Brittany Grunig: Building Country Radio Listeners Love

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Brittany grunig grew up listening and living country music, and later in life, was programming one of Canada's most competitive country stations in Ottawa, winning a national program director of the Year award. And then she moved on from corporate radio altogether. You can now find her working for John Paul's my Broadcast Corporation out of Kingston, Ontario. And what she's found there is a fiercely local independent radio company doing things one can only identify as truly radio. Spoiler alert, what Brittany is seeing on the ground in Kingston makes her genuinely optimistic about radio's next 10 years. And now Brittany grunig joins me from Kingston, Ontario, where is Wallace Nova Scotia.

Speaker 1  0:57  
That is home. It is kind of in between Pugwash and tademagush, which also doesn't seem to help people. So I go to the next bigger cities, churro and Amherst, and then they kind of know, and then I have to go monk dinner, Halifax, yeah.

Matt Cundill  1:15  
So if you've driven down the I believe it's the 102 Yeah, the one that goes through Truro and then also through Amherst, then people would know those two places. But I had to look on the map, so I apologize, and that's after spending five years living in Nova Scotia.

Brittany Grunig  1:31  
Yeah, no. People in Nova Scotia still don't know, although the fox harbor Golf Resort has kind of put us on the map, because that is technically involve us, and every golfer knows that one that's on the that's sort of on the bucket list for playing golf in in Canada. Yeah, that's where the elites go. How'd you get into radio? I got into radio actually, I went to college in PEI, and I needed to do an internship. And I thought, Where would a fun place to intern be? And I ended up at a radio station because I was taking marketing, and I loved it. I got hired after that for a summer cruiser position. And then once you start getting paid for doing fun stuff, it's really hard to ever leave that.

Matt Cundill  2:13  
So I need call letters and station names.

Speaker 1  2:15  
So the station that I started with was ocean 100 they just celebrated their 20th year. Don't remember call letters anymore. Then I went to K rock, which is their sister station, and then I left that company, went to university, thinking, Okay, it's time to get a real job. And then figured out that I could actually voice track that would take me, like, 30 minutes, and the company, at the time, was paying me for four hours. So I went to cfcy and did that for a few years, and then I ended up getting a job offer in Ottawa, and thought, well, I guess I'm just going to have to accept that radio is my my career path, because it just keeps following me.

Matt Cundill  2:50  
And you know, what else I didn't know existed was Holland College, and Holland college is in Charlottetown, I believe. And I didn't really know till my son went to Mount Allison and started to play badminton against Holland college. And I had to see where that was, and lo and behold, it's in Charlottetown, which is a great place to spend time. Yeah.

Speaker 1  3:09  
Well, I ended up choosing Holland college because I was originally going to be a paramedic, and they have a great program for that. And then I kind of chickened out at the last minute and thought, I don't know if I can physically be a paramedic like I don't know if I have it in me, so I just kind of divert it really quick. Got into the marketing program, and then the rest is history. I was actually their poster girl. So if you go back in the archives of Holland college, you're going to see all the banners and all the info books and all that stuff with my mug on it.

Matt Cundill  3:37  
I mean, that's marketing one on one, right there, right? I mean, you may as well go in house for the marketing stuff when you can How did you get the Ottawa position? And I asked this because I know a lot of people want to find jobs and look for them, and how can I do that? How can I make that jump, and how can I get the attention of somebody to make that move up?

