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Radio is a tough business. And broadcasters often have to make tough decisions that are 2nd guessed by people who don’t understand them. So normally I don’t comment on other station’s personnel moves. But I wanted to make an exception to talk about @AaronAxelsen THREAD: 1/
At my first radio job my boss taught me this industry phrase “One monkey doesn’t stop the circus”. The idea is that one talent is never bigger than the the station, it will keep going on without them. And I think for the most part there is wisdom in that. 2/
Everything we say on the radio vanishes within seconds. The work we do lives on only as long as people remember it. So it’s easy to see how people move on, go on with their lives and find other things to listen to. 3/
But the more I’ve done in this business, the more I’ve learned there are actually exceptions to this rule. And Aaron was one of them. He was the MD at KITS when i was still in college. At that point he was already guy to play Radiohead, and Popscene was up and going. 4/
Eventually I made it to Live105 and I got to see up close how much he put into finding the next thing. Early 00’s KITS was filled with music people who were genuinely excited about new music. Most of what we heard, we heard first on his show, Soundcheck. 5/
Many of us who worked there would also hang out at Popscene. We saw countless bands that would become huge, bands that were hyped and forgotten, and random hilarious things. I would say a significant percentage of my life’s “Holy Shit” stories happened there. 6/
Mind you, this was 15-ish years ago. He was STILL doing all of this up to last week. So many bands got their first spin on the radio through Aaron. Many more played their first gig in town at his club night. A lot of these same bands have saluted him on Twitter this week 7/
It’s those relationships with bands and managers and booking agents, and with listeners through his show that made him the exception to the “monkey rule”. When Live would do research projects Aaron would come back huge even though he was on 3 hours a week on Sunday nights. 8/
You can’t just go out and grab another Aaron Axelsen. Even if you could find someone with the relationships and the skill set and the experience they wouldn’t have the same relationship with the audience. It takes YEARS to build an Aaron. 9/
So when a company makes a decision to let go of someone like that because it doesn’t quite make sense as a line item on a budget sheet, it doesn’t have any sense of the opportunity cost of that decision. There’s not gonna be another Aaron at KITS. 10/
And when you look at the station now, there’s currently no morning host, no signature MD, no signature specialty show, no signature summer festival, and a “franchise” name you can find across the US. This is the sum of a lot of these type of decisions over many years 11/
I’m proud to say that almost everyone I worked with at Live105 back in the day is still in the business, and many of them are in prominent positions, and doing some of their best and most fulfilling work today. 12/
All of which is to say, I don’t know if the circus will stop or not, but this time my money is on the monkey. 13/END
