The only problem with this (admittedly great) idea was the 80s artist they picked: Rick Springfield.

Now, before you fans of Rick start working on hate letters to me, let me explain: we here at BlackLight Radio LOVE Mr. Springfield. In any given hour you might hear “Affair Of The Heart,” “Don’t Talk To Strangers,” “Jessie’s Girl,” or “Love Somebody.” We play Rick because we know you love him, and because we love him.

So what was wrong with picking Rick Springfield to play Parkland on April 27th in Pine Trails Park?

Nothing… unless you’re the city of Parkland and ignore the fine print that says until Springfield’s concert January 11th at the Seminole Casino was over, they weren’t to breathe a word of his April appearance.

They did, and his talent agency pulled him out of the show.

What’s a fifty-year old town to do?

Go get another Australian 80s hitmaker, of course!

The Little River Band (“Cool Change,” “Man On Your Mind,” “Take It Easy On Me,” “The Other Guy”) will perform at the free concert celebration on April 27th.

Loudcity has had a hard drive failure (multiple hard drive failures?) Tuesday night, and as a result if you click the play button on our front page, you will get… absolutely nothing until Loudcity returns.

The good news is, there are several ways still to listen to BlackLight Radio:

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SHOUTCAST
You can launch the Shoutcast Popup Player for our 128 kbps stream. You’ll need to click the play button on the page after you click the link.

You can also click here to select either our 128 kbps mp3 stream or our 64 kbps AAC+ stream from Shoutcast.

TUNEIN
This page will give you access to our 128 kbps mp3 stream, launching almost immediately upon clicking the link.

ITUNES
You can also still listen to us using iTunes, by going to “Radio” at the top of your player, then opening the “80s Flashback” section below, scrolling to “BlackLight Radio” and clicking the title.

In honor of the arrival of the New Year around the planet, BlackLight Radio will be playing PartyMixes from midnight 2013 in Christmas Island, Kiribati & Samoa, until it turns midnight 2013 in American Samoa, the Midway Islands, & Niue!

LONDON: PartyMixes air from 10 am New Year’s Eve to 11 am New Year’s Day.

NEW YORK CITY: PartyMixes air 5am NYE to 6am NYD.

CHICAGO: PartyMixes 4am NYE to 5am NYD.

DENVER: 3am NYE to 4am NYD.

LOS ANGELES: 2am – 3am.

ANCHORAGE: 1am – 2am.

HONOLULU: midnight – 1am.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Click on the (>) button, above and to the right, to listen.

This is great news because instead of begging each month for listeners to send in money, we can promote a handful of great products or services to pay for our licensing fees, software upgrades, and music library expansions.

We’re offering a commercial length of your choosing up to sixty seconds, either provided by you or written, produced, and voiced by us and subject to your approval.

These commercials will air at least six times a day during regular programming on BlackLight Radio’s web stream.

The charge for one month of this schedule (approximately 180 airings over the course of 30 days) is $10, which includes any writing or production needed and all 180 airings. (Yes, this works out to 18 cents per airing!)

There is no long-term contract required; advertising agreements are month-to-month.

As a listener, this should not scare you. We have no plans to run more than one commercial an hour in place of a PSA or classic commercial we’re airing right now. As our advertisers increase and fill up our advertising spots, our advertising rates will go up so that our working capital will increase, advertising clutter WON’T increase, and our advertisers won’t be lost in a long stretch of ads.

If this interests you, please contact me (Gene Savage) at our email address at the right, or contact me on Facebook (again on the right side of this page). Sponsorships will also be available for our newscasts and specialty programming; contact me for more details.

BlackLight Radio is back… and the future of the 80s looks BRIGHT. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

We’ve made contact with someone at LoudCity regarding our canceled account, and they are talking with the “higher ups” to find out if we will be able to restore the previous terms of our account.

If we are not, the cost of streaming with our current listening audience wouldn’t go up a lot: only about $5 a month as long as nobody else starts listening. Of course, we’d prefer to have more and more listeners!

