410 – Tony Zeoli thinks that radio’s not dead, it’s got an online future

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 410 entitled, tony Zeoli Thinks that radio's not dead, it's got an online future. It was published on Thursday, the 20th of February, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we get into the conversation with Tony, a few bits of housekeeping.

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Okay, what have we got for you today?

Well, it's Tony Zeoli. He's gonna be chatting to me today all about internet radio. Turns out that Tony has a real history, a heritage of being involved in audio production, both online and offline, and he's on the podcast to talk about that today. You may think that radio is dead, even internet radio is dead. Well, Tony has some products or services in the WordPress space to counter that argument.

At the beginning of the podcast, I kind of get Tony to introduce himself and he lets rip. He keeps talking and tells us all about some of the products and services that he offers. The plugins that he has in the WordPress space. There's a lot about his history and his thoughts about radio and audio in general online. And I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Tony Zeoli. Hello, Tony.

[00:04:24] Tony Zeoli: Hey, Nathan, it's great to be here.

[00:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. thank you for joining me and joining the podcast today. Really appreciate it. This is right up my street. this podcast is gonna be about something that I am personally really into, and if you've followed anything that I've done, you know that basically all I do online these days is create audio content, the occasional bit of video thrown in, but I'm all about the audio and Tony has some.

A couple of really interesting products out there. Now, I don't know anything about them. I've never used them, so I'm gonna be asking Tony questions and it'll be a story of how it works, what it does, and you never know if you're an audio person as well, this might be right up your street as well. So first off, Tony George, wanna do your little two minute bio?

Tell us about you, where you're from, what your relationship is with technology, WordPress, all of that.

[00:05:14] Tony Zeoli: Oh, it's, it's more than two minutes, but I'll try to break it down for you. my name is Tony Oli and I. NETM mix.com and radio station. radio station for WordPress. my journey has been, right now I live in Asheville, North Carolina. Ended up in North Carolina in 2010, just through a happenstance meeting at Word Camp Raleigh, where I got a job at UNC Chapel Hill, work to work in a digital newsroom.

And I moved from New York City, so I started off in Boston as a dj. back in the eighties and nineties and I was a, I became a major club DJ for a number of years, and through that I became what they call a billboard dance chart reporting. DJ Billboard Magazine selects well select, used to have a dance chart in the magazine.

that all the labels would, push their music to some of the major club DJs and then it would get on the chart and then they would use that as a licensing vehicle. For example, in the UK where you are, a lot of UK labels might license something off the dance chart because they saw it move up the chart, right?

So the billboard dance chart reporter was really important and so I was DJing in, a number of nightclubs in the Boston area as a billboard dance chart reporter. I was working for a record label. Called Xix. And Xix was a remix service that gave birth to a very well-known, DJ producer named Arm Armand, van Helden.

And, at Xix I was doing sales and distribution, globally as well as managing, Armand's career through the management company. his manager was Neil Petco, but I was really. On the top there, getting him bookings and remixes. And as a matter of fact, it was DJ Magazine in the uk.

I got him his first, article. But, that being said. In Boston, things started turning for me in the club scene. The club scene was very Euro focused in terms of people from the Netherlands, people from Turkey, Greece, England, France, all different places around the world, south America.

And, I was a white American kid named DJ Tony Z. And there were other DJs named like Ricos and Tassos and Manolo, and they spoke different languages and I didn't. So I started losing gigs and. I was like, what am I gonna do? I, I'm part of this scene, it's really cool, and I'm not getting hired anywhere else.

And so I started looking around thinking like, where's the audio online? Where, what do I, where's the DJ mixes? And prior to that, around 19 91, 92, a girlfriend of mine. at the time she invited me to Harvard University to sit in the apartment of a, it, a Harvard IT guy, like the, I didn't know anything about it, nothing.

I, I lived next to Harvard University. I was right there near the campus and she said, you gotta check out this thing called the internet. And that was like the internet. What's that? So he, showed us at his apartment one late night, like nine at 9:00 PM went over to his house and he's on this thing called Telnet.

And Telnet is a software application, right? That's like what email and chat. And everything that we do today is really based on, sending images. And so I saw him send images over the web and Talking to contacts around the world and those are really the things I remember. And I was like, oh, that's interesting.

And so I left this hot, his apartment, but didn't really know what to do with that because I didn't have a computer. And so my dad, I had been talking to my dad and he said, get ready to buy a new computer, Tony. And I was like, oh, that's great. A computer. I don't even know. I don't have one.

