CINEMATIC SOUND RADIO began in September of 1996. At the time I had about 50 – 60 soundtracks in my collection and I felt that I had enough material to produce an entertaining and varied two-hour radio program, just as long as I purchased a new release every week to keep the show fresh. At the time the radio station was only broadcasting on cable FM, which meant you had to attach a coaxial cable to your FM receiver in order to hear the station. In those early days, my audience was limited to about 5 or 6 loyal listeners. The only real exposure the show got was when the broadcast was pumped into in the local pub, The Arnie. There, the four large speakers would blast the wonderful sounds of John Williams’ STAR WARS, James Horner’s WILLOW, and Jerry Goldsmith’s FIRST KNIGHT to the lucky listeners as they enjoyed an afternoon brew. Once, I stirred up a huge Star Wars debate while playing my first of many Star Wars tribute shows. The entire bar was buzzing about their favorite characters, their favorite movie, and favorite lines.
Soon enough the station received approval from the CRTC to broadcast on the FM dial in May of 1998. At the same time, my slot was changed from Friday’s to Saturday’s. For the next eight years, CINEMATIC SOUND RADIO would be on the air between 12 pm and 3 pm every Saturday afternoon.
THE FM YEARS
The FM years were highlighted by one particular broadcast on May 1st, 1999. It all began in late April when I received not only the “Duel of the Fates” radio single from THE PHANTOM MENACE by John Williams but also the finished album! I had only planned on playing the radio single but when I phoned up the people at Sony Classical on April 29th – two days before by broadcast – and asked them about the playing the album in its entirety. They kindly said that they sent it to me so I could have the world broadcast premiere of the album. Nothing much else was said. I said thank you, they said goodbye and I had less than two days to promote arguably the highest profiled program I would ever produce. If I can remember correctly I posted a few comments on the Film Score Monthly and Filmtracks message boards but I had no idea that theforce.net picked up the story from FSM and published it on their site. That’s when the trouble started. Soon, I started to receive a barrage of emails from fans asking if the program would be available live on the internet. Live streaming was something relatively new at C101.5 and we only had enough bandwidth to host 60 concurrent listeners. Unfortunately, that was a fact I didn’t know about until after the program was aired.
When I arrived at the station on Saturday morning to put the final touches on my show prep the DJ on before I informed me that the phone had been ringing off the hook with people from around the world calling in to make sure they could hear the program. As I got closer to show time I personally received 3 calls; one from the Philippines, one from Germany and one from Massachusetts. The people on the other end were having issues connecting to the C101.5 server. I had no idea that the server was hemorrhaging at this time but I calmly told the callers to refresh the C101.5 web page and to keep trying to connect.
Noon arrived and it was an absolute thrill to hear the new STAR WARS score blasting through the giant speakers above my head in the old studio. For three hours I played the entire THE PHANTOM MENACE album, the original trilogy scores and Joel McNeely’s fabulous score to SHADOWS OF THE EMPIRE. Once the show was over, I left the station and headed home. Little did I know that what had just happened would be something that would never be repeated at C101.5.
On Monday, May 3rd, I received an early morning email from my station manager. He wanted to know what I played on the program over the weekend. The first thing that came to my mind was that I did something wrong. I sent a simple reply back stating that I played the world broadcast premiere of the new STAR WARS score. About 15 minutes later I received another email from my station manager, this time, forwarding me an email he received from a guy named Ted who was in charge of our streaming server. In his email he wrote:
“On Saturday, around noon, service request went to nearly 3000. The server then collapsed and died. The server cannot support this kind of service level, nor can the network. If this were to occur during a week when classes were in session I’m sure the IT support guys and most of the students and faculty on campus would be looking for somebody to hang. Whatever was done demonstrates clearly that you can create a demand for this service, be careful how you use it.”
READ THE ORIGINAL EMAIL
This soon because my station manager’s favorite story to tell to new C101.5 DJ’s and was the highlight of my tenure at the station.
10 YEARS ON THE AIR COMES TO AN END
On September 9th, 2006 the Cinematic Sound Radio Show turned 10 years old. September 9th, 2006 would also mark the final FM broadcast of the Cinematic Sound Radio Show. Why did the show go off the air? Let me explain.On July 3rd, 2006 my wife gave birth to our first child, a wonderful baby boy. So, like most parents, I had to reorganize and re-evaluate my life to accommodate the arrival of the new bundle of joy. Newborns take up almost every moment of your free time so things like hanging out with old high school buddies, playing the occasional road hockey game after work and simple things like watching a movie have to take a back seat. One other thing that was going to have to take a back seat was my radio show. I didn’t want to admit it at first telling friends and family that I would have no problem continuing with my three-hour show every Saturday. Well, I soon realized just how precious those 3 hours were going to be. I felt that if I continued with my show I would miss out bonding with my new son. I also wanted to give my wife a break from taking care of Liam all by herself for most of the work week. So with all this happening, I began to write my resignation letter informing C101.5 that after my 10th-anniversary program in September I would be leaving the station for good.
As I was writing my letter I knew that I wasn’t going to be giving up Cinematic Sound for good. I still planned on producing an On-Demand program for my website which takes only a few hours to produce at home. Well, that got me thinking. Why not kill two birds with one stone? I thought maybe I could just send my new On-Demand programs to C101.5, they could upload the programs to the automated WAVE station and play my program during its regularly scheduled time slot. I mean, isn’t that what the WAVE station is for? I don’t HAVE to be on the air live but yet my show can still air LIVE.
Well, unfortunately, this plan didn’t work for C101.5. Below is the complicated explanation from the new station manager as to why Cinematic Sound couldn’t be a pre-recorded program.
“Wave Station has a “Time Next” feature which is applied to an audio file that you want to launch at a specific time. “Time Next” allows the current audio file to finish playing first. The problem here is that C101.5 would have to program the Cinematic Sound “Time Next” file into all of our playlist backup logs because they would have no way of knowing what log would be running at 12 Noon on Saturdays when nobody is in the station. What would happen then is, the Cinematic Sound files could fire at any other day at 12 Noon should we be in Playlist Backup mode.”
So, with the size of my pre-recorded files, the very real possibility of nobody at the station to launch my show and because C101.5 feels they have a better radio station when they have live hosts doing their thing every day it was obvious that Cinematic Sound was going to have to die on terrestrial radio.
So with that Cinematic Sound became an On-Demand program exclusively.
THE FUTURE
July 2010 saw the launch of a brand new Cinematic Sound web site with at a brand new address. Since 1999 the CINEMATIC SOUND RADIO had been hosted on Yahoo! GeoCities’ free web hosting service. In June of 2009, GeoCities announced that they would be closing their doors permanently meaning the CINEMATIC SOUND RADIO would be without a place to call home on the internet. That unfortunate bit of news meant that I had to create a new site and finding a new place to live on the world wide web. cinematicsound.net was born and the rest was history.
In February of 2016 Cinematic Sound Radio was picked up by the online streaming radio station WROCK. CINEMATIC SOUND RADIO, first the first time since 2006, now runs a live 2-hour weekly broadcast every Sunday at 1 pm (EST). The show is also syndicated on Movie Scores and More Radio.
Lastly, I always love hearing from YOU! The fans are what makes the show tick. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, requests or just a thoughtful hello please EMAIL ME.
Happy listening,
– Erik Woods
host and producer CINEMATIC SOUND