Another licensing company, StreamLicensing, is talking to us about using their services. They would be about $15 a month more… BUT, we would be able at that point to take on advertisers to run legitimate commercials on BlackLight Radio.

Do you have or do you know of someone with a product or service that you would be willing to spend $5 or $10 a month to advertise on BlackLight Radio? Four advertisers at $10 a month would pay for us to move to StreamLicensing.

We need to hear your thoughts. If you would consider investing $10 a month in promoting a service or product on BlackLight Radio, please email me, Gene, at inbox@blacklightradio.com or contact us on our Facebook page.

Today I feel more confident than I did yesterday that the 80s greatest hits will return to BlackLight Radio. We need more information from LoudCity to make our decision, and we need more information from you.

We have a contact email on our website at blacklightradio.com. You can also reach us through Facebook, which is also linked on our homepage. Or you can email us directly: inbox@blacklightradio.com.

Would you spend $10 a month advertising your product or service on BlackLight Radio’s web stream? I look forward to hearing from you… and will be back with another update tomorrow.

For those of you who follow us on Facebook, you already knew that we were $15 short this month in covering our licensing fees.

After trying twice to draft our PayPal account and coming up empty-handed, LoudCity canceled our account with them Sunday. Without Loud City’s protection, we are unable to legally stream any music over the web.
Therefore, effective immediately, the music on BlackLight Radio has been silenced.

We are working with LoudCity in hopes of coming to an agreement to reinstate our blanket license, but have not yet been able to restore our coverage.

If you would like to donate to pay our licensing fees, please click the PayPal donate button on our webpage at blacklightradio.com. If we are unable to return, we will refund any donations made from this point forward. If we ARE able to return, every penny will be used to keep the music streaming on BlackLight Radio.

We love the 80s. We think we have one of the best 80s music libraries on or off the web. You’ve told us you feel the same. We want to be able to share the music with you again, soon.

Again, if you would like to contribute, go to blacklightradio.com and click “donate” on the right side of the page.

Thanks for listening to BlackLight Radio over the past two years… hopefully we’ll soon be back and with you for years to come.

This post is an attempt to equalize the playing field for us a bit.

Do you have a smart phone (an iPhone or an Android)? If you do, you have BlackLight Radio almost anywhere you can get an internet connection. Let’s start with getting your phone up to speed!

If you have an iPhone, you’ll want to go to the App Store. If you have an Android, you’ll want to go to the Google Play store.

My favorite app, and the easiest way to get BlackLight Radio playing on your phone, is the TuneIn app. It’s free, although a “pro” version is also available for 99 cents that removes the banner ads and gives you some additional features. The choice is yours; both are GREAT players.

When you launch the app, click the search bar and type in “BlackLight Radio.” Chances are by the time you get “BlackLight” typed in, you’ll see our purple and black logo and our slogan “All of the 80s, all of the time!”, so go ahead and click the entry.

Once the stream starts playing, look for the “heart” symbol (it’s near the top right on the Android app). Click the heart, and you’ll be able to add BlackLight Radio to your favorites list.

Now when you launch the app, all you have to do is click “Favorites” and click our entry. Our 128 kbps stereo stream will begin shortly!

There are other apps which will play BlackLight Radio. Shoutcast has an app for the iPhone, but I haven’t had a chance to test it and Shoutcast’s app on my home blu-ray player hasn’t impressed me so far… use it if it works, but if it doesn’t, try TuneIn.

You may have limited or metered bandwidth on your phone. If you would like to listen but use less bandwidth, you’ll want to try tuning in to our AAC+ stream which, for the moment, is a little more challenging but far from impossible.

If you’re on the iPhone, then iTunes should automatically start on our AAC+ 64 kbps stream.

On Android it’s a bit trickier. A Online Radio will play our stream if you install it and then launch our stream from the LoudCity webpage (through the play button on our page), but the player doesn’t seem to be as solid with our stream as I would like. (As we speak, I’m trying to connect to our AAC+ stream and it’s not connecting, while it popped right up on my PC desktop.)