And he said, oh, I'll give you, I'll give you my old one. So he gave me this CompactRio desktop. And I got on and I got Talent Net and I got on CompuServe or Prodigy, whichever one I signed up with, my 14 four Bard modem. And this is the nineties, right? This is in the early nineties. The, early, there wasn't even a browser yet.

Mozilla hadn't happened. Netscape wasn't a thing. And you had to use Prodigy or copy serve and just talk with text, right? And just send people messages or images or whatever have you. And I got online and I found, then a OL came about America online and they sent a CD to every house in America.

And so I was able to get on a OL and in a OL there started to be DJ news groups and DJ chat rooms. And 'cause I was a dj, I wanted to be in those areas. After a while I said, oh, it's great. I can chit chat with these people, but where's the audio? Where's the music? How can I broadcast on this thing? Can anybody listen to me?

And, triangulating between losing gigs and being a Billboard Dance star reporter and not being sure what was gonna happen, and then being on a OL and looking at the landscape and saying, where's the audio? I thought to myself. How am I gonna put DJs on? I should put dj, I should put myself on the internet.

This is 1992. 1993. How should I put myself on the internet, right as a dj? Maybe I'll blow up that way and I won't lose gigs and I'll be global or whatever. And I was working with X mix and all that stuff, and, Then I found out about this big trade show called Internet World. Internet World was a huge trade show that happened in every major city, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco.

And I went around the country and I went to internet world probably around 93, I think. And I said, you know how there's gotta be something here. So I found this technology called Real Audio by a company called Real Networks

[00:11:16] Nathan Wrigley: I remember it. Yeah.

[00:11:17] Tony Zeoli: Yep. Born in Seattle. And it was a server software with a CLI server client.

So you had to have the server software to be able to encode the streams, and then the client on the, on anybody's desktop computer would play it back. That costs $10,000 to purchase. For the server, and that was probably, I don't know, a hundred people could listen, simultaneously on that at that price.

So I was DJing one night at a club, and this guy named Jason Male from a. From one of the first web development companies in Boston, maybe, even the first came up to me. He was a wealthy guy. His father's had a Ferrari dealership. He had six Ferrari. It's crazy. And he, this is that euro, this is that Euro scene, right?

Like people have money and they're rolling into the clubs and all that. And so he comes up to me and says, Tony, you have any ideas? I, own this internet, web development company, now do you wanna do something? And I said, yeah, I've been thinking about. Streaming my DJ mixes online, so he said, come on down and talk to me.

So I went down to his office, talked to him, we got it going, that I would spec out, do information architecture ia. Before I even know what IA was, I just drew it on the piece of paper. This is what I want to do before Omni grl and all these IA documenting softwares that I use today. And, balsamic and, he took that, we did our first website. took about, a few months to do, cost me 10 grand. in the WordPress world today, you can have a website for free, but back then you needed somebody to code it and do HTML and that was all new and so it was expensive. And so I invested $10,000 my own money.

I had been working also during the day at a retail electronic store selling mobile phones, and so I would take that money and my DJ money and invest it in what would become net mix, because I worked for X Mix. I was like, what should I call

[00:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a good one. Yeah.

[00:13:21] Tony Zeoli: it? I called it netm mix.com.

So in 19 95, 96, I registered netm mix.com and we put up the site in January of 96, and I began to stream not only myself, but the world's most influential DJs. like Paul Logan Fold, Derek Marillo, John Dig Weed. And Carl Cox, all these DJs. So I became the first person in the world with Netm Mix to stream these DJ mixes.

And you can go on the way back machine, you can see early Netm mix, and then the history of it progressing. And I moved it to New York City in 1996. By September of 96, I was like, I'm out of Boston. I gotta go to New York. And I met a record, I knew a record promoter who was promoting music to me as a billboard dance chart reporter.

He said, why don't you come and we'll marry my promotion company to DJs. and you are online, and we'll go out to labels and we'll do a marketing service online. So I did that and Netm Mix became one of the first companies to actually market music online. Now, jump fast forward to, all the trials and tribulations of a startup.

Into the late nineties. we were doing about a million, unique visitors a year. By 1999, almost 2000, I ended up selling that mix to another youth culture startup that was bringing a bunch of youth culture companies together that sell advertising around, around content, right? And then there was.com 1.0, and all of a sudden everything fell apart and everybody lost their funding.

