I am a huge fan of Holiday Music! In the past, we’ve played all Holiday music for the entire month of December. While my family, a few others, and myself have really enjoyed it, it’s not always the best strategy. This year, beginning the day after Thanksgiving, we will begin to slowly add Holiday songs to the normal rotation of Hot Country Hits. As we get closer to Christmas Day, we will have up to 4 or 5 songs per hour. For Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I will be playing 48 hours of Christmas Music and hopefully some long-form specials from our providers.
I want to share my love of the Season without overwhelming you all. Holiday music can sometimes be a very polarizing thing. A lot of people really love it, some folks really don’t like it at all. And yet further, some folks are just kinda OK with it. I hope to strike a good balance and provide the best to everyone.
I will be playing some of the well known classics from Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole that you all know and love along with some of the best from our stable of incredible Country artists like Blake Shelton and Martina McBride. As always, I will ask for and encourage your constant feedback. Please post on Twitter, Facebook, or on this post if things need to be adjusted. “Play More Holiday Music!”, “Don’t play so much Holiday Music!”, etc… I want to know!
Again, we wish all of you Happy Holidays and thanks for listening to America’s Country!
I was doing some looking around and realized there are a lot of songs out there about daddy, pop, father, pa, etc… We want to honor them for all they do! This week, you’ll hear a lot of great Father Songs. I’ve tweaked them up so they play much more often. Here’s a quick sampling of what you’ll hear:
Glen Templeton – That’s My Job (Excellent cover of a classic Conway Twitty song)
Tim McGraw – My Little Girl
George Strait – Love Without End, Amen; The Best Day; The Breath You Take
Reba McEntire – The Greatest Man I Never Knew
Alan Jackson – Drive (for Daddy Gene)
Brad Paisley – Anything Like Me; He Didn’t Have To Be
Bucky Covington – A Father’s Love (The Only Way He Knew How)
Gary Allen – Tough Little Boys
Kenny Chesney – There Goes My Life
Rodney Atkins – He’s Mine; Watching You; Cleaning This Gun
Trace Adkins – You’re Gonna Miss This
Lonestar – I’m Already There; My Front Porch Looking In
Tracy Lawrence – ‘Til I Was A Daddy Too
And so much more!
We all love our Dads and we want to be sure he is recognized and honored! Father’s Day is June 17th and we’ll feature these songs and more through that time!
If you have more ideas for great country music Father songs, please comment!
I’ll just open by stating the problem: It is costly to run this station. There are 2 major costs involved in operating an internet radio station. One is the bandwidth to serve the station to you. The other is royalties and licensing fees that allow us to legally play the music so the artists and their labels get paid for their work. At the current setup with how many listeners I am allowed My fees total about $70 a month.
Here’s the problem: If I want to make this thing both legal and huge, it costs more and more! I have to pay more for both streaming and for royalties. It’s a really crummy setup. I understand that artists need to be paid. But I also understand they want more exposure so it’s a backwards spiral for us web broadcasters. I’d LOVE to be able to have 1000’s of listeners jammin’ to Hot Country Hits and not have to wade through tons of commercials to hear the music.
I’ve done some research and there are ways to make money by playing commercials. It’s not difficult. I just play them. However, I feel like in order to differentiate myself from all the other country stations on FM and online, I need to not have commercials. I feel like more of you will listen and tell your friends about us if you can tell them there’s no commercials.
Here’s the solution: I need your help. To keep us commercial-free, please donate to us. I have options on our website, our stream launch page and our Facebook page to either make a one-time donation or create a subscription where you pay a set amount monthly. Both options are through PayPal and are flexible. There’s no contracts for the subscription and you can change it any time. Currently, under the Subscription option, you can pick $5, $10 or $20 a month. All the money donated goes directly into the PayPal account where my fees come out of. The money will not go toward any station equipment or upgrades. I will not use the money for anything personal.
Plan B: I start playing commercials. I REALLY don’t want to! I think that would be reason enough to just end the whole project. Why would people listen if I had commercials and was like anything else out there?
I am very happy with the incredible growth we’ve seen in 2011! A lot of you are very loyal listeners who also interact on social media! I was happy to have 2011 be our free year. Now that I know that this concept is viable and successful and that I want to continue, it’s time to get serious.
This day and age, everyone wants things RIGHT NOW! Even on the web, people have shortcuts and favorites so they can get where they want to go with as few clicks as possible. We want that for you too! Previously, we’ve had some interesting ways to listen, but none have been automatic and have required some effort and plenty of clicks. Now, you can click on one play button and through the magic of the innernetz, America’s Country will start playing!
The best thing here is that you don’t even need to install a player! If your browser supports Flash, our new player will just launch when the page is loaded! It also will show you album art and recently played song titles. We also have our traditional links if your setup doesn’t support Flash, but like before, you’ll need to use a player like Winamp or iTunes to listen.
Here’s the only drawback: the Flash player will only play our High Quality 128 kb/s MP3 stream. That means, if your on a mobile device or have a slower internet connection, you may not get the best results and hear skipping or not even have the stream start. We’re willing to bet that most of you already can play a HQ stream (since I know most of you listen on that stream already!) and this will just make life easier for you!
Coming soon we hope to have additional Flash players for our lower bandwidth stream and our AAC stream. Meanwhile, enjoy our new instant-gratification enabled Flash player! As before, just click on that nifty graphical play button on the right and a new page will load that will auto-launch the Flash player! EASY!!
If you run into any problems, please contact us at studio@kxrtonline.com or comment here or on Facebook!
You all have an assignment this week. As you’re listening, please write down two lists for me. List 1 will be called “Missing Songs”. List 2 will be called “Garbage Songs”.
For List 1, you’ll record songs that you would like us to add to our playlists. This is NOT for requesting songs that we do play. This is NOT to ask us to play certain songs more frequently. These are songs that you’ve NEVER heard on our station and would like to have us add.
For List 2, you’ll list the songs you do hear that we should get rid of entirely. Please let us know these songs that offend you or make you want to mute or turn off the station. This is NOT to tell us to play a song less because you may be ok with it but are getting tired of it. This is for songs you think we should get rid of ENTIRELY.
Once you have your lists after a couple hours or days of listening, please email them to studio@kxrtonline.com. This will be a huge help with how we make our station sound.
If you catch us playing two songs in a row by Brad Paisley and are the first person to comment on our Facebook page with the two song titles, YOU WIN a free copy of This Is Country Music!!
It’s that easy! Just be watching our Facebook and listening to America’s Country for the Double Play Give-Away and WIN!
We have 10 copies to give away, thanks to Sony and Arista Records! We’re giving them away all week long!
Thanks for playing and thanks for listening to America’s Country!
I was doing some looking around and realized there are a lot of songs out there about daddy, pop, father, pa, etc… We want to honor them for all they do! This week, you’ll hear a lot of great Father Songs. I’ve tweaked them up so they play much more often. Here’s a quick sampling of what you’ll hear:
