Doug Mulray this week began a new program on Foxtel’s MusicMax channel. The new breakfast show is simulcast on basement.com.au and MusicMax between 7-9am weekdays.

radioinfo spoke to Doug Mulray and his General Manager Hamish Cameron about the success of basement.com.au as an internet radio station and about the new program.

DOUG MULRAY

radioinfo: Tell me about the new Foxtel program – how is it going three days in?

Mulray: It feels good. We are getting a great reaction. I went to the James Taylor concert the other night and people were coming up to me saying they were watching the show. Of course listeners feel they can give you some very opinionated feedback – so they are also telling me what they think I am doing wrong too! They seem to like the ‘free format’ of the show, which is a good start.

By the way James Taylor also liked the format, which is a great buzz for me ‘cause I’ve always been a big fan of his. When I was at the concert he sent someone over after the show to invite me back stage because I had done an interview and he had seen the show.

radioinfo: It will now be on TV and the internet, a dream of yours. Will you also secure a radio simulcast as well some time?

Mulray: It would be great to get a radio station to complete the picture, after all what we are doing is essentially still radio – the format is designed so people can wander round doing their morning routine and come over and look at the screen when something interests them. We have news, with the lovely (sigh!) Penny Dennison and regular weather, so it would work on radio. I guess like anything in this business, it will depend on the reaction to this show.

radioinfo: I thought you were never going to work breakfast show hours again.

Mulray: I lied! Well actually, to be fair, I think what I said was I would never get up this early to do commercial radio again, so I guess that’s slightly different. The show will give breakfast viewers and listeners a fresh new option.

radioinfo: Will this mean a revamp of anything at basement.com.au?

Mulray: I have not had to change my style. I won’t be cleaning up any jokes because there are not too many restrictions on Pay TV – if you’ve seen that World Movies channel you know what I mean. I’m the least offensive thing they have on compared with that!

In the studio we have added MusicMax logos and got some lighting advice from the TV professionals. The monitors on PCs are not very good compared with TV, and TV viewers expect a particular picture standard.

In terms of music, Charlie Fox programs our music and we have a say in it as well – we call it ‘Stoner Rock’ – the Stones and the rock of that era that appeals to a 30 plus demographic. Now we are working collaboratively with the people at MusicMax and we find we are in accord with us about the music we should play. MusicMax is committed to contemporary artists as well as emerging Australian artists, and so are we. We can also bring live concerts from the basement to MusicMax.

We are freer than the commercial formats you hear on radio now. I love Joni Mitchell, we might play her Big Yellow Taxi, but we could also play the current version of that song too.

HAMISH CAMERON

radioinfo: You have developed one of the few internet radio businesses that has stood the test of time. What makes your business different from other failed internet broadcast ventures like bigfatradio, spike and others?

Cameron:
A number of factors have helped us to survive just over three years in a very turbulent period for technology-based ideas. Firstly, we decided to provide a service that creatively offered an alternative to mainstream commercial radio. We believed that what went out over the Internet had to be a service you couldn’t find anywhere on commercial radio. Hence our leaning to blues, jazz, funk and soul music, with a big emphasis on live Australian music content.

Secondly we developed a service that would find its success in broadband. We thought that narrowband was like AM radio, (16KHz mono) and broadband was like FM (32KHz stereo), plus with broadband you could send vision as well! All our staff were former radio staffers, looking for a bit of freedom from the mainstream. This meant we were not a bunch of Internet geeks trying to program a radio station, rather we were experienced radio professionals trying to make a new technology work for us.

Finally, we knew you could only make a web-based service work in partnership with a telco, because bandwidth costs would kill you if you had to purchase it at commercial rates. And with broadband, particularly, you also needed a telco who was willing to make it a “free” service in terms of the consumer not having to count the bandwidth against their monthly allocation. For instance if you have a 3Gb limit and you watch www.thebasement.com.au at 256Kb/sec, you’re going to chew up your allocation in a matter of days….and then you’ve got to pay a few cents per Mb after that. It wouldn’t be a compelling story for the consumer. But with Telstra’s support, you can log on to Doug Mulray and all our live concerts for as long as you like and it doesn’t count towards your download allocation.

Oh, and careful spending of our funding has helped too. We have been on the air for over three years and have spent less than $8 million, and that includes $2 million to build the studios, offices and webcasting facilities. I think K-grind churned through $8 million in just six months!

radioinfo: Would you still call it internet radio or have you really created a new broadcast paradigm?

Cameron:
I think that whichever way we look at it, we are still a grass roots radio broadcasting operation. It’s in our blood. Sure, we’ve added tv cameras so they can observe the radio program, and we play video clips instead of CDs, but the communication factor from the announcers is pure radio warmth and the spontaneity that only live radio can deliver.

radioinfo: Is what you are doing really “broadcast” – or is the internet more a narrowcast or one-to-one medium?