New York City became a ghost town. there were huge parties. I remember gonna a party on Ellis Island where they shipped everybody on, they, rented the Harbor Cruise boats,

[00:15:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:15:04] Tony Zeoli: to ship, like 5,000. It was 10,000 people over to Ellis Island for a party with two stages, with all the, major club artists and, they fed everybody.

It was crazy. That was, those were the heady times. of.com 1.0, but then that, because we bottom fell out of the market, things happen. I ended up, getting Netm mix back from the company who acquired us because they went outta business. And then my partners and I got into it and we ended up separating and I ended up shutting down Netm Mix, in 2001.

it was a really great experience to grow a startup in that era. Resulting in not much after, the fact, but it's okay. so fast forward to 2000 and, I didn't do anything with Netm Mix for a while. I found WordPress in 2003. I was working at the Associated Press. Which is a major, news gathering organization that licenses their content to, news organizations worldwide, like CNN and, Alex Jazeera and all the, all these, news, big, news organizations.

And so I was working at the Associate Press. They were rolling out. This thing called the ASAP Young Readers Project. I was a program manager there and they said, we need you to build a blog, a companion blog for the website. And I was talking to the lead developer and he was of the mindset that he wanted to use a Java.

There was a Java blogging system called Roller Web Logger at the time, just as WordPress was coming

[00:16:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you dodged a bullet there.

[00:16:57] Tony Zeoli: he forced me into, Roller because he was building the

[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, oh, you didn't dodge your bullet there.

[00:17:03] Tony Zeoli: and so yeah, so he had to marry the site, the, whatever the database was that they were using and publish in Java, into the Java, base system into their, database and into roller, right?

So I was forced into roller, but there was movable type and WordPress and I had settled on WordPress. But he didn't want to go to WordPress, so okay, fine. We'll do it. Enroll a web logger. And so WordPress, I put it on the side for a little bit, but then I launched Netm Mix again in WordPress around 2005, but didn't really do much with it.

2009 came along. I was working in different startups and companies and all these kinds of things and helping other people. And then 2010 comes along and, I say, oh, I should, I really need to go to this. I, started going to, word Camp NYC, and I spoke at Word Camp NYC in 2009. I met Matt Mullenweg at Word Camp NYC in 2009.

who he came to, promote and, talk about WordPress. And once that happened. I was starting to be immersed in this world of WordPress and how can I apply it? I started doing small websites in it for clients, and I decided to set up my own web development business called Digital Strategy Works.

So I started that in 2009, and then I said, I'm, gonna check out this work Camp Raleigh. I'll go down there. My, so my wife and I, decided to go to work Camp Raleigh, and I was sitting at, the lunch table and I met a. individual who worked at UNC Chapel Hill, and I started talking to him. I asked him if there's any opportunities in WordPress at U UNC Chapel Hill, and he said, yes, in fact there is.

And so why don't you apply for it? And so I applied for it and didn't get that gig, but he, they called me back and said, there is another role. We just started this new program in the journalism school and I had worked at the Associated Press And, and, cable Vision, which is a big cable company in New York City and did, web, I was a web producer there and also, a television producer or a cable television producer, and the head of the new program flew me down to interview me, said, you're hired.

I moved my stuff down in July of 2010. my wife, Mo moved. she and I moved there. and then we started this project called the Reese Felts Digital Newsroom in the journalism school. That newsroom paid the students a stipend on a weekly basis, so they made 3 25 bucks a week, each one, and they could work in a digital newsroom and get paid while they studied.

So I ended up bringing, I ended up being, bringing WordPress platform into the newsroom, launching the Reese Felds Digital News project on WordPress. That was our news site. I guided the students in digital news production online, and, streaming and video production and these sorts of things, as well as, the editorial, components and text, and managed that project for about a year and a half.

And then there was some issues with the, The, head of the program, six months after I got there, got caught having an inappropriate relationship with a student and got fired and that left my job exposed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I ended up losing my job because they wanted to move on. I.

From that era into a new era and hired, different people for different reasons and wanted to go all mobile. No, WordPress didn't realize that you could run mobile applications with WordPress, but at neither here nor there. So went from there and then, had a journey, working for other companies.

Got to Asheville. And in Asheville, I, I've always been in radio. I've always been close to radio. I've done mix shows on radio. I've appeared on radio stations. I interned at a radio station in high school, and I always wanted to be on radio and I never got there. And I was really disappointed by that in my career that I, never was in, involved in radio, in a way that I was working in radio.