Speaker 1  3:56  
So I actually got it in the best way possible. Like I said, I was working at CF Cy, which is a country station while I was in university. And we didn't get, like, a lot of opportunities being, you know, a smaller market station. So I was reaching out to some up and coming artists and asking them for interviews. And I ended up asking an artist at the time, Wes Mack, who was signed with big machine for an interview, and the record rep, Ron hardwood, was impressed with the interview, and then he had found out through a like a relationship, that the station in Ottawa was hiring and put my name forward. So he only knew me based on coordinating that interview, but he said, you know, she kind of fits the bill. They were looking for someone, you know who lived the country lifestyle that age range? It was for mid days on what was new country, 94 and then I literally just got a DM asking if I would ever consider moving to Ottawa. And it was just one of those things where I remember thinking like, I have no connections to Ontario. I've never been to Ottawa. OWA, like, this is a huge leap, and it just felt like something that's never going to be offered again, and I have to try it. So I sold everything I owned, jumped on a plane and moved to Ottawa. So Ron

Matt Cundill  5:11  
Harwood is the type of person who would be able to identify passion in a country music fan. He loves country music. I worked with him for many, many years, and he's still and remains, one of the hardest working people in records,

Speaker 1  5:25  
yeah, and at that time, I mean, I had no idea he was just an, you know, an email address that I was coordinating with to reach out to this artist, but yeah, like to this day, because that was 10 years ago, you know, and Ron is still somebody who's so great to have in your corner.

Matt Cundill  5:40  
Yeah. I've asked him many times to come on the podcast, but, you know, it's difficult to get record people to come on the podcast for many different reasons, because of all the moving parts that go on with promotion and who says, What, When, etc, etc. So one day I will have Ron on this podcast.

Speaker 1  5:55  
It will be one of those three hour ones. Oh, he has stories to tell for sure.

Matt Cundill  6:02  
Yeah, incredible stories. If you can meet Ron at a bar, it will be a great day, and you'll, you'll come away probably about six or seven drinks in, and very, very happy with the stories.

Speaker 1  6:13  
Yeah, but yeah, it was like, but that whole thing was just, if I don't take this opportunity, because I remember taking it and having, like, major imposter syndrome, where I was thinking, like, I didn't go to Radio school, I don't think that I'm ready for a market of that size. Like, do they think they're hiring somebody that I'm not? And then, you know, basically I just talked myself out of that and said, you know, if they're thinking you can do it, who am I to say I can't? So who hired you in Ottawa, Dana Burgoyne and Richard Gray. And what was the position? Mid days on new country 94 and then once I started doing that, I just loved it so much that I started doing all the music scheduling and trying to learn as much as I could. And that went on for probably, like, six months or so that I was just doing that basically to fill time, like it wasn't my job. I just wanted to learn, and I was shadowing people and, you know, trying to do as much as I could, until eventually Richard called me in his office and said, Okay, we're going to make you the music director, because you're doing the work of a music director. So let's just, you know, solidify this, and then that, of course, opened a ton of doors for me.

Matt Cundill  7:21  
But what was your first impression of Ottawa? By the way you get there and you're like, I'm not sure. I'm in the market, but what did you think of Ottawa, just as a city?

Speaker 1  7:30  
I loved it, and I had never been there until the day that I walked off the plane to live there, and I was right in the ByWard Market. They put me up in a hotel for a month because I had nothing planned, like they offered me the job, and 18 days later I started. So it was a really quick turnaround, and I just lived in the market. I didn't have a vehicle, and I just loved how everything was close by. It still kind of had a bit of that feeling of Charlottetown, where there's water and it's a, you know, it's a, kind of a historic feeling city, just the buildings and you know, so I didn't feel entirely out of my element, like I would have, you know, if you plot me in Toronto, but it felt safe, and it felt like I had everything that I needed right there, especially for somebody in their mid 20s by themselves. Yeah, I loved it. Loved it. Still love that city.

Matt Cundill  8:18  
And then you're given the position of music director. And so what are those early moments of being music director like? Because now you got to build the relationships with the record reps, and you've got a music system that you've already learned or are learning, and then you're gonna have to kick out logs to how many radio stations?

