On September 13, when WYSP/Philadelphia dropped its Free FM Talk format in order to flip back to Active Rock, most of the airstaff was let go, including 11-year WYSP veterans Matt & Huggy. The duo started out in 1996 doing weekends and overnights, then enjoyed a long run with the evening shift before they were given a 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. talk show to go along with WYSP’s Free FM format. But after settling into their new time slot and getting adjusted to hosting a two-hour talk show with no music (which they did for over a year), Matt & Huggy became casualties of the format flip.
However, rather than sitting around and getting stale while waiting for their next radio opportunity, Matt & Huggy decided to take advantage of technology such as podcasting and MySpace as a way to grow their fan base and keep their radio skills sharp. Plus, the outpouring of encouragement and disappointment they received from fans when the show was canceled made it an easy decision to keep the show alive in some form.
“I was stunned by what people said to us through our Web site and through MySpace. I couldn’t believe how many people were upset that the show was canceled, and were complimentary towards us,” says Huggy. “When you do this thing every day, you don’t know who you’re reaching – it’s not a tangible thing. But we heard from so many people. The listeners wanted to throw us a party. I was very surprised.”
“I was touched,” adds Matt. “When you’re on the radio you don’t really see the fans that much. I was pretty amazed at how many of them were out there speaking up. I was humbled.”
At the behest of their audience, the duo took to the Internet only a week after they were fired and began podcasting the Matt & Huggy Show from the affectionately named “manhole,” their home studio in Matt’s basement. The podcasts are each about 45 minutes long and the pair records new ones several times a week. When a new “episode” is posted on MattandHuggyShow.com, they send out a MySpace bulletin to their more than 2,300 friends to let people know it’s available. The process is pretty easy since all it takes is a computer, a few microphones, a mixing board and an editing program, and the podcast keeps the Matt & Huggy Show in game shape during the off season, so to speak. On October 5, only a few weeks after starting the podcast, hundreds of fans gathered with Matt & Huggy at a local Dave and Buster’s to celebrate the success of the Web site and podcast.
“We’re doing podcasting to keep ourselves sharp, and people wanted to continue to hear us in some way. We weren’t sure what our next approach was, and so many people told us to podcast,” explains Huggy. “We keep people abreast of things via our Web site and MySpace, which is a powerful tool. When you have a few thousand people as part of your friend base, you can get the word out pretty quickly.”
Matt adds, “This keeps us fresh, and it gives the people who like us a chance to listen. Maybe we can get some new listeners out of it, and if we do go to another station in another part of the country, they could still listen to us online.”
Thousands of fans continue to tune in to hear the duo discuss their daily lives, items in the news, sports, and their musings and predictions about their former station. Huggy says the first podcast had about 2,000 downloads (they are now up to #12), and they are even thinking about integrating live callers if the popularity continues to grow. However, neither of them views the podcast as a replacement show, and they still aim to get back on terrestrial radio sooner rather than later. To that end, Huggy says it’s important for them not to get too comfortable with the freedom that comes along with an unedited podcast that is free of FCC restrictions, while Matt feels it actually makes the program a little stronger.
“It’s a lot easier to curse, but it’s also easier to talk about things. It makes you more comfortable when you have no restrictions on what you can say,” says Matt. “But I feel like we’re the same people on the podcast as we were on the radio. This is just Huggy and I being comfortable with each other, saying what happened in our daily lives and having fun.”
“In some ways it’s nice to be able to talk about things we couldn’t talk about before and get into greater detail and use language and subject matter that we couldn’t touch before,” adds Huggy. “But we’re not like kids in a candy store who are all excited to talk about things that we couldn’t talk about before. It’s nice to know that we could, but we don’t want to get too comfortable with that. Still, every time I say a bad word I look at Matt like, ‘Oh, is that okay?’ And if people from potential future stations are listening, I don’t want them to think we can’t clean up our act. Plus, it’s fun and challenging on terrestrial radio to find a way to say things without really saying them.”
The popularity of podcasting is definitely growing, as a recent study from Arbitron and Edison Media Research showed that awareness of the term “Podcasting” increased from 22 percent to 37 percent from 2006 to 2007, and the number of persons who had ever listened to an audio podcast also went up from 11 percent to 13 percent. But even though Matt & Huggy have found a level of success with the medium, they don’t believe it’s ever going to eclipse the reach of terrestrial radio.
“I don’t think it’s ever going to be as big as terrestrial radio, but I do think it’s having an impact,” says Huggy. “It just gives people more options to listen to. A lot of people have said, since they’ve heard us be more free with our language and subject matter on the podcast, ‘Why don’t you go to satellite?’ But I still think there’s nothing like regular radio. It’s an amazing thing to turn on your radio and get programming you can’t get anywhere else, and you’re not paying for it. Terrestrial radio will never die. Everybody thought TV would kill it and it didn’t. It just had to reinvent itself, and it’s reinventing itself again.”
Matt suggests that tying the two things together more effectively would help keep terrestrial radio relevant among listeners whose time is divided between other technologies. “Terrestrial radio needs to incorporate more podcasting. Radio stations as a whole need to do more with computers rather than avoid it,” he says. “I feel like there is so much avoidance of technology among broadcasters. People should be able to download any part of a radio show any time of the day. Content should be more accessible so the air talent could have more of a fan base. If stations used their e-mail database and sent everybody a part of a show every day, that would keep people more involved with what the guys on the radio are doing and maybe get them interested in a show they didn’t listen to before.”
** QB Content by Mandy Feingold **