And an LPFM is a low power fm. It's a, it's mandated by the, FCC, the Federal Communications Commission here in the United States. That, once there was consolidation and radio in terms of iHeart media, aggregating a hundred, 200 stations, 400 stations across the country, and bringing them all under one umbrella, local broadcasting then was impacted greatly because.

we didn't, we started having regional program directors who would direct programming for, a hundred stations in a region and not in the local market. And so the FCC and the government came up with okay, l PFMs that could only broadcast within a, five to 10 mile range at a hundred watts instead of 50,000 watts.

And there are a few LPMs in Asheville, started DJing in Nashville and I set up this thing called the Asheville House Music Society. I've always been close to house music through X mix and through my own personal DJ journey, and I wanted to bring house music, that style of house music to New York, the London, the UK sound, from labels like defected, and a MPM here to Asheville and the Chicago sound, and the San Francisco sound of house.

so I set up this thing called Asheville Husbands Music Society. On WordPress and then I got a radio show and I called the A-V-L-H-M-S. And so I started doing the radio show at the LPFM in, one LPFM called Asheville fm. And I was logging into the website, which was, WordPress at the time, and didn't realize they were using this plugin called Radio Station to set up their show schedule and their playlist.

And so I'm, I was just DJing, right? Doing my show. I moved on from Asheville fm and I went to another station, WPVM 1, 0 3 0.7, and she asked me, can you rebuild my website, for, me redesign it? And so I logged into her site and she was using radio station as well. I'm like, oh, what's this radio station plugin?

where does it come from? why is it So I start looking it up on.org. Found the radio station plugin, see who the developer was. And I was using Divvy to rebuild, elegant themes, divvy page builder to rebuild the, the WPVM website. And so I got to a point where radio station wasn't, hadn't been updated since 2015.

This is 2019. I contacted the developer and I said, are you gonna release an update because it's really not working with page builders, it's really having a hard time doing this, and, what are you gonna do with it? and her name, Nikki Blight. Nikki Blight, as a Colorado based, woman who developed radio station in 2013 based on a Drupal plugin, that she had found.

and. Just recreated it in WordPress and released it. And she had built a decent sized community already. People were commenting on her website and people were downloading it and they were asking questions on the daughter work support forms. And I was like, oh, this is really cool, So I talked to her and she said, I said, how you gonna do anything with it?

And she said, no, I got a job in Denver. And I really can't focus on that anymore based on my full-time job. Do you want to take it over?

[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:24:51] Tony Zeoli: me, Mr. Entrepreneur. Yeah, me, Mr. Entrepreneur. I was like, sure, why not? I had, I was, I'm not a developer, I'm a product manager, product project manager and program manager and information architect, right?

And somebody who works with creative designers. And I've always been wrapped in that throughout my technology career. over from the nineties building net mix into startups and corporations and all the things that I've worked in. I also worked in jump back into the two thousands and I also worked at Major League baseball and video streaming, and I worked at two banks, JP Morgan Chase, and Lehman Brothers in audio streaming.

So I was a project manager, facilitating audio streaming, of meetings and these sorts of things. It just so happens an interesting story. It just so happens I was streaming the derivatives trainings for Lehman Brothers and derivatives of what took down the global economy. So I was in the room with the derivatives brokers actually streaming their trainings with the world's greatest mathematicians to Lehman offices worldwide.

And the derivatives is what they used as a tool to do whatever shenanigans they did. And so I was like, so I saw nine 11, the dark home 1.0 and, the, and I was involved in the derivatives training. you don't

[00:26:12] Nathan Wrigley: you're Fort Gump.

[00:26:14] Tony Zeoli: you. Yeah, I'm for a Gump. You, wanna stay a little, a little clear, of me, right?

And 2019, so I take it over, have no plan, and I post on the, on, the WordPress jobs board that I'm looking for. Somebody and a developer in Australia, Tony Hayes. Contacts me and says, yeah, I use radio station on one of my friend's, websites and yeah, it's really cool. I'm a DJ too, so I talked to him, he said, I'd love to help you with it.

And then he started helping me with, radio station and reconfiguring it. We were able to, relaunch it, in 2019, as a whole new, rebuilt plugin, on the.org repository. And it's a good thing that it was already established because then I didn't have to go through. The, what I'm realizing now, the queue and waiting for approvals.

So it was already, I, don't know what I would've done if I had known that I would've had to deal with that by starting it from scratch. So I jumped the shark there and bypassed it, and so he rebuilt it. He, and I rebuilt it. We refactored it. We relaunched it, and it already had over a thousand, I think it was like 2000 or so installs.

