Boredom with current radio trends and nostalgia for early top 40 programming led Richard Kaufman to create his own Web-based radio station.
By DAVE SCHEIBER
Published June 16, 2003
As a kid from New Jersey in the 1960s, Richard Kaufman spent countless hours tuning his AM transistor radio to rock 'n' roll. He loved the music, and the rapid-fire shtick of DJs like Big Dan Ingram and Barnie Pip.
They inspired Kaufman to become a radio DJ, too. But he never made the impact or had the kind of free-wheeling fun he dreamed of as a youth.
That is, until he traded a home on radio for a home online.
On the Web, Kaufman morphs into Ricky the K and brings the '60s alive again.
Kaufman's Solid Gold Time Machine site (www.60sradio.com) features old-school DJ chatter, more than 3,000 songs from 1955 to 1971 and classic commercials and jingles from the '60s.
That vintage, reverb-heavy radio format faded from the dials with the advent of '70s album rock, and the trend toward more music, less talk FM stations.
But now Kaufman, 52, who paid his dues in Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma, is trying to revive the long-gone sound. He's poured his energy and resources into a nostalgic venture beaming '60s radio to baby boomers over the Internet.
Kaufman says he draws listeners from across the United States, Canada, England and Australia who pay a subscription fee of $12.95 a month or $119.40 a year. Operating from his home in Dallas, the native of Livingston, N.J., declines to reveal how many paying customers he has, but adds, "I'm making a good living. And it's only getting better."
Clearly, Kaufman is targeting the truly hard-core oldies lovers with his play-for-pay site.
"In order to make it on the Internet, you have to do something different than, better than and cheaper than (your competition)," he says. "Cheaper than, I cannot do. So instead, what you do is superserve a niche audience. I'm doing that with an audience that is not being served by traditional radio."
Kaufman launched his '60s music project in 1998 at the advent of the Internet's popularity. But e-commerce hadn't evolved enough to make subscription payments convenient, and media player technology wasn't as advanced. Listenership was limited.
Today, he uses the PayPal online billing system to process subscriptions. With faster computers and high-speed connections commonplace, Web radio links abound, and Kaufman says his station has thrived since last year.
Still, making a radio network succeed on the Internet is no easy task, says Larry Magne, publisher of Passport to Web Radio: Music, Sports, News and Entertainment from the Hometowns of the World.
"It's very much oriented to a part of broadcasting that's been ignored: the narrow, super-niche market," he says. "For that, it might work. You find a dozen stations can work this way and eke out a living."
Magne says the biggest challenge is convincing listeners to shell out more than $100 a year for a subscription.
"You can get an awful lot of stuff through cable for 40 bucks a month," he said. "But for one station - unless you've got your slicked-back, Wild Root hairdo - paying $10 or so a month is a lot when there's so much out there for free."
As a Webcaster, Kaufman has to pay a fee to the recording industry, ASCAP and BMI, but he builds that cost into his subscription rates. He had thought about pitching his endeavor for radio syndication but wanted to maintain full control.
"I didn't want to have it watered down," he says. "If I'm going to be the last dinosaur on Earth, I didn't want to be in a situation of dealing with radio people," he says. "These are the people who messed radio up. I wanted to go directly to the audience."
To do so, Kaufman dons one of his many Hawaiian shirts and goes to work in his home studio. He records three five-hour shows - 15 hours of programming - and changes the files once a week.
"This way it's convenient for anybody in any time zone to listen," he says. "You just download it when you want. And with all the songs in my library, I don't repeat a song for 12 weeks."
Kaufman has gone to painstaking lengths to re-create the feel of the 40-year-old format. He uses much of the same sound equipment employed in the '60s: an RCA 77-DX mike (like the one adorning David Letterman's desk) that provides a big bass boost; tube compressor-limiters, refurbished with parts from 1964, that create a warm, dense sound free from digital distortion; a distinctive "plate" reverb setting; and 31 bands of equalization per channel.
"Put it all together and that's the sound of '60s radio," he says.
Well, part of it. The rest comes from Kaufman's frenetic, looney approach, which he learned as a youngster by listening to DJ heroes such as WABC's Ingram in New York and Pip of Chicago's WCFL.
One of his ongoing routines, inspired by a Miami DJ, is a faux dialogue with Tonto (the late Jay Silverheels) of the Lone Ranger TV show. Kaufman dubbed hundreds of Tonto lines from Lone Ranger tapes to create a Tonto quip for virtually any situation. He recorded them onto separate cartridges and pops them in on the fly.
"I have five boxes of Tonto carts, all by category," he says. "To do this kind of radio, you have to be able to find this stuff in about five seconds or less."
Then there are the time-warp ads: some 200 old cigarette spots, dozens of soft drink and beer jingles (Reingold, Ballentine, Shaeffer), and movie promos from The Ten Commandments to The Graduate.
Kaufman says it takes a lot of effort to do the job right, but he's having a blast as Ricky the K. Though he worked as a radio DJ, starting in 1968, he never thought he reached his true potential.
"I wanted to be great, but I was always very average, and I never knew why at the time," he says.
Kaufman attributes it to the direction radio moved in the late '60s and '70s, de-emphasizing the role of mega-personality music DJs.
"There were maybe about 20 who were really good," he says. "It was very hard to do well, you had to talk about 45 times an hour, but in short bursts, and you needed a quick mind to make it all work.
"Then a guy named Bill Drake came along and invented this format that keeps the music moving, and it kind of became the McDonald's of radio: The DJs would only talk over the intros to the songs and outros to commercials. It basically made radio mediocre. Even a great DJ would sound mediocre in a Drake format, and a bad DJ would sound mediocre, too, because less is expected."
Kaufman worked at stations in Fort Walton Beach and Atlanta, but left radio disenchanted. He moved to Dallas to write jingles for seven years, producing some for KOMA in Oklahoma City, a 50,000-watt station heard at night in more than 30 states.
The program director liked Kaufman enough to hire him as a DJ in the mid-1990s. He worked there for 21/2 years, adopting a more rambunctious style, and was encouraged by the response. That's when the idea dawned on him to create his '60s show.
"The typical oldies station plays the same 300 songs over and over, and can't sell advertising to anyone over 49," he says. "So if you're over 49, you don't count. Most oldies stations aren't even playing any oldies pre-1968 now.
"I play the real oldies, thousands of them. And I make it entertaining like they did when I was a kid."
