Why William Goldsmith, the human DJ of internet station Radio Paradise, matters more than ever.
Alanna and William Goldsmith of Radio Paradise. Photo by Margot Duane, courtesy of Radio Paradise.
By Gautam Raja, content manager, Upscale Audio
Long before the “loudness war” in mastering studios, came the “genre war” in family homes.
From turning down the volume of Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’ at the equally high-volume behest of a bewildered Sinatra-loving father trying to talk to his friend on the phone, or, years later, stopping Surgeon’s ‘z8_GND_5296’ mid-track to the cry of “What the HELL are you listening to?” by a wild-eyed wife at the end of her tether, the “genre war” starts out intergenerational, turns interspousal, and then, at least in homes with children, flips (often in surprising ways) to intergenerational again.
Despite a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between my wife’s and my musical tastes, for over 15 years an internet radio station has become, as I like to say, “the soundtrack to our lives”, serving up music that sits so neatly at the intersection of his and her tastes, it’s as if Radio Paradise is the third character in our marriage.
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“This is not how normal radio people program their stations… but it’s how I work.”
William Goldsmith, founder and DJ of Radio Paradise, and I are discussing ‘Desolation Row’ by Bob Dylan, specifically the track’s 11+ minutes that play regularly on his station. Listener comments for the track on the Radio Paradise website run the gamut from “Sheer poetic brilliance” to “Please make it stop”, and William’s wry song introduction gives you the sense that yes, he loves Bob Dylan, but a part of him is cueing up this decidedly ‘not for radio’ song simply because he can.
“I know that I'm going to push a lot of people's buttons by playing this,” says William on our recent video interview. “But there is no way in hell I'm going to avoid controversy by not playing it. Because it's just one of those songs that need to be played.”
It is this principled approach, as well as rigorous attention to sound quality that has made Radio Paradise, or RP for short, so beloved to so many audiophiles. Indeed, I’ve been hearing William’s voice for so many years, that I’m slightly starstruck to be talking to him, and thrilled to be later joined by Alanna Goldsmith, RP’s CEO, who also happens to be William’s daughter.
Source First
So what is RP doing that has made it a part of my life, even playing in the background for much of the writing of this article? First, while RP is easy to listen to, it is also really, really interesting. Second, because it’s listener supported, there are no ads. And finally, it sounds noticeably better than most other streaming stations. “It's always been my goal to make Radio Paradise sound as good as it can,” says William. “Back when we were starting, it was 128k MP3 that was pushing the envelope.”
In return for giving songs the best possible backbone, William requires that everything about an RP track be up to a certain level of quality. “It needs to be a well-written song that is performed, recorded, and mixed well.”
This allows William to meet his goal of touching the master files as little as possible, usually doing nothing more than normalizing to keep track-to-track volume consistent. “Most recordings these days–at least in the kinds of music that we feature–are pretty well done. Much better than they were 10 or 15 years ago. They're mastered much more intelligently.”
When William speaks of the Radio Paradise signal path, he sounds like an engineer for any of the hi-fi brands we sell at Upscale. “Most cases [making the music sound good] means keeping everything we do out of the way. Making absolutely everything about our signal path and the way that we handle the music as transparent as possible."
“It's always been my goal to make Radio
Paradise sound as good as it can.”
Thus, every aspect of RP exudes quality, and this makes it instantly appealing to hi-fi enthusiasts. Richard O’Neill, a salesperson at Upscale Audio, listens to streaming radio stations with his wife but says, “The ones that sound really good are few and far between, and most of the ones that sound the best are usually still far below CD quality.”
Richard found Radio Paradise recently through a long-time fan (ahem!) and apart from loving the programming, is very specific about the sonic advantage: “There are no weird compression artifacts that can make delicate portions of the music sound strange.”
Similarly, Paul Stephenson, former managing director of Naim Audio, was smitten back in 2007 when he was researching internet stations to be included as presets in the then-new Uniti range. A few years later, Naim Audio worked with RP to create Naim-exclusive streams, so it was Paul who indirectly introduced my wife and I to it, and we’d often cue up the Naim-exclusive 128 kbps stream (the 320 kbps stream being too much for our early-2000s internet connection) on our Naim UnitiQute, the predecessor to the Atom.
Paul Stephenson (left) with Julian Vereker, the late founder of Naim Audio, in the mid-eighties. Photo courtesy of Paul Stephenson.
Now in semi-retirement, Paul still listens to Radio Paradise. “The alarm on my Mu-so Qb just went off, and RP came on,” he wrote to me, referring to Naim’s smallest all-in-one system. “I listen every single day at home when I wake up; in my car; and on holidays everywhere.”
Founded in 2000, and operating at first out of William’s home in the Northern California town of Paradise, RP played its advantage of being just one of a few dozen streaming stations (versus over 70,000 today), and one of an even smaller number that stuck around. And then, William made the clever programming choice that made his new station as indispensable as a workplace coffee machine for its thousands of listeners. In the age of the internet cafe, most people had good online access only at their offices, and William understood he should cater to listeners who tuned in all day, unlike other stations that repeated shorter sets multiple times through the day, or had themed shows that turned off people not into that particular genre.
