It is with a chest bursting with pride that I am announcing BlackLight Radio has been selected as a finalist for this year’s RAIN award for Best Single-Stream Webcaster!!!

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.