Sadly, when I popped in our direct listening address, the stream started immediately… but I can’t tell you what the direct stream address is because of copyright laws. (I’m serious!)

I’ve tried to figure out a way to launch it from Shoutcast’s page, but it tries to pop up a window which then fails to load. This is something I’ll continue to work on and research.

NEXT POST: it’s on my phone; what are my listening choices?

Sixteen hours of spooky musical treats from the 80s start at noon today (east coast time, 9am Pacific) on BlackLight Radio.

The perfect soundtrack for all of your All-Hallow’s Eve activities is BlackLight Radio!

Roothog Radio describes themselves as playing “Real Country Music, Honky Tonk, and Mind Altering Bluegrass.”

They are one of hundreds of thousands of stations all across the web and all across the world providing unique and excellent programming every day.

Congratulations, Josh, on this year’s award, and a job well done!

This is the third year for the awards presenting by the veteran news-site for the internet radio industry, and the first year stations could submit their streams for consideration. This was good and bad for webcasters: good, because if you weren’t in the “field of vision” of the judges in the past, you had an opportunity to MAKE yourself visible.

On the other hand, instead of being in competition with dozens or perhaps hundreds of stations, you could be in competition with thousands or tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of stations!

That last point is what makes this nomination mean even more. I doubt we were on anyone’s radar in years past. This year, with all of the extra stations to go through, with all the added competition, they STILL decided to select BlackLight Radio as one of the finalists. WOW!

Do I expect us to win? Of course I hope so, but we’re up against:

* BeachFront Radio, who has been named “Trop Rock Station of the Year” for the second year in a row, & one of their shows has been named “Radio Show Of the Year” for the third straight year.

* Castle Rock Radio, who has three state-of-the-art digital studios & a full schedule of live radio shows. Castle Rock Radio’s staff is comprised of veteran radio hosts, audio engineers & producers, plus technology, media, & marketing experts.

* Floyd’s 99 Radio, the official station of a national chain of barbershops (which is an EXCELLENT idea, BTW… why not have your music stream [playing your ads, of course] available for people to listen to when they’re not at your place of business? I’ve never understood why Sonic Drive-In, AMC Movies, and Reasor’s Foods don’t make their 24/7 in-store streams available online).

* Radio Paradise, run by Bill & Rebecca Goldsmith (who work on the station FULL-TIME) and who use an automation system designed by Bill, fer heavens’ sake…

* Roothog Radio, a station in North Texas dedicated to “real” country music that has both advertisers AND donations from listeners… so they must be doing SOMETHING right…

and

* The Cigar Station, one of the slickest, most professional looking pages I’ve seen in a while, and the station is run by a programmer who has been in the broadcasting industry for 30 years & won Billboard’s Station of the Year and Programmer of the Year multiple times in the process; another guy who’s run award-winning stations since the 1970s and has worked with CBS, Entercom & National Public Radio; and their voiceover guy / production director currently programs FIVE radio stations Reno area.

So… yeah.

I’m just honored to be nominated!!! If we can even be in the same club as these stations, I’d say we’re doing OK.

I believe what we offer is something extraordinary: a complete overview of the pop hits of every year of the 80s, expertly blended with 80s-style imaging, news, state events, historical information, and unique hosted shows on the weekends. This is fed through a “home-brew” of audio processors to attempt to re-create that “80s FM” sound, and fed to the world at low and high bandwidths for mobile devices as well as office & home listeners.

If we don’t win, I will still wear this nomination as a badge, with pride.

If we win… you may have to call the medics… I suspect my heart will stop!!! (Then again, I didn’t expect to be nominated, either…)

I wish I could be there for the announcement of the winners, but my financial situation won’t allow it right now… although I suspect if I KNEW we were going to win, friends & family might chip in to get me there to accept the award… holy cow, can you imagine???

Thank YOU, the listener, for being there every day and being the REAL reason I do this every day. The 80s live, thanks to you.