Music Ally was the first publication to write about New York startup Stationhead back in March 2017, describing it as blending ‘Spotify with user-generated radio’.
People could use the app to broadcast their streaming playlists (Spotify at first, and later Apple Music too) to an audience, while also talking to them live as a DJ would – the twist being that all the music was played via listeners’ own streaming subscriptions. If a Stationhead DJ had 1,000 listeners, every song they played would get 1,000 streams.
It was a clever idea, and since that first profile, Stationhead has been slowly but surely building partnerships and honing its technology. Now it’s getting a big push, and a new feature: the ability for people to record their shows and make them available on-demand, rather than only being able to broadcast live.
That means a Stationhead show is now much more like a podcast – except it swerves the now-infamous challenges around licensing music for podcasts, because of its integration with Spotify and Apple Music.
The company has also revealed its latest lineup of investors and advisors. The former category include Avex, Downtown Music Publishing, Atlantic Records’ Julie Greenwald, S Curve Records’ Steve Greenberg, 300 Entertainment’s Kevin Liles and Arista Records’ David Massey.
The latter, meanwhile, include Stevie Van Zandt and Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon, now responsible for our favourite press-release statement of 2019 so far: “This is the illest shit since sliced bread.”
Stationhead’s challenge is now to figure out the marketing that will bring its app – new, on-demand shows included – to a bigger audience of listeners.
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