Speaker 1  8:35  
Well, back in that day, it was just the one radio station, thankfully, way before we all started, you know, doing the whole sharing logs and network scheduling, but it was really great because I went there with no connections, and, you know, I didn't know the major players or the record reps or even the artists. But Ottawa, being the city that it was at that time, we were constantly getting artists through the door. So any given day, we would have, like, actual artists in our building. So that kind of really expedited the getting to know people. So you're seeing the same reps over and over who are bringing in their artists, and it's you're you're getting a lot of, like, one on one face time. So that part was really cool. And then as far as just the whole music industry, like I launched a Canadian country countdown, so it kind of gave me a place to put some of the content that I was getting from some of these up and coming artists. And it just, it just opened so many doors to try so many different things on a scale that you can't do in a lot of other places other than like a Toronto or Ottawa.

Matt Cundill  9:41  
So back in the dark ages of radio, back in the 1990s artists would come to town, you could record it, and then you could play the interview later, or you could have them live on the radio. And, you know, maybe it goes a little bit long. I don't know how much time we want to dedicate to a segment with an artist who wants to come into a radio station, but here you are, you're, you know, it's. 2018, 1920, 2122 in that zone, you have all these options and things you can do when you record content. So, so when you do, when you record with an artist, what are some of the ways you're thinking in your mind about how you're going to distribute the interview?

Speaker 1  10:16  
I mean, at that time, definitely getting content for our countdowns, because we produced a lot of in house content like that, and then we kind of moved it into doing these, like on the record type of shows. So it'd be like an hour long show dedicated to some of the more major artists we could really get into the interviews and the music. We were just kind of on the cusp of figuring out social media like Tiktok wasn't a thing. At that time, Instagram was kind of becoming a thing. But we would do, like, I have a vivid memory of, like, cramming the entire James Barker band in our small studio, going live on the air for them to play in the studio, recording it, putting it out on social media, and just, you know, getting some traction. And that was always a thing too, as people were always much more willing with their time if they knew you could repurpose this and get more mileage out of it and and that was always the goal. And obviously, once we started putting our stations together as brands and sharing things across the network, it definitely opened up the interest to get time with some of those more bigger artists.

Matt Cundill  11:17  
It's one of the bigger mistakes that radio makes, and that's using a piece of content only one time, and now there's just so many opportunities to do that. I love the idea of just letting a band play live in the studio, you know, the Tiny Desk kind of thing that goes on. Tell me about the Ottawa market, because there's multiple country stations in there, and it's, it's a fight. It's very competitive.

Speaker 1  11:41  
Yeah, it was. It was very competitive, and it was very fun to be competitive. Ottawa at that time was such a interesting market too, because of the whole hit, non hit thing. Luckily, that has been dropped, where you can only play, like 50% hit music. But our country station had that rule, but the competitor didn't, because they were technically a Smith falls base station, and this was just an Ottawa specific rule to protect the French language rules. I guess that came from Quebec. So what was kind of fun with that, though, is you had to be creative. How do you build a really cool radio station when you're basically told half of your playlist needs to be non hit music. So basically, people, you know, music that people aren't into in some ways.

Matt Cundill  12:27  
Yeah, can you name me another industry on the planet where somebody is legislated to present 51% unsuccessful product?

Speaker 1  12:36  
I can't, and it was, you know, again, you had to be kind of creative. And that's where we always felt like we had this opportunity as a new country station to be like the first on songs, to play those songs as many times as we could before it was going to count as a hit. And it worked really well for that format at that time, but it it definitely took some creativity.

Matt Cundill  12:57  
Yeah, well done. I can only think of a handful of music directors who really figured out how to how to get on it early and then just hold back enough before it crosses 40 and becomes a hit, and then you have to move it to a new category. It was an incredibly precarious thing you had to master, and one that would really confuse record reps. Why did our spins drop?

Speaker 1  13:19  
Yeah, definitely. And it was, you know, because I had never scheduled music before that market, so I didn't know any other way. And then looking back, I'm like, that was, that was a great way to learn, because you're learning with like, obstacles galore. So once I was starting to schedule for like, Kingston, or, you know, some other markets, I'm like, Oh my gosh. Like, it is just so crazy. But yeah, luckily, they've they've since dropped that rule.

