MUSIC

A coffee with ... Matt Shiv at WOXY.com

Station identification: WOXY free-form radio via Internet streams from Austin

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, September 24, 2009

"... This is the new Royal Bangs on New Tunes Tuesday," Matt Shiv says into the WOXY.com microphone, sounding every bit the lifelong DJ he is. The 33-year-old music director slides his microphone's fader down and looks in my direction. "These guys are pretty great," he says and turns back to the computer to type on the keyboard.

"This show is song by song; you've got to come up with it."

He's talking about the lack of a set playlist at the popular Internet radio station, which moved from Ohio to Austin at the beginning of September. The DJs come up with the music — no set songs to push and few albums with just one track emphasized.

This is old-school, nearly free-form radio. The station, an Ohio modern rock icon that went online-only in 2004, now shares space in a building with ME-TV on South Congress Avenue.

Hanging out, I can't help but be reminded of my alma mater's station, WTJU, community radio for Charlottesville, Va. The vibe is the same, the scads of indie rock are the same.

But the technology sure has changed. At WOXY's Austin studios, there's a wall of CDs, none of which Shiv touches, though a dual-deck CD player is to his left. Two computers are in front of him — one set to WOXY's e-mail inbox, the other to the automation system and massive server where the vast majority of music played over the station is stored. The turntable is in the production studio, where everything is digitized and dumped into the server as WAV files.

Four professionals are on staff, with a few other DJs pre-recording shows and sending them to the station, as opposed to dozens of volunteers.And where a terrestrial community or college station can only approximate how many people are listening at a given time (at least, over the airwaves), Shiv knows how many computers are tuned in.

"This isn't the audience number, but I can tell you that the station was streamed 441,844 hours last month," Shiv says. This includes WOXY and WOXY Vintage, the modern rock oldies (or "comfort food") station featuring such bands as the Fall, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the The.

Even online, a radio station with an audience this big seems a throwback to an earlier era, to the border stations whose massive signals reached from Monterrey in Mexico to Minnesota. It's college radio where anyone with an Internet connection is on campus.

As with most radio nerds, the bug bit Shiv early. "I lived in a small town on the Ohio-Indiana border and discovered WOXY in junior high," he says. "It was known as 97X then, the sixth-ever station to embrace the modern rock format."

The station, run by a husband-and-wife team, was in Oxford, Ohio, between Dayton and Cincinnati, and was only 3,000 watts. Shiv says everyone has stories about what you had to do to pull in the signal.

"I swapped bedrooms with my sister for better reception," he says, taking a sip of the Jo's Coffee I brought to the studio. "Then I made my dad hook the outside antenna to the living room stereo. That worked really well, so I'd fill tape after tape with the station so I could have it for driving around."

Yes, folks, people once took radio very seriously. (Heck, they still do — see also the kerfuffle between SaveKUTAustin.com and KUT management.)

In high school, Shiv got involved with the station at Earlham College: "I did a show in the summertime when the students left so they could stay on the air."

Shiv attended Bowling Green State University, did time at its station (WFAL) as DJ and music director and started interning at WOXY in '96.

"I'm going on 12 years at the station," Shiv says. "After I graduated college in '98, I just started pestering them. There's never much turnover at a station like that because people love their job. In '98, there was a shake-up and I was hired." And he never left.

In 2004, WOXY owners Doug and Linda Balogh sold the station. "Nobody could begrudge them," Shiv says. "They were both in their 60s, and they were offered over $5.5 million, and it was time to retire."

Plans to go Internet-only were launched immediately, but Shiv says when a key investor pulled out in May 2004, it looked like things were over for the station. "I went looking for another job," he says.

New investors were found, and the station stayed alive for two more years before being purchased by Lala.com, who ran it for two more years. "We've been called 'zombie radio' because we do not stay dead," Shiv says. The current owner is Future Sounds Inc., a PR company co-owned by former Austin resident John Mascarenhas.

The station isn't a stranger to Austin.

"Four years ago we came down and did a party at South by Southwest," Shiv says. "I remain mystified about how it all came together. We had, among others, the Frames and Feist, and we had been playing the Canadian version of Feist's record before she broke in the States. It was packed."

The past few years, WOXY has come down during SXSW, set up in a studio in East Austin and taped live sets . "We ended up doing 26 last year," cranking through five or six sessions a day, Shiv says.

Moving down here was something of a pipe dream, but with Mascarenhas having spent time here and the volume of bands that come through Austin, a move made sense.

So now that they share space with ME-TV and are in the process of remodeling the live stage in that studio, they hope in time to record some of the bands coming through for Fun Fun Fun Fest in November.

The strange thing is that WOXY.com is entering the Austin radio marketplace without really being a ratings competitor. They aren't a KOOP, a KUT or even a commercial station needing to pull ears away from other local stations. They're a national station, broadcast online, that happens to be headquartered here.

"It's a goal to have more people on the air, and some of them might be from Austin," Shiv says. "But that's a long way off. It's tricky. We're not a community radio station that needs to have a new and different show every two hours. Consistent programming is our goal."

He pauses. "That being said, if you hate something that we play, you don't really hear it enough for it to drive you crazy."

He turns back to the mike. The song is almost over.

"One of my favorite albums this year from Mr. Joe Henry," Shiv says. "That's 'The Man I Keep Hid' from his album 'Blood from Stars.' Also 'Elevator Love Letter' from the band Stars. Nada Surf and Dodos in there. ..."

And another of the 441,000 hours of WOXY.com continues.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926