Cameron:
It’s radio, through and through. A good radio program is broadcast to thousands of people simultaneously, but to each individual listener there’s a feeling that the announcer and the program is just for them. We strive to keep this aspect happening all the time. As a result we have over 500,000 listeners/viewers every month from over 60 different countries and hundreds of them email the announcer live on-air and enjoy a one-to-one relationship.

radioinfo: A lot of broadcast businesses have decided that streaming audio is not really very successful, but that the opportunity for audio-on-demand that the internet offers is still very worthwhile. What do you think of that point of view?

Cameron:
Well that’s a different sort of business, in my opinion. There’s obviously a role for accessing specific music at a specific moment, and it fills a big demand for a lot people. But that doesn’t mean streaming audio doesn’t work. Like any program, you’ve got to deliver something that is a quantum leap above a juke-box. You need opinions, information, communication and above all entertainment. The very thing Doug Mulray has been doing for all his career. Failing at streaming audio, is just the same as failing at radio broadcasting, if you don’t offer something compelling people will tune out. From our point of view, our audience has grown ten-fold over the last 18 months and reaches the most culturally diverse audience, I could think of. I think we must be doing something right.

radioinfo: At the last ABA conference you challenged traditional radio to break some of the format boundaries that you have been breaking. Has anyone done that?

Cameron:
I don’t think the radio industry really takes us, or new technologies very seriously. They seem like in some sort of time warp. It’s a bit like 1980, when FM first launch in Australia. The old AM operators all said “FM is witches brew, it will never work!”. Twenty years later they’re saying, “Broadband and the Internet is bullshit, it will never work!”. The similarity, is quite ironic.

radioinfo: How much Australian music do you play on basement.com.au?

Cameron:
We have no set targets or limits, it’s just that we love Australian music, and want to give our local performers every opportunity to ply their trade. In the end it works out that at least half of what we play is Australian.

radioinfo: How many listeners/viewers do you have?

Cameron:
We serve over 500,000 streams every month. However, only 50,000 of these are Australian. This is not so surprising when you consider that there are only 150,000 broadband subscribers in Australia, which means we touch something like 1 in 4 of all broadband subscribers in Australia.

radioinfo: Where are your listeners from?

Cameron:
For some unknown reason we about half our streams are directed to mainlaind China. However, they only log on for about 5 mins average, whereas everyone else logs on for about half an hour average. The United States and Germany are the biggest users of our service outside of Australia. But we have listeners everywhere from Brazil to the Netherland and from the U.K. to Antarctica. For a broadcaster, it’s absolutely amazing to have this sort of reach.

radioinfo: Are they listening at work, where the company pays for their internet access, or are they listening at home?

Cameron:
We don’t have any firm research on this aspect. However, it does seem that we have a big “at work” audience during the day, which peaks at night when we webcast live concerts. Overnight, the numbers remain strong, because of the foreign time zones, so it becomes hard to work out what they’re doing.

radioinfo: Who are your main advertising clients?

Cameron:
Well, of course Telstra is a main patron, without their support we wouldn’t exist. However, we also have had advertising support from Fuji Film, Bimbadgen Winery, Toyota, Ford, Carlton United Breweries, Intel and Cisco Systems. It’s still early days for advertisers to understand that we’re a boradcast medium, they still tend to throw us into the banner ad basket. So our results are still a bit erratic, but with our launch of two hours of simulcast programming on the musicMax pay tv channel this year, we hope the profile will be raised a lot higher.

radioinfo: Have you been successful for your advertisers? How?

Cameron:
Well, they seem to keep coming back and Fuji Film claimed that www.thebasement.com.au delivered the most traffic to the Fuji website.

radioinfo: A little while ago you split your broadcast stream and offered a pay channel for a charity concert. Did it show you whether people would pay for streamed media content?

Cameron:
It was an “off-broadway” trial. But we were thrilled that just over 200 subscribers paid an average $25 to watch Skunk Baxter & Friends live from The Basement and then as a video-on-demand for a week. We had the payment platform set-up to default to a minimum $5 donation and the punters upped it to an average $25. Admittedly, it was all in the name of charity and it may not be quite the same commercially. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

radioinfo: What else are you doing that is innovative?

Cameron:
Staying alive! No, seriously, simulcasting on musicMax, selling 12 x one-hour specials to the ABC, releasing 9 DVDs and 4CDs is all really exciting stuff!

radioinfo: What advice would you give to anyone starting up an internet radio station?

Cameron:
Make sure you really love broadcasting, have a compelling program format and be prepared to die for it! Oh, and make sure you have the backing of good telco.