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Since Y-Not Began Broadcasting At Ynotradio.Net, Landow Has Paid All Charges — About $1,000 A Month, Including Streaming, Residual Payments And Promotion — Out Of His Very Own Pocket, Supported By A Part Time Job At Radio Trade Mag FMQB.

It has been a year since Landow, his stable of twenty-five DJs and pussy-cat mascots Hugo and Starla, started broadcasting Y-Not over the Web from his West Philly home. “Or, the Bunker, as we call it,” Landow claimed.

His goal is to keep on the legacy of Y100, playing similar music without the restraints of corporate playlists, allowing the DJs to play deep album cuts or indie bands, so long as they fit with the station’s identity.

Since Y-Not started broadcasting at ynotradio.net, Landow has paid all costs — about $1,000 a month, including streaming, royalties and promotion — out of his own pocket, supported by a part-time job at radio trade mag FMQB. He earns no salary and all of the DJs work for free . Ideally, Landow would like to get sponsors or partner with another organisation, but doing stuff like selling advertisements isn’t part of his DNA. Recently the station has started taking donations to defray costs.

In a perfect world, Landow would be back on earthly radio. He has a soft place in his heart for the FM dial. Not to mention, the FM listeners.

The quantity of people tuning into Y-Not fluctuates, but on a recent Wednesday morning, 93 were listening. He admits it is not a huge number and it’s miles away from the average 384,000 weekly listeners logged by Arbitron in Y100′s final years. But Landow is philosophical. “It’s just good to know somebody’s listening.” Y-Not broadcasts through Web radio network Live 365, which calculates the popularity of a station by measuring listener hours. As of Monday, Y-Not had logged 21,361 total listening hours.

“To get a station over one thousand or 2,000 is pretty difficult,” said Chris Houghton, online-marketing chief at Live 365. Y-Not is the fourth- most-popular alternative rock radio stations that broadcasts through Live 365. And Y-Not differs from the 3 more popular stations because it caters to a Philadelphia audience, not a worldwide one.

Landow mans the mic Monday thru Friday from 9 a.m. Until he’s relieved by another DJ. Y-Not is online twenty-four hours a day with a live host curating and introducing music from 9 a.m. To ten or eleven p.m. Monday thru Friday and 9 a.m. To four p.m. On Saturdays. On Sundays and the off hours, Landow puts the station on auto pilot.

“Realistically, I want to have my living room to myself one day a week,” he claimed.

Sound deliverance When most radio stations go off the air, DJs scatter to available jobs and listeners find new buttons on their radios. But the former Y100, once called Y-Rock, has declined to go down silently.

Its first death was February 2005, during a wave of format-switches away from alternative rock, when owners Radio One made a decision to switch to a preferred hip hop sound. Program manager Jim McGuinn led the troops to a spare room in his South Philly house and Y100 Rocks was born. “I thought that if we kept the onlookers together in one place and we kept some semblance of a staff, that somebody with an FM frequency could be entrapped to re-launch the format,” said McGuinn, now a program director at the Current, a public-radio station in St. Paul, Minn.

The liberty of Internet radio was thrilling for McGuinn and Landow, especially after the corporate management of the final years of Y100. “For the people who worked at the original Y100, doing the Internet thing was getting back to why we got into the business in the first place,” McGuinn said. “We were the individuals that wished to come over and sit on your couch and play you some really cool record that we found.

The Web enables us to get back to that initial impulse that brings most people to radio, or should.” With almost no competition in the alternative market at that point and a mailing list of fifty thousand e-mails, Y100 Rocks flourished. “It incidentally turned into a business and a thriving Internet radio station,” McGuinn said, who credits volunteers for helping the station file for taxes and ensure everything was legal. “We were blown away when listeners and members of the community wished to join.”

In July 2006, McGuinn expounded to his volunteer staff that Y100 Rocks would become a part of WXPN as a new service that would appeal to a younger audience, Y-Rock on WXPN. Till last year, Y-Rock was broadcast over the airwaves for ten hours per week and full time online on XPN’s HD-2 channel,writes tagza.com.

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