Online radio station creates Fusion for world audience
When Energy 92.7 FM left the airwaves in early 2003, things looked grim for fans of high-energy dance music. But corporate-dominated FM radio can’t stop the beat, though.
Or, it seems, keep the dance divas and DJs down.
Fusion Radio Chicago (www.fusionchicago.com) literally rose from the ashes of the former FM frequency. Fusion co-founder Manny Esparza met the station’s two other founders, Gergory Schweitzer and Dave Tripper, in an Internet chatroom set up for fans of 92.7 to mourn the loss of the dance radio station.
“Corporate-owned radio stations tend to shy away from dance music because it targets a specific audience and the [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered] community is at its core,” says Esparza, now president of development and the new online station’s manager. “Half of our listeners are from the GLBT community, but that’s a risk that few FM radio stations are willing to take.”
“It was kind of a do-it-yourself kind of thing,” says Tripper. “I hadn’t even used an mp3 file, and in one week I learned how digital music works and had my own show.”
The Evanston-based Internet radio station is currently the Chicago area’s No. 1 online radio station and is ranked 95th in the world. Nearly a third of their listeners are overseas.
“Dance music is taken much more seriously overseas,” Tripper says. “To attract that kind of an audience tells me we’re going in the right direction and doing something right.”
Things didn’t start out that big, though.
“The first show I did was a countdown show,” recalls Tripper, who is one of the station’s on-air personalities. “We had three listeners and two of them were Manny and Greg. The third person found us just by searching on the internet, so that was pretty cool.”
The station will celebrate its fifth anniversary by sponsoring a float in the 39th annual Chicago Pride Parade this weekend. Dance recording artists Jenn Cuneta (whose Billboard hit “Come Rain, Come Shine” samples the horns from The Wings’ “Silly Love Songs”) and Jenna Drey (whose latest smash is a cover of Air Supply’s “All Out of Love”) will perform to the parade crowd.
Tripper will kick things off with a Pride-themed block of music on his show at 7:30 tonight. Fusion will be broadcasting live all day from Saturday’s Pridefest and from Circuit nightclub that night.
“FM radio has lost an entire generation to the Internet,” Esparza says. “All these conglomerates bought up all these stations and now everything sounds the same. Fusion offers something different.”