And so I was like, yeah, I'm, I'll take this over. And we re rewrote the landing page on.org and all that. And then we worked on that for a year and then we dec I decided, hey, let's build a pro version. So we built Radio Station Pro. as a companion to radio station. And that introduced a lot of new features, like a Google calendar, so to speak, of being able to create your show schedule.

So you would pop in and you could see a visual view of the schedule. And then we had, schedule overrides, which were already there, but we improved them 'cause the overrides weren't, they were very primitive overrides are, I have a show, and it's gonna be overwritten by a news, like maybe there's a.

There's a big event, and now we have to override that, of that show that's already been broadcast with an override to say, oh, this is the new news event that's coming up. And then it also had, oh, the ability to, do the repeats and also repetitive scheduling. So the show appears, every week at three o'clock.

But then we needed to make it oh, it appears for three weeks at three. And for two weeks at five and for six weeks at seven, different times. And so there's a lot of, thought gone into that. And then we built something called stream player, which is currently in the queue for approval as a free plugin.

And stream player is our sticky footer player that persists like a Spotify or a SoundCloud or a mixed cloud player that persists and WordPress. Websites don't really have that. There are there, there was one streaming player on theme force that I found that can do that, and it's really robust, but it wasn't integrated with our tool, what, with radio station where we would have to show the, what show was playing, right now, Or what track was playing and what show and who the host was. So we needed to build our own. And so we did that and we're releasing that soon as its own free. Open source free standing plugin as well as the Stream Player Pro, which is available right now. So you've got radio station, pro and stream player, pro, stream player, like I said, is, awaiting approval.

It's in its final run. It's been a year and I've been going through a cycle with them, and I've learned a lot in that and we can talk about that in a few minutes, but. That, where does Netm Mix come into that? So I'm like, how do I deal with Netm Mix now? Okay, I'll say radio stations buy Netm Mix, and then we'll take Netm Mix and we'll make a, online radio directory of all sites using radio station plugin.

So yeah, you have Tune in and other, other aggregator apps that are aggregating radio stations and that's great. But there wasn't one specifically for WordPress sites that are doing that. And WordPress sites instead of using radio stations. So I said, oh, I'll marry those together. So now if you go to Netm Mix, you'll see a number of stations that are using, the radio station plugin.

They have to ping the directory to be included and many haven't. So I really have to do a better job of, letting those stations know that they can ping the directory and ad themselves. So there's a little bit of work to do there, but it's really still in its infancy, even though it's 2005 and we've been around since 2019.

It takes a long time to do product development, marketing, getting the word out, getting people to know I have other things I need to do. with, I have a 10-year-old son and my wife and she has a, business and I have clients too with digital strategy works. So it can be a lot, in terms of, what my work schedule is like.

But we're really trying to facilitate the development of radio station and that mix and build this ecosystem. for radio stations to then stream and broadcast and list themselves and the directory to get more SEO.

[00:31:26] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask what's, what's the primary difference?

So, obviously everybody that's listening to this, the, the people that tune into this every week, they don't really tune into anything. They have a, a podcast player. Typically it's on their phone. They might come to our website, but mostly it's on a mobile phone or something like that. And they don't, they don't tune in.

And there's no schedule. They just kind of go through the UI and they pick the one that they wanna listen to and they press go. Is is the difference between a podcast and a radio station, just basically that there's a schedule at a radio station that programming comes out and what you hear is what's going out at that exact moment?

In other words, it's got like a live component. Is that the only difference really?

[00:32:07] Tony Zeoli: Yes. That is really the only difference. a podcast is an archived audio recording that you can listen to at any time, and it uses the feed, the feed function of WordPress to then publish posts with that so you can, so then you can have a podcast feed going into your. Device and then that feed can show you, ping you when a new episode is published with live radio.

someone sitting there behind a microphone right now speaking. And, it's going out just like a terrestrial broadcast, even though it's a stream. some terrestrial broadcasters obviously are streaming simultaneously now. So yes, you're listening live right now. So you need to see what's the schedule.

What's the schedule in my time zone? So Radio Station Pro and radio Station can show you what the schedule is. You can switch time zones and say, I wanna listen to a station like Huntington. Huntington Radio Community Radio in Huntington in the UK uses radio station and they, somebody could switch their time schedule to their own, time zone and see what time, so say something's at 11:00 AM in. In Huntington, it might be at 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM in, New York. So you want to see that in your time zone, so radio station to show you that show in your time zone. So that's the advantage of a radio station to use Radio station or Radio Station Pro is to show their schedule not only in their own time zone, but allow users to then flick and see, oh, that show's on right now for me at 3:00 AM I can just tune in right now and listen to it.

yes, that's

[00:33:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. With your software, can you, with the plugin, is it possible? So, as an example, me personally, I've probably recorded well over a thousand podcasts now at

this And, and so I dunno how many hours that is, but it's, it's many, many weeks of continuous, of audio. But, but it's, it's in an archive, so, you know, essentially you, you record one, you move on, you record another, and you never really get to.

