Before I started on WOD1 in August I had been involved in pirate radio in Dublin for years. I was on Pulse FM, ESG - I've done them all. I did the pirate circuit for a long time. But then basically when WOD1 came up I heard about it and decided to go in and have a look and they asked me to stay on and take over as the flagship presenter.
The majority of the work I do is online and basically I am on WOD1 Monday to Friday from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. That's the flagship show and basically it's just playing all the big dance floor stuff at the moment - all the big popular dance (without it being too popular). It's referred to as "up-front dance", which is basically playing it before everyone else gets it.
We get it from the record companies pre-release. We get it a couple of months before it's actually coming out and that's when we start playing it.
On Sunday, then, from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. I do a show where I actually mix the music live in the studio on the turntables. That's going really well because there's a couple of thousand of people from the States logging in every Sunday. They're five or more hours behind us over there in the US, so it's morning time, and they're finishing off Saturday night and they're listening to me on Sunday morning as such.
The whole thing is going really well. We're getting lots of "hits" from Britain now as well. We've very little advertising in the UK and US markets, but it's really started to take off.
I was told last week that the hits have been going up 50 per cent in those markets. We can tell how many people are listening at a time, what time they logged in, what time they logged out, where they logged on from. We can tell basically everything. It's a whole new way of looking at radio and entertainment.
I have to do more preparation on Sundays because I have to supply all the music. And, like my work as a DJ in night clubs in Dublin, the Pod and the Redbox, it's kind of underground music. So I've to prep and organise what way I'm going to play the set and whatever different features I'm going to do during the show. It takes about an hour to put the show together beforehand on a Sunday.
During the week I go in about 30 minutes before my show and just get together news and bits and pieces and whatever has to be plugged. That doesn't take a whole lot of preparation.
At the moment, it's "more music, less talk" - because we don't want people to log on and just hear a DJ blabbing away. So I talk every fourth or fifth track - we've no news and we've no ads.
The site generates money by flashing banner ads on the screen, which is brilliant. It's uninterrupted music - it never stops.
I think Internet radio is definitely going to take off. In the last year the number of people who listen to Internet radio has gone up by 80 per cent. It's going to take time. It's going to be the future and I want to be in at the bottom rung of the ladder.
Initially, when we started, I was doing four hours a day and six on Sundays, which proved to be really long. But that was just to get me in and get me up to speed with the technology behind it, which is brand new.
Nobody else has used it before. In a way we are kind of pioneering the way it's done because there is no textbook. It's not like FM radio, where there is a set way of doing things.
Some people would describe my job as a labour of love. I love music.
In an interview with Elaine Larkin
