Gary Reid never dreamed that one day he’d be the general manager of a radio station, let alone one that’s virtually owned the Michigan “college radio station of the year” awards for the past 10 years

“I started off as a professional musician by accident in the 1960s,” he says. After joining Michigan State University’s facility in 1976, he became very “bullish on radio” and became part of the radio board in 1980.

Reid came from a producing and engineering music background; when MSU’s radio license was approved, and “the guy we had hired left, the VP said, ’We have to have somebody,’” it turned out to be Reid. The rest is radio history.

In the early days of The Impact  (WDBM), alternative music was its own genre. The station “could play certain bands and be considered really hip,” he explains, such as U2 and REM. Then came the iPod generation. Then, streaming. The only constant, as the saying goes, has been change. “From a radio station point of view, we’ve had to change constantly to be relevant to our audience. Most of the students coming in are from the iPod world.

“Ironically, where a lot of commercial stations have been losing audience to the Internet, we’ve embraced it. We’re trusted by young people these days,” he says, adding that, “I want to find out what the next big deal is going to be.”

Reid calls keeping the station fully staffed “the bane of my existence.” With an on-air staff of 47 people, every student does between three to four hours a week. Of course, come summertime, or over Christmas break, it can be a little harder to motivate the students to show up. He said that yearly turnover is typically 50 percent.

Now, for the star of our show: streaming audio. “I’m an early adopter,” Reid says. “We started our first stream back in 1996. It was virtually impossible to do. The bandwidth was tiny [and we] couldn’t get too many simultaneous listeners. Over the years, we’ve progressed. [Today] we’re streaming with QuickTime. It’s become far more popular. MP3 stream is pretty popular as well. In our case, we have a great high-speed backbone on campus,” he says, that helps deliver content to listens on campus and off.

He adds, “Arbitron [the rating service] tells us that at any given time we have about 2,000 people listening, and that the average age is [a little over] 29 years old.” In other words, the Impact isn’t just for college students anymore—and the airwaves aren’t the only way people are listening in.

He says at any given time, their streaming audience comprises approximately 10 to 20 percent of the audience. Reid also says that certain programs, like the techno-show on Friday night, have a huge online listenership, and still others have online audiences that are huge in Texas and across the South and around the world. “We can literally watch the online stream spike on Tuesday nights,” he says, when Progressive Torch and Twang airs.

In fact, Reid says he recently received an e-mail from someone in Russia: “Hey, I love your station. Please send me materials.”

Originating from the basement of Holden Hall, digital processing delays the signal a couple of seconds compared to the over-air signal, meaning you shouldn’t try listening on your computer and your radio at the same time. Reid said that online listeners, who listen a lot from work, are not shy about letting the station know when the stream goes down.

“When it goes down, we get e-mails immediately,” he says, adding that they’ve “just upgraded to an HD2 signal,” enabling listeners to receive their music, talk and more on 88.92 on an HD radio.

Reid offers an excellent insight regarding streaming audio: “The business model for a radio station to stream is an upside down model. It’s very bandwidth intensive,” he pointed out. “Eventually, as the number of listeners goes up and up, the amount of bandwidth increases,” making it more and more expensive, as opposed to broadcasting where it’s “the more [listeners] the merrier.”

Because the station’s license is of the noncommercial education variety, like WKAR’s, The Impact does not run commercials. The majority of their revenue comes in the form of a $3-per-student fee. Additional monies are collected through underwriting, but most of it comes in the form of trade-out. “We give away a lot of pizza,” Reid says, “and tickets to Common Ground.” He said that the station tries “to live off the student fees so that we’re not seen as a competitor [to the local commercial radio stations].”

Out in the world of commercial radio, where many of his graduates end up, Reid says that “many stations have stopped streaming, or [are] limiting [their streaming] to content that they solely own,” so that, in addition to paying for more bandwidth, they don’t have to pay increased royalties when they add listeners. Because what’s a radio station to do when an increased online listenership comes at a very real cost?

According to Reid, there are no definite answers yet, but as they say in radioland, stay tuned.