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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Internet Radio: Most Stations Make Nothing

Gerald Gaule
Gerald Gaule once weighed 540 pounds, but he cut that to 246 with gastric bypass surgery three years ago, and now he's started two Internet radio stations with plans to add a third.

"I have a face for radio," jokes Gaule, 49 tooregonlive.com, a veteran of little AM radio stations from Colorado to Oregon's Stayton, Sweet Home, Woodburn, Albany, Eugene and Springfield to Longview and the old KAAR AM 1480 that operated in Vancouver from 1981 to 1987.   Gaule lives in Hazle Dell, OR.

He worked for Omni Media, the digital media agency for a while, but after a 23-year career, mostly in AM radio, he moved back to Vancouver last July.

He is now the owner-manager-engineer of KAARadio-Oldies (1954-79) (Listen-Line: Click Here) and Country Lovin Radio Classics (1927-89) (Listen-Line: Click Here).  KAAR is "a tribute station," to the job he loved at KAAR AM 1480, he said, operating in his closet-sized studio in his apartment in Hazel Dell. His third station will be adult contemporary, perhaps called "The Breeze," he says.

He plays tunes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, peppering the offerings with old radio shows, news spots and information. He works from his personal collection of more than 30,000 classic pop and 20,000 country music songs, all of which he has digitized for his three computers. He says he has maybe 10,000 easy listening songs. But he has no way of knowing how many listeners he has beyond the occasional emails he gets from fans.

Gaule's stations are among hundreds of thousands of Internet stations operating in the United States, few of them turning a profit.

Joe Kenney, CEO of the profitable Pandora Internet radio system, says in a recent videotaped online interview that these stations are intimate and personalized.

Some make money by selling advertising or soliciting donations. Most make nothing.

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