Free Thinking Friday (Or making stuff up)

Like a giant cartoon hammer hitting me over the head, I've realized you don't need a radio to make a radio station. As marketing minister at Unique Orthodontics, we have two radio stations playing 12-24 hit music in both our Fresno and Clovis, CA offices. This Fall we are expanding UNIQUE RADIO to on-line listening through our web site and making a smart phone application available for listening and appointments.

We figured why play local radio stations? Most medical and dental offices play the local AC or Hot/AC station. That makes sense if the patient demographic is older. We target 10-15 year olds and some younger adults at our practices. The early results are in and the patients love it. The dental assistants hate the repetition. We balance the music with sweepers talking about the practice on an image level and mini-promos for our promotions and marketing. We have had interest from other offices in doing this. The whole process takes about 2-3 hours a month to do a day of programming. Music is mixed into Audition, then processed and transferred to USB. 

I was listening to some final mixes in the car's media center on a short drive the other night and told my wife, you don't need radio to do radio. I program a Top-40 radio station. We change the music once-twice a month and play 7 powers, 11 mediums, 7 lights, 3 new, 15 recurrents and 25 recent gold titles. Yes we have contacted BMI and ASCAP to remit royalties on the 68 songs we play. 

This is something all offices, businesses and retail businesses should look into, instead of playing the radio or faceless Music Choice type audio programming.