After the runaway success of the Celebration of Curation, it’s back to regular business again on the Mixcloud Blog, and yet another Mixcloud member doing sterling work being given their time to shine courtesy of the Spotlight.
This week we’re shining our light on pirate turned legit local radio station, Kane FM, so without further a do, here’s Managing Director Ian Handy giving us the lowdown:
Why did you choose to put the station on Mixcloud?
There are many services, in particular emerging ‘cloud’ services, which offer artists the opportunity to share their music across the web. However there are very few that specifically provide DJ mixes.
With most of the aforementioned cloud services there is a trade off. To avoid UK law and complications with licensing their T&C’s request in some cases that you sign over your worldwide rights perpetually. In plain English; you give away the rights for your tracks forever across the world but in a more typical example of the danger this can represent, you basically make sure you will never recoup a penny for your track each time it is played.
With Mixcloud this is not the case. Being fully compliant with UK licensing laws; each track that makes it onto the mix will be receiving the right remuneration. Making Mixcloud simply the best and only option for a law abiding radio station to support both in terms of legality and responsibility to the music and artists we represent (which is anything that is independent).
How else have you promoted the station, how have you utilised new online technologies?
Mixcloud is one example of unique new technologies that Kane FM has chosen to align with. Obviously; social networking has also taken the forefront for any self respecting ‘muso’.
Can you run me though a brief history of the station?
Kane FM started life as a pirate radio station in the early 90’s. The opportunity arose in 2004 to prove the demand for our service through an RSL (Restricted Service License). It lasted 28 days, was listened to in over 30 different countries, had 77,000 FM listeners and represented the best in independent music culture; featuring Ram Records (drum ‘n’ bass), True Tiger (UK garage, dubstep, grime) Grant Nelson (house) and Low Life Records (hip-hop), and with hundreds of other labels, producers and DJs within the UK circuit.
It has now grown into a not-for-profit community radio station to benefit the youth of tomorrow. All profits generated are used to drive social gain and community cohesion. On 24th February 2010; OFCOM Awarded Kane FM with our community radio licence, making Kane FM one of the few pirates ever to make the transition from pirate to legal radio. We have been licensed with the frequency 103.7FM for Surrey, South London and surrounding counties.
Can you describe your DJ/artist line-up?
Quite simply our artist line up represents anything independent. Just our production team alone reads like an all star cast with people such as Jazzy M (an old hand by our teams’ standards, sorry Jazzy!) and new blood such at the hardest working man in d’n’b, DJ Subterra, through to brand new dubstep up-and-comers Magic Mash.
We have over 14 producers and this gives you a tiny example of their quality, so you can imagine, given the artists we had involved in 2004 and the strength of our production team, that our line up reads like a who’s who of music in the UK across all independent genres. We are hesitant to give out any details on the exact line up prior to launch however! So you need to keep checking back on kanefm.com or listening to our mix series at Mixcloud to get an inkling of what is to come!!
What more would you like to see from the Mixcloud service, how can we improve?
Kane FM would like to see a mobile application on iPhone and just as importantly for Android platform or any other. We would like to see better systems for time stamping and improved GUI. Also the option to have a single widget embedded on a page that allows the user to search through all our content that is on our page and chose which mix to listen too would be awesome!
What’s going on at the station and website in the next few months?
The website is being finalised behind closed doors, but simplicity and functionality are key to the website side of things. Look at any commercial radio website and it is like a sensory overload attack with too much information attempting to be forced down your eye balls! We think get back to basics and we at each stage will request from our supporters, what they want. Enabling a smooth and simple website that only contains what our followers want to see.
Kfmp: Cj Mackintosh by Kane Fm on Mixcloud
Any musical highlights we should be looking forward to?
Well we have just released a CJ Mackintosh mix (the man behind the 1987 number 1 ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and 1987 DMC World Mixing Champion) as well as a Waveform Festival mix.
Kfmp: Waveform 2010 by Kane Fm on Mixcloud
The Waveform mix is a multi- genre mash-up to prepare all you festival lovers for October, when Kane FM and Archangel (owners of Waveform) join forces and cross brands for the ArcKanegel Arena at the Waveform festival. Sited in beautiful Cambridge with all the artists in the mix and more performing; so make sure you come along if you like a real underground festival. If you can’t make it then don’t worry, as some of the best bits and live sets will be going live and direct on Mixcloud of course.
In another innovative initiative we have a joint website with the Surrey Advertiser (one of the biggest local newspapers in England with a distribution of 500,000) and their online offering last year won the annual EDF Energy London and South of England Media Awards 2009. I mention this because today (25/08/10) we have uploaded our Guildford Music Awards Cloudcast. This represents three local signed artists; each respected in their own genres. There will be a vote on our joint website Kane FM/Get Surrey that runs from Monday 30th August until Tuesday 28th September. The winner of this vote will receive the Kane FM Underground Achievement Award at the red carpet ceremony taking place on Wednesday 29th. So listen to the Cloudcast, enjoy the music and as of the 30th August pop onto the Kane FM/Get Surrey site to vote for your favourite. The event will be filmed and you can catch up with all our video and audio content via our Kane FM – official fan page on FB!
As for the future … more Kane FM Presents Cloudcasts that I refuse to tell you about. You will just need to follow our Mixcloud profile and wait to be blessed as ever.