I was doing some research on Jazz stations today, and checked out the listings on Shoutcast. Out of about 18 pages of listings returned for the term “jazz”, 9 pages had 4 or less concurrent listeners on.

That is a lot of stations missing their audience somewhere! While they range from acid jazz to oldies and playing Frank Sinatra, somewhere along they just keep on doing it with hardly any visitors. Sounds a bit like the blogosphere!

Many of the stations are just doing it as a hobby, others just can’t market themselves if they had to do it for their life. For example there is one channel there with a description of ‘Excruciatingly Relaxing Jazz‘. That one must cater to the masochists, quite a niche!

Yet sometimes there’s a goldmine of raw talent in there. If we get lucky, one of them will come to our SKY.fm, or we find them instead, and they will not mind joining us instead of doing their own thing. We tap into the raw talent, give them a platform, resources, eyeballs and ears complete with a ready audience. If they are truly truly good with their music, it doesn’t matter that they only got 4 listeners before, they can go to 400 or 4000 concurrent listeners with someone who knows how to do their job right.

On the way to doing things right: 

Nobody knows how to do everything great, you need a team of friends or colleagues who work in unison to bring success to something. If you want to really do something special don’t just sit on your behind.  Start something, create a network of friends, talk them into your idea - as long as you have something yourself to bring to the table as well.

Yes I am serious, it’s not enough that you have an idea as ideas are often a dime a dozen. It’s the execution of the idea that counts, that’s why many times you can see the same idea done in different ways and one sucks and the other is very successful.

So what can you bring to the pool of talent if you want to start something new? One argument with which I fully agree is that you need at least two qualities to yourself which are way above of the average person. If you have excellent attention to detail, that counts as one thing. If you have a stockpile of cash, that counts as something too If you are a great communicator, a great people person, or if you are a very reliable executor of tasks - all those are qualities your team will need. You can’t be all those things at once, but you can work to get a team. If you are a lazy average bum with a great idea - quit now.

For more such ramblings, check out Scott Adams’ Career Advice (of Dilbert cartoon fame).