24 Hours With…. FBI Radio music director, Stephen Goodhew
24 Hours With… spotlights the working day of some of the most interesting people in Mumbrella’s world. Today we speak with FBi Radio music director, Stephen Goodhew
6:00am Most mornings for me start when my alarm goes off at a time that seemed seemed entirely reasonable the previous evening, but in actuality was always hopelessly optimistic. A morning person I am not. Engage snooze button.
7:00am After spending a glorious 60 minutes or so in deep snooze mode, I get up and begin to attack the task of FBi’s Northern Light’s entries.
Often I’ll try to spend an hour or so tackling emails before heading into work, but at present my attention is focused entirely on getting through the extra music listening. In a typical week I’ll be serviced about 400 releases or so (give or take) from around the world. I’m expecting another 400-500 Northern Lights entries to arrive by the time entries close tomorrow, August 5.
At this point, my ear is pretty finely tuned to know what will and won’t work for FBi. Generally it only takes a few seconds to work out the difference between a no and a maybe, so am able to burn through some of these fairly quickly, while sorting the others that will need more attention into separate piles.
10:00am I‘m in the office now (10:00am start times are, actually, the greatest) and am setting about preparing for the coming week and prepping for my radio show, The Playlist, which starts at 1:00pm.
First, I’ll have to ensure that our music scheduling software is updated with all the newest tracks being added to rotation before doing a rough schedule for the coming week’s playlists. I’ll then check over all the newest bios, ensuring they’re of a standard ready for presenters to start using on-air. Then, it’s a matter of pulling together all the tracks for my own program, uploading them to our digital playout system and then making some radio.
1:00pm For the next couple of hours I’ll be yakking it up on the old yak box, introducing all of FBi’s newest sounds to our audiences, as well as our new albums of the week for FBi 94.5 and FBi Click.
Sometimes I’ll have a guest (a recent highlight being Pitchfork’s editor in chief, Ryan Schrieber) but more often than not it’s just straight tunes and music chit-chat.
background of audio mixer
3:00pm Time to squeeze in a quick bite to eat, catch up on some emails, do a couple of quick meetings, if needed. My inbox is the absolute bane of my existence and emails can pile up unbelievably quickly. Always important to be scanning it for any time-bombs that need urgent attention.
4:00pm Today is the first Monday of the month, which means we’re running our Music Open Day and bands/managers will be dropping in to present their music to me. I normally take industry servicing each week on a Tuesday, but Music Open Day is more focused towards the greenest of Sydney’s emerging talent; it’s an opportunity for them to present their music, have radio programming explained and then have any other questions they may have about the industry addressed.
It can pretty fun but you do get some interesting characters in from time to time.
6:00pm By this point the bands have stopped filtering in and I can spend a bit more time fine-tuning the next couple of days of on-air playlists, ensuring that our local content quotas are met, that there’s no obvious errors in scheduling, and that there’s an even spread of genres throughout the day.
7:00pm Once that’s out of the way I’ll probably respond to a few more emails before throwing in the towel and heading home. I do not put on any music during the car ride, radio or otherwise. Sometimes, silence is golden.
Stephen Goodhew is the music director for FBI Radio
I always wondered who would use all the memory on an ipod…400 songs a week…Stephen would go through 20,000+ songs a year!! And manages to be on air too!
User ID not verified.