Matt Cundill  13:44  
I don't know anything about country music. I know Megan Patrick likes the Buffalo Bills. I actually did a podcast episode about that at one point in my life, and it's still available and in the show notes of this episode. But how do you organize country music for a quarter hour or an hour. How is it organized?

Speaker 1  14:03  
I mean, I guess it kind of depends, because country is such a like, a Passion Driven format, that if you're a country listener, chances are you're listening to the country station. So anything that we're serving up, you're going to love, because it's country and the alternatives are not country. So therefore you're, you know, you're staying loyal to that station at that time, with that station, you know, with the hit, non hit, and being so branded as being first on it new country, kind of like that Boots and Hearts crowd. It was, it was, you know, that was always a vision in our head when programming that station is, you know, would the girl in the cut off denim shorts at Boots and Hearts like to associate with what we're doing. So always trying to get those, those power hits played every time you turn on the station, like at one point that was kind of our strategy is, if you're landing on our station, you're going to hear like one of the top five songs of that moment at any given time of the day. Like the rotation was crazy. It was. I think, like 72 spins a week, or something on our powers. So that was always a big part of the scheduling strategy. And then the golds, we were really picking the best of the best, because, again, that's going to count as a hit. So you want to make sure it's coming from like Keith Urban or Jason Aldean, you know, some of the really major, major artists. And then, of course, Canadian it was always a big focus to try to build our own star system in Canada and give the Canadian artists an opportunity to be heard and in rotations. That's, you know, a lot of the American artists were getting on other stations, but maybe not being treated the same. So, so we definitely prided ourselves on really opening those doors for Canadian artists too. So you would hear a lot of them. Yeah, I

Matt Cundill  15:43  
hear a lot of screaming from program directors, and rightfully so on the pop side about the number of pop artists who will record a track and it is not Canadian because they have collaboration. Does that problem also exist in country?

Speaker 1  15:56  
Very, very minimal. Most of our Canadian country artists make sure that their content is Canadian. We've had a couple examples where it wasn't and the songs really didn't get played. So I think they kind of abandoned it and made sure that, okay, we're Canadian artists. Canadian radio is supporting us, probably in ways that other formats don't support the artists that are, you know, the homegrown talent. So I think there's always been a bigger effort to stay in that Canadian content compliance.

Matt Cundill  16:26  
I love how you live the lifestyle, yeah. How does one, by the way, live the lifestyle of country music? I mean, I

Speaker 1  16:35  
think it just comes from growing up in a very small town, very rural town. I always say, like, my closest Walmart would be 45 minutes. So that's, you know, check number one on the country lifestyle. You know, my teenage years were partying in fields, bonfires. You know, I always liked mud and four wheeling, you know, stuff like that. Growing up that, I think you only get in country living, you know, had I grown up in Ottawa, but I, you know, had the same experiences to kind of like, be that, you know, that country person. And I think it just comes down to like, what you value, and you know, what you gravitate to when, when I listen to country music, I'm like, yeah, that resonates with me. Like, that's, that's my life.

Matt Cundill  17:21  
That's truly, by the way, a small town Nova Scotia experience, where your Walmart is 45 minutes away. I know this because I was looking to buy a place down in South Shore Nova Scotia, and I said, this is going to be a great place, until you realize that the Soviets is 35 minutes away. I'm like, I don't know about that. Yeah.

Speaker 1  17:41  
No, it's, it's like that was 100% the reality, like, you want to do anything, and you're committing to at least a 45 minute drive.

Matt Cundill  17:49  
And for those who don't know this always is the grocery store. What is one country music festival that I would have to go to to really get into the country lifestyle? Give me one country music festival in North America that I would have to go to.