To sort of air the ones, I mean, they're still on the website, people can listen to them, but you never really kind of get a chance to regurgitate those. Is that the sort of thing you can do with this? Could you turn preexisting content, like podcast episodes for example? Could you turn that into a scheduled radio station and then say, I don't know, put all a thousand episodes in a queue and when it's gone through those thousand episodes, it just starts again and that kind of thing.

[00:34:45] Tony Zeoli: Yeah, they call that, the software, is a station playout system, right? It's a system that you can store all your archived or any, whatever archived audio you have and create that on your laptop and then stream it using shell cast or ice cast into the radio station player, and then post all your show schedule and radio stations.

Show scheduling system, our system doesn't yet have that functionality to take the audio and, schedule the audio itself. We are just like a Google Calendar system where you can publish your show schedule. but we don't stream it because there are licensing issues with streaming that, there are performance rights organizations for music and for talk, and we wanna make sure that.

Where, just a tool to show you to publish and show your schedule on a WordPress website and use Icecast or shell cast, connected to a station playout system or a scheduling system like Azu Cast, which is an open source. System or, Libra Time, which is an open source system. And so if you use that and spawn your, ice cast, the shell cast feed from that, you can put your feed into our player so you can schedule your programming, you take all your archives and use those, tools to then.

push the audio out through the stream feed and into our player. There's a company called Live 365 here in the United States that does that, and we are hoping to partner with Live 365. So we are trying not to be the originator of the audio feed. Because there are expensive licensing components to that.

And we also wanna partner with companies like radio.co or Live 365 or whatever companies are in the UK that are doing live streaming, and we want to present the WordPress interface to their. To their broadcasters to use for their websites, and we don't want to step on their toes, so to speak, and, bring that and go down that road.

We're really focused on WordPress providing the tools for WordPress. The streaming providers are out there and they spawn their own mini sites on their own, in their own. Environments like Live 65 will give you a webpage, right? But it's not WordPress. So you can't do advertising, you can't do, you can't set up a e-commerce store.

You can't, do all a whole host of thing. You can't have a membership right site. But you can do all that in WordPress, right? So if Live 65 says, oh, this is awesome opportunity for us to get involved with Radio Station in our. Customers can use it, then we can do a partnership in that way. So we try to, we're really not trying to step on the toes of, streaming broadcast companies at this time because we want to be partners with them and give their, customers WordPress and then they can benefit, the customer and that company can benefit from that relationship.

So I'm really taking gingerly ginger gingerly steps forward in that, making sure that I don't overshoot my welcome mat,

[00:38:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I what you mean. Yeah. There's some big players there and they've got their, they've got their thumbs on that kind of content. when I was a kid, like tv, Basically taken over from radio in that most, most people given the choice would sit down and watch telly, but radio was still really popular.

It was the, you know, you'd have it on in the background, you could be doing all the tasks. It didn't mean that you had to sit in a chair and be absorbed by it. You could have

[00:38:39] Tony Zeoli: And driving.

[00:38:40] Nathan Wrigley: but. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Perfect example. You know, it's the sort of, it kind of just goes on in the background, but it feels to me as if, as if I don't know what the state of radio is, you know, that is to say, is radio in a, in a period of, you know, is it in general decline?

Like, and what I'm meaning by that is, you know, the idea of having a radio. A machine called a radio player that you would have in your house that you plug in. It's got nothing to do with the internet, nothing to do with any of that. It's just using the FM band, whatever it may be. Is that still a thing? and is it, is it a thing which given the generation that are coming up that have been brought up with a phone in there.

You know, in their hand more or less since birth. Is that, is that gonna be a challenge? And if so, I'm guessing that your plugin kind of meets that challenge a little bit. 'cause it brings internet radio, it brings the, the radio into the phone, without the

[00:39:38] Tony Zeoli: on.

[00:39:38] Nathan Wrigley: an FM receiver or something.

[00:39:41] Tony Zeoli: And on the, as a, in the web browser in Safari or Chrome for your phone, you can u you know, you can listen to radio through our plugin because we have a stream player that works on the phone. And it works on the desktop because it's mobile responsive. And yes. But to speak to where is Radio now and the United States, obviously, this.

