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Thursday, September 1, 2022

Zach Sang Wants To Save Radio


At this time last year, Zach Sang was broadcasting to more than a million people each night via his syndicated program, Zach Sang Show,” which aired on around 80 terrestrial radio stations across the country. In a lengthy profile piece, The NY Times reports he’s building from the ground up: In March, he began broadcasting for three hours every weekday on Amp, the still-in-beta radio app recently introduced by Amazon.

“The bedrocks, the building blocks that make radio radio — companionship, friendship, music, personality, discussion — that will remain the same,” Sang said. “But the delivery method at which it gets to the people is going to change.”

The method is still slightly in flux. Several times over the next three hours, while songs played between conversation breaks, Sang tested out the studio’s Alexa smart speaker to make sure it played his show when prompted — mostly yes. He selected songs to play largely on the fly, sometimes inspired by a conversation in the room. It all made for a far looser approach to pop radio, with flickers of the unpredictable energy of livestreaming.

Sang’s new perch allows him to figure out a fresh path for an old format. “I want them to understand that there’s a better version of radio out there,” he said of the listeners he has not yet been able to reach. “Radio that doesn’t play the same songs every 42 minutes. There’s a version of radio out there that doesn’t shove 18 minutes of commercials an hour down your throat.”

Sang is 29 but carries himself with the awe of someone younger. It is a byproduct of a career that began in his teenage years, and has never let up since, a run that has made him something like the Ryan Seacrest of young millennials. During his 10-year tenure on terrestrial radio, he became one of the most crucial interviewers of contemporary pop stars, with clips of his most intimate conversations — with Ariana Grande, Halsey, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, BTS and various onetime boy band and girl group members — often gaining viral traction online.


Sang is an uncommonly gifted interviewer: formidably grounded, fluid, quick with responses and also keen to steer conversations toward more intriguing topics. He makes an intense (but not uncomfortable) amount of eye contact and delivers his questions not brusquely, as can be the norm for radio interviews, but with a balmy, inviting smoothness. He treats interview subjects not as famous people, but rather people who happen to be famous. Sometimes, in videos of his interviews, there are little moments of relaxation a few minutes in, when stars realize they can turn off autopilot, retreat from the hard shell of fame just a bit and ease back into their humanity.

Sang’s negotiations with the radio conglomerate Westwood One went to the 11th hour late last year, but they couldn’t come to terms. The transition was jarring. “Seven o’clock at night would roll around and I would just be driving around my neighborhood, not knowing what to do,” Sang said.

Losing his syndicated show forced him to assess whether he was in the business of radio, or the business of Zach Sang. When his contract ended, he’d already been having conversations with Amazon for a few months, and he began to see Amp as an opportunity to spread his gospel of the power of radio even more widely.

Amp is a creator-focused app meant to allow users to set up their own radio programs, a nod to public access and internet radio and an attempt to harness the democratization of online content creation.  The platform is new, and the listener numbers modest.

By last month, though, Sang was getting comfortable being indie again. “Nobody listened to me when I was broadcasting from my bedroom — I literally was talking to myself,” he said. “So, been there, done that.”

The friend group he hopes to cultivate, he realized, begins with his own “therapeutic” relationship with the microphone. Everything else good has followed from that.

“Every time, without fail, I have built it and they have come,” he noted, “so this will not be any different.”

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