The Alphaville Herald

The Morning Coffee Mix In Second Life

by Alphaville Herald on 15/11/09 at 5:15 pm

Stroke awakened the radio passion

by Alessandra Narayan

Did you know there’s a live radio show going on SL every day? Me neither.

Jameslarken Supply, a former musician in real life, suffered a heart stroke which led him to discover the magnificent new world of Second Life. At first, he started DJ’ing, a live experience that made him take the next step: having his own live radio show, a way of keeping him in contact with music and the audience.

After one year doing streaming radio, Mr. Supply wants to reach more public, driven by the listener’s reactions, determined to help people having a nice time, every day of the week, from 8.00 to 10.00am Pacific Coast time/SLT. 

Alessandra Narayan (AN) – Is it true you run a famous SL radio show?
Jameslarken Supply (JS) – I don’t know about famous, but yes I have a radio show.

AN – When did you start it?
JS – I've been doing it for a year, around September 2008.

AN – And how's it going?
JS – Very good actually. My audience is half SL, RL on the web. A lot of the people that listen are SL folks, but they listen on the web site. They listen from work and in SL, we do the show at a venue.

AN – How can people access it?
JS – Through http://www.themorningcoffeemix.com or in-world through the stream http://72.8.159.14:9520. 

AN – What's your show about? When do you run it?
JS – It’s a music show, its Monday-Friday 8-10am Pacific/SLT, although I live in Texas. It’s a very organic music show and well, because one of my skills seems to be using the music for things going on, either in the audience, or in the world I don’t do the typical request kind of love song. Besides it’s 75/25 per cent music/talk, with comedy.

AN – How did it start? Did you have experience already in real life?
JS –I have been a musician for a lot of years as a side thing. I have an associate in music and unfortunately, I had a stroke in RL. I really had a void missing that, so I found Second Life and started doing the DJ thing. Really enjoyed it but I kept running into RL time conflicts for my kids. Then one day, I just realized that maybe I should try in the morning. You would think the SL morning would be tough but it just clicked and it was slow starting, but it gradually took off. Then I kept getting people that had to work and said “I miss hearing the show”, so I found out what was needed to properly do my show from the web. I’m a legal station on the www, pay royalties, etc.

AN – How big is your audience?
JS – I get between 20/60 people listening per day. Busiest is on Wednesdays/Thursdays for some reason and in RL I have only use of my right arm. I've met a lots of SL folks in person. The show is made to be very uplifting for that reason, happy. I had 4200 unique listeners last month.

AN – Would you like to expand the market of listeners?
JS – Yes, I'm continuously attempting to do so, but not at the expense of the show. I ultimately do it because I enjoy it and because of all the comments I get from the listeners. I went to the SL Convention and I’ve been trying to give it more visibility mainly word of mouth and a little SL advertising, but, to tell you the truth I am great at content, horrible at promoting, so most of my listeners is word of mouth. I've used Facebook some also.

AN – What was your best and your worst experience related with your radio show?
JS – The best has been people that I found out that were going through difficulties in life, they send me a note tell me what was going on, and how I helped get them through wit h the show. The worst, I guess, is a recent venue change thing within SL as the sim in which I've had the show since inception, was closing and I had to line up a new location.

AN – Are you the only guy running a live radio show in SL?
JS – Not sure. Probably not in the way I do I think.