Country has a bunch of narcissists who only think about themselves, the radio industry here, people will say, oh, radio is dead. But it's not, it's the number one format still in the, car. I listen to the radio all the time in the

car. You have serious. Yeah, you have serious xm, there's a lot of people who can't subscribe.

Who don't wanna subscribe to a $10 a month platform to get Sirius XM content or whatever, whatever the provider is in the uk. For, satellite radio, we're on to, 5G. Where it's gonna be, who's gonna benefit from 5G is more streaming radio and not satellite radio. Satellite radio comes to your car and you have to have a satellite receiver in your automobile to then convert that audio over your speakers.

Internet radio, hopefully will start being more integrated in the dashboard, and I think that it already is with, apple. Apple has a car software system, right? So you can pull up things on your Apple car. So Microsoft has a car software system, right? So you're starting to see that progression and with 5G and things get faster, you'll start to see more streaming in the car with radio, with more traditional radio stations.

Converting. They try to go to digital audio broadcasting for a little bit, DAB, but that didn't take off in the car as much as they thought it would. So you're seeing terrestrial stations, terrestrial meaning, over the air to a tower, to the car, to the house. They're, all streaming now, so you can get them all in tune in.

tune in. Or, somebody could go to Netm Mix and we're not streaming with Netm Mix yet. if Tune in Streams, but they have licenses with all the pros. We're just listing the stations on Netm Mix. And then the future we may stream, who knows? But, but that's where it's at.

And I think around the world, because radio station inherently as a WordPress plugin is global and it's multilingual and can be translated into any language. Radio in America is shifting because there's money here, but still in the, rural areas, radio is still important 'cause towers aren't available.

So there's a give and take to where radio is nationally in the US and the uk. To where it is in the rural areas, who need that, who still need those stations. And then globally a country like India or Brazil, radio's still hugely important 'cause they haven't, those countries are there's a lot of poverty in some of those countries and those people can't afford to buy a mobile phone and get a streaming subscription, so they still need radio.

So radio still presents a huge opportunity. Globally to broadcast and transmit information. and that's, I think the potential for radio station itself, the plugins, right? Radio, station, pro and stream player is that we're there at that intersection and helping those broadcasters stream, inexpensively, right?

It's $99 a year to get Radio Station Pro. and that's not, that's even still we're finding in other global markets that's still expensive. That's still

[00:43:36] Nathan Wrigley: interesting 'cause in, in the UK, DAB kind of is the default now because we don't really have rural in the same way that you have rural in the us. You know, rural means that you live like a mile away from something in this, in this part of the world. So everything kind of got hooked up to DAB.

But what, what I find kind of curious is that the, the habit of listening to radio is just a different experience. Like you, you can go in and you can create in Spotify a playlist and that's fun. But eventually, you know, at least I do, I, I get fed up of having to curate that playlist and there's something quite nice about the serendipity of just tuning into something and saying, right.

It's up to them what I get. You know, I'll just, I, I'm, I'm here. I. Whatever you give me is what I'm gonna get. I might discover something new and obviously Spotify and those services have tried to take that over with music, but in the UK we have a lot of talk radio you might call it, where, you know, it's, it's like a panel show or it's a comedy show or something and, and there's

[00:44:37] Tony Zeoli: Or sports.

[00:44:38] Nathan Wrigley: I.

Like that, where it's just one show after another and, and I'm just like you, whenever I get in the car, the first thing that I do after turning the car on is to put the radio on and make a selection. So there are, there are certain areas where radio really holds out, like the car for me, it might be going on a walk or something like that.

I'll put tuning on. Maybe it'll be a podcast, but maybe it'll be tuning or something like that. So I, I get, I get what? I get What you mean. I mean, it kind of feels. From the outside for the, the younger generation. Maybe it's something they've yet to discover. But if you are, if you can carve out that niche, be it, you know, playing this kind of music or having this kind of talk show, it feels like radio is, it's another credible avenue for putting your content out online.

And yeah, it's great. Really

[00:45:27] Tony Zeoli: all the, all you know, all the DJs. I've been involved in house music, so I listen to BBC Radio one on Friday

[00:45:32] Nathan Wrigley: Uh.

[00:45:33] Tony Zeoli: So that's because I know that music is emanating from the, from, the uk and those, presenters are presenting and they call 'em presenters, right in the uk where they call 'em Host or DJs.