Speaker 1  18:03  
I'm going to say Cavendish beach music festival and Pei Wow. And I'm going to say that probably because that's the one I have the most connection to my very first experience there was actually my sister won tickets off of a radio station, so we had weekend passes for their very first festival, and it was like Reba McEntire and big and rich. And it was just like, we never had a festival like that out east. And it was just so amazing to see these major, major headlining artists and like multiples, because it was like a three day festival all coming out there. And I think every country fan in the entire maritimes landed in that big open field in Cavendish. And it's just, it's such a cool experience because you're also getting Pei in its best month, and you're getting country music. And it's just, yeah, I mean, I love it, love it, love it.

Matt Cundill  18:56  
I seem to recall a story from last year about that festival and or maybe it was a couple years ago, but I think it was about how they were struggling to get back on track after the pandemic, and really sort of just keep it going and break even. And just because, if it disappears, it was something that was really going to impact the island.

Speaker 1  19:12  
Oh yeah. I mean, it's and I think they've tried to reinvent a little bit like they would offer like a rock night. And then I think they they might have even tried to do, like a, like a rock type of festival in that same festival grounds. And I think, like, after the success of that too, all of a sudden there's a big festival in New Brunswick, and there's, you know, some bigger artists landing in Nova Scotia for shows. But prior to that, I mean, it was like ghost town to get artists like that, like maybe, maybe, on a rare occasion, you might get someone in Halifax.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  19:43  
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Matt Cundill  20:16  
what was the country music station of choice that you grew up listening to? Was it cfcy? Yeah.

Speaker 1  20:22  
So even though I grew up in Nova Scotia, it's just right across the water from Pei, and we would get the cfcy signal at home. So between that and the one in churro cat country, which is now back to being cat country, those are always the go to, yeah.

Matt Cundill  20:37  
I mean, if you practice long enough, you could probably whip a Frisbee over to Pei from where you live, yeah, yeah. By the way, all this led to an award in 2021 that I had to, I think she's won an award. I was like, yeah, she's won an award. I think I presented it to you because it was, was a Canadian radio award,

Speaker 1  20:59  
yeah, for program director, that was a surprise.

Matt Cundill  21:03  
Yeah, media market Best Program Director of the year Canadian radio awards. Think we were like, one or two years into it. So again, congratulations for winning that.

Speaker 1  21:12  
Yeah, no, that was that was so exciting, too. And it's one of those things, like, it's such a nice accolade just to have on, like your LinkedIn. Because if you can say, you know you won something, then, I mean, even if you know your day to day life obviously doesn't change. It's just nice, I guess, to have that recognition in a field where you admire, you know, all the other people who are in that category, and to just kind of realize, like, Huh, I'm actually a part of that group. Now that's the coolest part. Yeah, I

Matt Cundill  21:37  
probably should have put that on my LinkedIn, but when I was being nominated for this stuff, we didn't have LinkedIn. Have LinkedIn.

Speaker 1  21:45  
You put it in, like a message in a bottle and just like threw it into the ocean.

Matt Cundill  21:50  
First of all, I never won. That was the joke. So I would go on the air and I would say that I'm six time nominated music director of the year, and just that would be it. And it was designed to the listeners. Were supposed to call up and make fun of me for never winning. And then that bit would just go on forever. And it was silly to be known for that, but they eventually people started calling me Susan Lucci, which is probably a joke that sails way over your head, but you recently made some changes, and you had some time off. By the way,

Speaker 1  22:16  
I did. I say I was out of the game for the better part of three years because I had two kids really close together, and it was just maternity leave, came back for six months, took 18 months, and just, it's crazy how much in your life can change after kids are introduced into the picture. Yeah, especially

Matt Cundill  22:33  
two kids, because the first one seems sort of easy, and then the second one comes along, and then you've got some competition. Yes, it's chaos, yeah. So what was the end result of the chaos? Because you wound up getting a new position, yeah.

