Gimme Radio

» see gimmeradio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Gimme Radio was an American niche product aimed at a specific listener, and I was never that listener. It reaches this list on the strength of what it was trying to prove. In 2017, a company raised venture money on the argument that human beings picking records for other human beings was a business, at the exact moment the rest of the industry had settled on the opposite answer.

It launched out of San Francisco in June 2017. Tyler Lenane, who had come through Rdio and Google Play Music, ran it, and the product was a single stream of heavy metal with no advertising and no algorithm. Shows were hosted by people from inside the genre. Dave Mustaine of Megadeth put out his first show on 9 November 2017, and Randy Blythe of Lamb of God and Johan Hegg of Amon Amarth ran their own. Metal Blade and Nuclear Blast sent guest DJs.

The room mattered as much as the playlist. A live chat ran beside the stream and everybody listening was hearing the same song at the same second, which is the one thing on-demand streaming took away and never gave back. If a record came on that you did not own, there was a button to buy it right there, and the money went where a record store's money used to go.

~ the case file ~

~ the economy of it ~

Subscriptions were the smallest part of it. Gimme sold merchandise, ran a vinyl club at thirty dollars a month, and put a tip jar next to the artists who hosted shows. More than a thousand artists went through the DJ booth and hundreds of them took tips out of it. There were digital collectibles too, in the years when everybody was trying those.

It read as a plausible model for a genre that has always been about direct exchange between bands and their audience. Metal fans buy physical records. They buy shirts. A radio station that could sell both while the record was playing was a better fit for that economy than a per-stream royalty ever was.

~ the second station ~

Gimme Country launched in February 2019, with Brandy Clark and Joshua Hedley among the first hosts. The theory was that the format would travel to any genre with a real community under it, and country was the obvious next one: another audience with a strong sense of who counts as authentic and a long habit of buying things.

Two stations is also where the pitch changed. A metal radio station is a business with a ceiling you can measure. A method that works on any genre is a growth story, and growth stories are what the money in the room had come for.

~ the money ~

The investors were not tourists. Half a million came from a crowdfunding round in 2019, and a later round drew iHeartMedia alongside Metal Blade Records, which is about as knowing a cap table as a metal station could ask for.

It needed about five million dollars more to keep going and could not close it. In April 2023 the company told listeners it was unable to raise the financing needed, and both stations went quiet on 29 April, six years in. Whatever the model proved, it did not prove it fast enough for the money that was funding it.

~ the funny part ~

The store outlived the radio. A company called Mainfactor bought the e-commerce and direct-to-fan side out of the wreckage later in 2023 and put the Gimme Metal shop back online, selling to the same audience the station had gathered.

So the part that was supposed to be the side business is the part still trading, and the part that gave it a reason to exist is gone. That happens more often than anyone building the reason would like. An audience assembled by something worth listening to is a real asset, and it can be sold separately from the thing that assembled it.

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