Stationhead creator Ryan Star first got the idea for the booming social audio site from the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume, where Christian Slater transmitted his own pirate radio station from his bedroom.
The one-time recording artist was originally signed to Madonna’s Maverick Records when a DJ at Long Island radio station WLIR took a shot on his band and played their song.
“I grew up with the power of radio,” he says, although as an artist, he quickly learned PDs and DJs at terrestrial stations were more interested in “playing the hits than breaking them,” so he sought to level the process, eliminating the gatekeepers so would-be on-air personalities had the platform to stream cast their own individual shows, receiving “tips” from the audience.
“I started this Stationhead to connect with my own fans, but it’s grown exponentially since,” says Star, who began developing the app five years ago. “A whole new class of creators is emerging from this transformative product.”
Emboldened by his own experiences in the record business, Star made it his business to reacquire his master recordings after realizing the long-term annuities represented by a streaming economy. By making deals with major streams like Spotify and Apple Music, Stationhead’s programming goes directly to an artist’s bottom line.
The app drew headlines recently when a BTS fan club station drew more than 400,000 to a live streaming party marking the band’s release of its single, “Butter.” It generatied 5.4m streams across Spotify and Apple Music, a practice replicated by similar fan shows for Cardi B, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande, using Stationhead to drive up their streams and chart positions. By last April, the social audio platform was up to 500,000 active users. Early investors include Atlantic Records executives Craig Kallman and Julie Greenwald, Lava’s Jason Flom, S-Curve’s Steve Greenberg, Diplo manager Andrew McInnes and both Downtown and Round Hill Music Publishing, while Steven Van Zandt served as an early advisor and consigliere.
“The desire to connect with human experiences is probably at a new high right now, but this is not a habit which will go away when the world returns,” says Star about the app’s burgeoning popularity during the pandemic. “The model of the traditional radio gatekeepers is broken. This is a new airwave for a new generation. I’m confident we have the magic and special sauce.”
Inveterate rock ‘n’ roll Star says Stationhead is just the latest evolution of an age-old medium. “We’ve gone from AM to FM to XM to what I call ON [for the app’s stylized StatiONhead logo]. In essence, I’ll always be an artist and musician who wrote songs in his bedroom I dreamed would inspire people around the world, but, hopefully, Stationhead will turn out to be my greatest album.”