Speaker 1  22:46  
Well, I guess kind of to backtrack. I was the Regional Program Director for Bell, and I was looking after Kingston, Brockville, Ottawa and Pembroke. And then right before I went on my second maternity leave, the news had come out that bell was selling the Kingston and Brockville market. So I'm like, Okay, well, there's half of my markets. And I was actually physically living in Kingston and commuting to Ottawa a couple days a week. I'd be in this office, you know, in Kingston a couple days a week. So after that had happened, the plan was for me to relocate to Ottawa and stay with bell. But then, like I said, after introducing two kids into the mix, all of a sudden, I'm already, like, a year deep on a wait list for daycare. My husband is established here, and I just, you know, the pros and cons of just picking up all of that and relocating, you know, for a job in radio on the best of days is kind of a sketchy thing to do right now. So I decided to resign from that position, and basically took a few months just to do a little bit of soul searching, which led me to, you, I know we had a conversation in July while I was also recovering from a hip replacement. So it was just, you know, how many things can life throw at me in a in a short amount of time? And then I got the job offer with my broadcasting company from John pole to come back to the Kingston stations that I was previously program director for, and after my maternity leave was up in November, I decided, yeah, I want to try that. I love, I love the Kingston market. I loved the people that I'd worked with who are still here, and I was really interested in John's approach to radio. I listened to all the podcasts that he was on. I read all of the interviews, and I'm like, This guy just seems to really get it and some of the struggles that I felt like I was having, especially in some of the smaller markets that I was programming, I'm like, he's saying the exact things that I was thinking, that I wished I could implement, but just different business models and different strategies, just, you know, Corporation versus independent owner. I'm like, that would be a really cool opportunity to get a chance to work under that.

Matt Cundill  24:47  
So, yeah, you've gone from one of the biggest corporations in Bell to what John is doing, and it's very we're radio. We're radio first. It is grassroots radio. What can we do? We're going to be. Innovative we're going to do things. What's it like to go to work and to have this sort of innovative thinking in front of you every day?

Speaker 1  25:08  
It's so fun, because I feel like a lot of my time at Bell, I feel like a lot of the approach is what we always intend it. But again, at the end of the day, if you're answering to shareholders versus answering to, you know, a couple of guys who own the company, you're going to get to different places regardless of what your intentions are. So working here, it's really fun, because I get to kind of go back to that, that grassroots approach. I mean, we joke here how, you know, our plan is to act like it's radio from like, 2030, years ago. What made it work? Then? How can we bring that back into the market? Because it just feels like people want those connections. They want to support local they want local people. They want to, you know, do all of that stuff. And it's like, well, we're still here, and we're doing all that, and we get to put all of our focus into that which is really nice. We don't have to try to be, you know, hitting these crazy streaming numbers. We don't have to be building, you know, a national app, or coming up with these contests that are like, $100,000 every couple quarters. Like, we get to go out and take coffee to nurses, or we get to, you know, just do little things that, on a local level, make massive impact. But you know, in comparison to what the goals and objectives might be for somebody else, it's, it's on a much smaller scale, but it's,

Matt Cundill  26:32  
it's impactful. You're making me very, very excited to get back into radio when you speak this way.

Speaker 1  26:39  
Yeah, it's, it's great, like, it's, I really enjoy this part. And I had said to John, and I think I even said to you, if I wasn't in radio, I would go into politics. And, you know, what are those things? It's like, okay, trying to make your community better, trying to serve people, trying to, you know, come up with, like, a little community that you're a part of and that you all kind of like work together to improve and so much of that is what we do in radio. When you're doing radio on this

Matt Cundill  27:06  
scale, for those who are listening and don't understand, when there's a big corporation and shareholders primarily involved, how these things run against each other, I'll just provide this example. It's my favorite one is that every quarter, shareholders want to know what's going on. They want to see returns, and they want to see something going up. If you run a radio station, even if you start a radio station, or you start a morning show, or you rebrand the radio station, you have to give yourself at least three years to start to see the results of the work that you've done. Ain't nobody got time for that. Over in the shareholder world, for any business, they're just not that patient enough. Well, they also want ROI. They want a return for their investment. And you mentioned about taking coffee to nurses and people. I've actually heard this conversation before. Why are we sending the morning show down to take coffee to nurses? What is the ROI on that? And at which point I just, this is why I have no hair. I pulled it all out, you know. Like, how do you explain that stuff? And also, at the same time, I know you're very active in Kingston. I think you've won some business awards as well in Kingston and been nominated just for, you know, but that's the sort of thing you want to be part of the Chamber of Commerce. You want to get to know everybody in the market. You want to be a part and show up for the volleyball games and pass out the drinks, and even if it come, you know, bar nights and stuff like that.