Here in the us those presenters are bringing forward, entertainment programming that I'm gonna listen to at an exact time and place that I know it's coming on. And I don't just get it whenever I want with a podcast. And with podcast you can't broadcast music. There's licensing issues because it's an on demand format, and that's a different license, so you can't really get music in podcasts.

people do it illegally all the time. or in, countries where maybe the laws are different, but in the US and the uk you just can't podcast music, right? It's the p the pros because it's a mechanical license and you need to license each individual song from each individual label or rights holder.

You can't do a blanket streaming license like you can with ASCAP and BMI or whatever the PRO is. and. in the UK where you get a streaming license and you stream podcast is on demand. I click, I can fast forward, I can rewind. With streaming, you can't rewind. Streaming is only forward. So that's the difference in terms of the licensing mechanisms.

And to your point about listening, this morning I got in the car to drive my son to school. there's two points here that you mentioned. When you said the child has a phone from cradle to grave, Not necessarily true. I, we don't want our son to have a phone at this age, at he's 10. So we're, we're trying not to have him be in the phone and scrolling and being addicted to Instagram and TikTok, and then using that phone.

So he has a regular radio, a MF, from radio in the bathroom. When he takes a shower, he listens to that. Or I might bring the phone in and I might play his playlist on Spotify. But generally speaking, when we're in the car, he's listening to, when we're driving back and forth to school or going to soccer, we're listening to broadcast radio.

And why is because morning drive, right? When you listen to radio in the mornings. The, presenters, the DJs, the hosts, they're talking about what's going on in the local market. And you can't replicate that on Spotify. You can't replicate that on SiriusXM. You don't have local storytelling. So here we have Josh and Ariel in the morning on 1 0 4 0.3 star fm, right in Asheville.

And this morning they're talking about their lives. What's going on, what's happening in the local community? With the school closings, you cannot replicate that. In a streaming environment somewhere else in the world and it's very hyperlocal. So radio is moving, making sure to, or radio networks and making sure to make sure that their presenters are hyperlocal, right?

That's where radio wins. Traditional streaming radio over, a traditional terrestrial radio with a streaming component. If you wanna listen to the preferred station. Over the SiriusXM's, over the Spotify's, over those kinds of things. Now, tune in is another story. If I'm from Boston and I wanna listen to KISS 1 0 8 in Boston, or some, BBC in the uk, I can use Tune in to do that.

But Tune in doesn't have, I think they do have a podcast mechanism now, but generally speaking. music cannot be broadcast over podcast because of licensing issues. So that's where radio replaces the podcast and the streaming comes, from the local identities of, the stations.

[00:49:14] Nathan Wrigley: sadly the time has got the better of me, and I've gotta move on to another appointment at this point. But, it, we'll chalk this one up to like, it's been a really interesting, discovery of your journey, but also kind of like we ended up there right at the end of, into a, I don't know, the philosophy of broadcasting and, and where the, where the future might lie for my part radio.

Isn't dead. It's just something that the internet kind of has, has kind of got in the way of a little bit. But in the same way that vinyl seems to be having a massive comeback OI mean truly massive comeback over this side of the pond. I'm wondering if people will, you know, be, get fed up of things like Spotify and return to radio and discover their radio station of choice and things, and obviously net mix and all of the different plugins that you mentioned.

I will be sure to include those in the show notes so that people can go. And explore and see what it is that you are offering. So, sadly, time has got the better of us. But Tony, what an interesting story. Thanks for telling us about your, your life, your journey, and your, your WordPress plugin products.

That's great. Thanks so much. I.

[00:50:20] Tony Zeoli: Yeah, no, it was really great for you to, tap in with me and, allow me to share my story on your very popular podcast. I'm grateful to be part of the WordPress community and, I just, look forward to continuing the conversation at some other point. hopefully we'll see you.

Yeah, hopefully I'll see you at a Word

camp Yeah, that'll Nice to speak to you Tony. Thanks so much. Cheers.

Okay. You take care. Bye-Bye.

[00:50:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got time for today. Hope you enjoyed that. If you did or if you didn't, head to wpbuilds.com. Search for episode number 410, and leave us a comment on the WP Builds website. We really enjoy it when people do that.

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Okay. That's all we've got time for today. Just a couple of reminders. Join us Mondays, 2:00 PM UK time. Most Mondays, we might have a few off around the WordCamp Asia experience, but join us anyway when we're there. wpbuilds.com/live. And sign up at slash subscribe. We'll keep you posted when we produce new content.

Okay, I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music and say. Stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.