public announcement of the call letters, channel number (where applicable), and city of origin of a broadcast station” (“Station Identification”). His next task was to get the channel up and running with channels and content and people really started to enjoy it. Once it went live, new channels continued to be added and it continued growing from there.
fter 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.
One part of streaming music that many wouldn’t initially consider is paying for music royalties. Music royalties are recurring costs that must be paid in order to use an artist’s music on a radio station. When running an independent radio station, where your sole focus is to play music, paying for royalties can be an alarming expense. When Hodge was hit with the fact that he was going to have to pay something close to a thousand dollars a day it was clear that something needed to change. Prior to this, there was the “Webcaster Settlement Act” that allowed small radio station operators to pay royalties based on a percentage of revenues rather than a per-stream rate. Once this expired in 2015 and was not renewed, there was fear that some low-budget online radio stations could be forced to shut down. Hodge was among a group of internet radio broadcasters that got together and went to Washington, DC to testify before Congress. One of the leaders of the movement was the popular music streaming platform, Pandora.
According to Pitchfork.com, “SomaFM will owe about $15,000 a month in SoundExchange royalties, which are on top of a separate batch of royalties involving music publishers and songwriters’’ (Hogan). Hodge had meetings with Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein’s office. Aside from testifying, they had to also explain exactly what they were doing in very basic terms because the internet was still relatively new. “We have a whole class of musicians who don’t have any other way of getting exposure,” (Hodge) argued. In the end, they came up with a compromise that eventually became known as the “Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002” or H.R. 5469. This allowed small independent stations to use content, and not have to pay out an exorbitant royalty fee that would cripple the business. He recalled someone telling him that “if both parties are unhappy, it’s a good compromise.”
SomaFM was a pioneer of internet radio and remains important today because of what it stands for. In addition to putting out awesome tunes to please every musical taste, it’s provided visibility and a platform for new and lesser-known artists through their unique way of sourcing music. Hodge has also been integral in shaping the way independent radio stations compensate artists in a manner that protects both the artist’s work and the company’s financial security. Hodge himself was a leader in the policy changes that led to today’s laws related to music royalties. Leading the way in commercial-free radio, the captain at the helm of SomaFM has proven that radio stations don’t need to be owned by large companies to be successful and that mass advertising is just a way to exploit listeners. SomaFM is successful and is 100% listener supported.
Hodge has big plans for the future. One long-term goal is to find someone that would be able to take over the full-time running SomaFM so he can pursue new dreams. Maintaining the station’s technical infrastructure and updating it with the current and future technological standards will be an ongoing project. This task will be challenging because he has to make sure that while they are updating the system with new technology, people with older devices will still be able to access the streams. In total, they plan to spend over two hundred thousand dollars in the near future to deploy new streaming technology, not to mention thousands of hours of labor to get everything running smoothly. SomaFM is not simply any radio station; it is clearly a labor of love and the realization of a childhood dream for Rusty Hodge.
Hogan, Marc. “Has a Royalty Change Doomed Small Webcasters?” Pitchfork, 27 Jan. 2016, https:// pitchfork.com/thepitch/995-has-a-royalty-change-doomed-small-webcasters/
Harris, Mark. “A Short History of Napster.” Lifewire, Lifewire, 16 Feb. 2023, https://www.lifewire. com/history-of-napster-2438592.
“Station Identification.” All Business, Dun & Bradstreet, 17 Dec. 2022, https://www.allbusiness. com/barrons_dictionary/dictionary-station-identification-4964205-1.html.
Hodge, Rusty. Personal Interview. 1. Mar. 2023.
“Soma FM.” SomaFM, https://somafm.com/about/index.html.
McDonell, Toby. Personal Interview. 5. Apr. 2023
O’Brien, Sam. “What Is DSL?: A Quick Start Guide to Understanding DSL.” RingCentral UK Blog, RingCentral UK, 4 Feb. 2023, https://www.ringcentral.com/gb/en/blog/definitions/what-is-dsl/.
“Grow Your Business with Radio Advertising.” Radiocentre, 11 Feb. 2022, https://www.radiocentre.org/why-use-radio/the-roles-for-radio/grow-your-business-with-radio-advertising/#:~:text=Boosting%20awareness%20and%20consideration,to%20consider%20them%20when%20buying.
“Industry Data.” NCTA, https://www.ncta.com/industry-data/98-decrease-in-price-per-megabit#:~:text=The%20price%20per%20megabit%20per%20second%20of%20cable%20broadband%20service,2000%20to%20%240.64%20in%202020.
Jensen McDonell is a junior at Mountain View High School and is studying Design at Freestyle Academy. He is an explorer of life as he strives to discover new places and Ideas. His goals in these upcoming years of adolescence are to discover new passions and establish great ideas. Outside of school he enjoys exploring nature, hanging out with friends, and creating art. Creating art is something that he began doing with his Dad and Grandma from a young age, and he has been expressing his artistic abilities ever since.