Speaker 1  28:25  
Yeah, no, and it's true. And I think that kind of ultimately led to me wanting to stay in Kingston too. Because, you know, the bigger my position got, the further removed I was from that, and the more that I was on that side that's looking out for your bottom line, and you're trying to make really smart decisions, to not be wasting money in places you don't need to, even though you feel like this is going to make an impact, it's like you just can't do it because there's so many other competing things that you have to be worried about, you know? And I say this because I think sometimes those corporations get vilified, and I don't agree with that necessarily. I don't know one single person that I've ever worked with that thought like, yes, layoffs, like, everybody is equally affected by that. When it happens, you're losing your co workers, you're losing some of your employees, and, you know, it's hard, and everybody kind of believes in what they're doing. And you see, you know, the outside world kind of like vilifying you for being a part of that. Because I felt that, I mean, I was the program director at move 100 when stunt man Stu and Angie got laid off, like, I mean, I'm one of the faces of the bad guys who who was a part of that conversation, even though I believed so much in a lot of the work they were doing at the end of the day, you just, you're in this space, and it's just business decisions are being made. So a lot of that kind of led to me saying, You know what, I want to go backwards, like I want to be in the smaller markets, doing the smaller level things that I can see on the faces of people in the community, that it's making an. Impact. I'm not so far removed from what we're doing that you can kind of feel like you're celebrating more victories than trying to dance around some of the negativity.

Matt Cundill  30:10  
It's funny, you said going backwards. I know we look at that, because we look at radio stations as being, you know, attached to a market, and this market has a million, this one has 2 million, and so on and so forth. But I've seen so many people go to Kingston to be creative. You know, I think it's going forward, yeah?

Speaker 1  30:27  
And, I mean, and maybe it's just like everything old is new again. The old way of radio is actually what people are interested in getting in. I mean, you look at like, the colleges and stuff losing their radio programs, and it's just there's so much going against us, saying, like, radio is dead and radio is not going to work. But when you're in it of this level, you're like, No, this is working, but maybe not on the scale of, you know, a company that also owns, like the Blue Jays, like, by comparison, you know, we're never going to be able to bring in revenue of that scale. So if somebody is going to be cut, then it's obviously going to be, you know, what's seen as a dead weight in a smaller market,

Matt Cundill  31:04  
yeah, in this world now, I've what radio is going through, where people say, Oh, radio is dead, and podcasting is actually now beginning to feel that, because everyone's like, well, you should, you should have video. You got to pivot to video. And, you know, we're doing a video right now. Yes, there will be a video available. Only a fraction of the people are going to see it. The majority of the people are going to be listening to this show as a podcast on their Apple or on their Spotify. But I'm seeing the exact same thing now with this discussion. And when I hear that radio is under attack, I'm not hearing that anymore. I'm hearing audio is under attack, and that video is really the way to go, and I see the consumption numbers, and it is not

