From its humble beginnings on 13th November, 1998 , www.NetFM.net has now achieved the status of “the longest continuous net radio station in the world.” As part of this milestone its most popular show, “The Vinyl Lounge” has become the longest running program on the net.

“It all started on Friday the 13th of November 1998, when the Fish and I did our first gig together in a tiny little studio we’d knocked up over the previous couple of weeks” said Scotto, the co- host of the Vinyl Lounge and co-founder of www.netfm.net with Nick Baltinos. “It was a lot of fun when we kicked off even when, if Nicks sister stopped listening, our audience was cut by 50%”.

Since its first show, the station has moved into a new digital studio in Sydney’s CBD and has seen its audience grow to over 100,000 listeners per month. It also has a talent bank of “promising dj’s who have the unique opportunity to interact with listeners from right around the world.” radioinfo spoke to Scotto about the station’s milestone:

radioinfo: You co-host the Vinyl Lounge, is it different doing a show for a global audience? What sought of feedback do you get?

SCOTTO:: Yeah, we do the Vinyl Lounge every week and it can be a bit tough. We’ve done over 200 shows so far. Because we’re going global, we can’t just concentrate on local Australian issues or comedy. We have to look what’s happening around the world and take the piss out of it, where ever it is. It’s much harder than just catering to a local, citywide audience for example. Because the Lounge is on during business hours in Europe and the UK, we do a lot of stuff from that part of the world, but we certainly don’t limit it to there. We’ve done stuff on Africa, the States, Middle East, anywhere we can find something we can have fun with and we think our audience will find funny.

We always make sure to ask the listeners what they think of it by way of e-mails, the phone or in the chatroom and mostly the comments are pretty good. Although, we have had several threats. We didn’t take them seriously though, just more material to take the piss. There’s something really cool about having people listening in from all different countries around the world, and sending e-mails, chatroom and often on the phone, telling us about their world and what’s happening in it. We’ve found that a lot of our listeners love, not only the music we play, but the style of the station. They say its like nothing they have in their own city or country and they love what we are able to say and play. I mean, we don’t play the sanitised versions of controversial songs, they can here the whole thing, rude bits and all and especially on the Lounge, we fear or favour no-one.

radioinfo: The show is promoted on your website as the most complained about show on the net, is that true?

SCOTTO: Well, we do get quite a few complaints, I don’t know why. I thought our Log In The Bog Competition was a great success, and judging by the number of times the file has been downloaded, so do lots of others. I reckon you should have a listen and see what you think. We don’t deliberately set out to shock people, as I said before, we just don’t show fear or favour to anyone. Everyone is fair game and that’s the great thing about the net, anything goes. Sure we’ve had the death threats, but only a couple, all the rest of the mail we get is very supportive, well, almost all of it anyway.

radioinfo: You do a show called Broadband, what’s that?

SCOTTO: Basically, its a vehicle for unsigned Aussie bands to get some exposure. Brooksie (Nathan Brook’s) does a great job interviewing the bands, has them do some of their songs live on air in the studio and plays a couple of tracks if they have a CD with them. We then put it on medium rotation for the next week and then leave it on the system after that. It gets a great reaction from the audience and also from bands. I think it’s the only type of this show, certainly on the net and maybe at all.

radioinfo: Does it bother you that so many net stations have gone broke, and how does www.netfm.net survive?

SCOTTO:: Not at all. So many of the other stations just went completely overboard with costs and cashburn, that cool buzz term of the Dotcom era. Nick and I continue to support the station and we’re very conscious of costs. Its just a proper business attitude, we didn’t get caught up in all the hype. We just drew up a plan and stuck with it and its been proved right. We’re still here.

radioinfo: Have advertisers come on board?

SCOTTO: Its been pretty tough. A lot of people don’t really understand the concept. They don’t get that people will sit at a computer and listen to music, but when we explain that we are going to a global audience and so, many of these people are at work and can’t listen to an ordinary radio in their office, but now, with most PC’s having sound cards and speakers, well, they can tune into the net and listen to us instead.

We also show them the kinds of numbers we are getting and can show them where people are listening from and so other stuff we collect, although, we can’t, unfortunately, show them all the information we collect from listener registrations. We place a very high importance on keeping that information private. They’re starting to come round. Another major factor is that a local advertising agency doesn’t want to spend its budget on a market that is out of their jurisdiction so we are now approaching head offices and they are beginning to see the benefits, just recently Motorola came on board.

radioinfo: This is your 5th year, do you think you will still be around in 5 years time and where do you see net radio going?

SCOTTO: No doubt about it. We’ll be here in another 5 years, for sure. We’ll stick to our plan and will continue our growth at a sustainable level. As for the future of net radio, I think it will gain very wide acceptance, provided of course, that record companies continue to support it as we are seeing in Australia. They are realising that it can only benefit their artists and their sales, just like terrestrial radio did in its early days and MTV for that matter, and work together with the industry to formulate sustainable model’s of royalty payments, I think its future is very bright.

I think also, as bandwidth costs come down and high speed access continues to grow there will be an increasing market for it as well. Whether it becomes a defacto TV market, with video streaming, or just top quality audio streaming is a bit hard to say. A station like say, theBasement.com certainly has its place, but I think that until bandwidth costs are reasonable, it will be a limited market. I see www.netfm.net as a high quality, CD quality at least, streamer going round the world and being able to target advertising to a particular market in a particular geographic location with audience results immediately available. The technology is already available to do that, its just needs ISP’s around the world to come on board. Once advertisers realise what is possible on a global scale and at such a cheap price, they will take to it like a duck to water.