Speaker 1  31:43  
no and I think we all serve a different purpose, like when we ask people, why do they want local radio? They want news. They want to know what's happening in their community. They want that personal connection with the the On Air hosts. They want to be able to just get in their car to set the station and just mindlessly listen. They don't want to be deciding what song am I going to queue up next. They don't want to be in a podcast where they're dedicated to a conversation that they're really trying to pay attention to. Radio is just accompanying you, you know, with whatever you're doing, and there's certain times in your day that that's all you want. How does the company handle news? We're heavy on news. There is more local news going on throughout this building than I've seen probably ever, and people love it. And again, we basically killed off newspapers, social media. We you can't even get Canadian news on Facebook, so, you know, you strip all of that stuff away from people, and you just, you make a community that feels less connected to each other, to the city, to knowing what's going on. And then you're bombarded with news on, you know, a more national scale or international scale, and all of a sudden the world is crazy and it's scary and and I think, you know, it kind of chips away at, I mean, I feel like I'm going way down a rabbit hole here, but it chips away at people's mental health and how they connect. But then you turn on your local radio when we're hearing about, you know, the United Way hitting their targets for the the year, or you're hearing about a great story about, you know, a firefighter that rescued a cat, like things that you just it's kind of like reinforcing there's good in the world and there's good at home and you can hear about it, because where else are you going to

Matt Cundill  33:25  
hear about that? Tell me why somebody in their 20s should be optimistic about radio. I had that question written down. I felt like he kind of answered it just a second ago, but I still want to, just in case you missed anything. Why should somebody who's 20 years old feel truly optimistic

Speaker 1  33:40  
about radio, because I think we also live in a world where, you know, people want to be influencers, and they want to be on, you know, some type of stage on some type of scale, and radio is like the OG of that. I mean, I look at our morning show hosts here, we have Reed and Ben on one station, and big G and Matty, who are like local legends on the other station, and they are our hometown celebrities. And, you know, I think people should feel optimistic about that, because my kids go to daycare, and their caretaker is like in her 20s, and she is such a mega fan of radio. And it kind of surprised me to see that, like people of that age love it, and it was basically for that, because she's resonating with the personalities that we have. It's kind of creating that little like, you know, smaller scale celebrity system in your town. And you know, those people who are in their 20s are going to go into industries and businesses or organizations or have things that they care about on a local level. And guess who's going to be there? Radio, you know, we'll be the one with your ads on the radio for people to hear. We'll be taking our station vehicle to your events. We always say, you know, Google's not showing up at your charity fundraiser, but radio is so I think, you know, younger people should be optimistic about that, because it's going to be there like I just don't believe. You can get rid of radio so it's you know, our social media platforms are going to change and evolve the way that we consume music and audio, and all of that stuff will evolve, but you will still be able to turn an FM dial in and get something.

Matt Cundill  35:14  
Tell me about morning shows in a market that size. What is a good video strategy? Is it Instagram? Is it Tech Talk? How do you connect with your listeners on which platforms in a market of that size?

Speaker 1  35:26  
Facebook always seems to be the one that we do best on, and I think it's the one that has had the chance to grow probably the longest we do a little bit of Instagram. Tiktok, really, not to any scale on these stations specifically, but videos on Facebook. And if you go to like our fly FM page and look at the videos, you'll see it's like, read and Ben going out and doing something that is super local, that's only going to make sense to people in this region or in this city. And I think that's kind of the strategy, is to be so hyper local with what you're doing that it's not even appealing to people outside of here. It's just for this group of people.

Matt Cundill  36:06  
How traumatizing is it for you to have a birthday on December 23 when most people are thinking about Christmas, and your birthday is two days

Speaker 1  36:14  
before Christmas? You know what? It's actually better now, because my husband knows that there is a rule of not one gift for two occasions. That's definitely something you fight with your entire life, but honestly, it's kind of fun, because once you start hitting the month of December, my daughter's also born that month, my birthday is in there. We have Christmas, and it's just it's almost like a long, extended celebration so traumatizing as a kid, because I can never have my birthday parties on my actual birthday as an adult. It's kind of like we're just in fun season once December hits.

Matt Cundill  36:47  
Brittany, thanks so much for doing this and talking radio. It's a joy. And you got me very excited.

Speaker 1  36:53  
Yeah, no, I think we have a lot of reasons to be excited. I think we're kind of, it's going to take some time, but what I see, you know, being on the ground is we're going in a really, really exciting direction. And you know, I hope we can look at this 10 years from now and say, Ah, she was right.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  37:10  
The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan cerminsky, edited by Taylor McLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.