It all came together so well for William and his former partner Rebecca Goldsmith, that within three years he set aside plans of consulting for other stations, and made listener-supported RP his full-time gig, an event so unprecedented that it was the lead of a 2011 Time feature titled ‘The Revolution In Radio’.
Listener-supported Radio Paradise
became a full-time gig in just three years.
Today, RP has been heard in every country but two (I’d bothered RP CEO Alanna with so many follow-up questions that I didn’t confirm which two, but let’s guess, shall we?). You can stream RP at up to CD-quality FLAC (except if you’re in Australia, where the limitations of the country’s incoming bandwidth don’t allow it), and I was happy to hear that William is considering higher resolutions. When I told him our audience (you!) would snap this up, he didn’t seem overly excited; I got the sense that here is a digital pioneer whose passion is simply to push into ever newer territories, and the followers are merely–well–what follows.
Human Curated
So we have great sound, great music, and no ads. There’s nothing else left to do, right? Just line up the songs and get it going, no different from creating a long playlist on your streamer?
Spend a day listening to RP, and you’ll see this flow is an art form all by itself. The journey from one song to the next always feels seamless, with energy built or dissipated at just the right moments. Sometimes I get a flash of what the connection is, but it’s usually elusive, yet so “right”, that I ask William if he commonly hears “get out of my head” as feedback.
“I’ve been accused of spying or planting software to monitor people’s music tastes,” says William with a laugh. I ask if he has ever articulated the “RP-osity” of a particular track because it’s pretty amazing that a station that plays everything from The Smashing Pumpkins to Miles Davis to Tanita Tikaram to St. Vincent has an identifiable sound.
After 50 years of doing this, William doesn’t need to give it a name. “I pick what I like, not even what I think the listeners will like.”
Alanna adds, “There is an element to it that you will not get from anything that's algorithm-based. No matter how good the algorithm is.”
She calls this human element a “wildness” that puts you on to music that “doesn't fall within any other parameters of what I supposedly–quote, unquote–really enjoy. But William's just gonna throw it at me and holy shit! I freaking love this new band.”
I thought this was a good point to reach out to another music tastemaker, so I asked Stephen Mejias what he thought was the relevance of “human curated” stations at a time of infinite access.
Stephen Mejias, curator of #NewMusicFriday at Twittering Machines, contemplates the future of music. Photo courtesy of Stephen Mejias.
Stephen is the director of communications at AudioQuest, and curates #NewMusicFriday for Michael Lavorgna’s Twittering Machines, a column he started “to provide a counterargument to anyone who ever suggested that ‘there’s no good new music.”
“That’s such a lazy, weak statement,” says Stephen, and I wholeheartedly agree. Stephen has been a fan of radio since childhood, and he doesn’t separate traditional and internet stations when he says that the generosity of music lovers is what makes radio such a success. “Sharing music with others brings immense satisfaction. Connecting with others through music is uniquely powerful.”
When he draws a connection between radio stations and record shops, Stephen is in lockstep with Alex Brinkman, Upscale’s marketing manager. Alex remembers when music stores started to close down in the early 2000s, and thinking to himself that he would miss the interaction and recommendations from music store employees. “I could not imagine what would make up for that sense of community in the era of streaming.”
Stephen agrees. “When I wasn’t discovering music through radio, I was discovering it at record shops. But the relationship was basically the same: Becoming acquainted with an expert, or mentor, trusting them and relinquishing control to them, allowing them to guide my musical journey.” (My emphasis.)
Bequeathing Music
Relinquishing control. That phrase, along with Alanna’s “wildness” is, for me, the heart of this story. Contained therein is the fact that while William Goldsmith does pay attention to the comments and the ratings, and removes songs that aren’t doing well, he will often decide–as with ‘Desolation Row’–that a song simply must be heard.
Being surprising, usually for delight, but sometimes for dismay, is the core of what makes the RP playlist so addictive over hours, months, and years, and sets it apart from algorithm-driven DJs that rely on the listener's past behavior. Unlike analyzing brain images to predict a stroke, an area where GenAI is proving to be hugely successful, being a musical tastemaker doesn’t just involve looking back in an aggregatory way, but looking forward and knowing what to see only after it’s been seen. In writing this piece, I saw that it’s irrelevant if a machine-DJ is, or soon will be, indistinguishable from William Goldsmith of Radio Paradise. What is relevant is that I, as a consumer, absolutely want to have a human at this and other artistic helms.
“We have a true artist at the helm.
William has 50 years of experience."
In the near future, when machine-DJs and their stations proliferate, and when all music apps use GenAI for their predictive playlists, William Goldsmith’s stand on 11 minutes of Bob Dylan will transfigure from “Because, dammit, I can” to something far more essential and profound: “Because, dammit, I’m human.”
Alanna sums it up perfectly. “We have a true artist at the helm. William has 50 years of experience. He is a master of his craft. Anyone can do anything, but it's those who have spent an extraordinary amount of their lives dedicated to their craft that stand out. That's what sets RP apart now and will continue to set us apart in the future.”
Paul Stephenson, the former Naim MD who was so happy to talk about RP that he responded to my questions immediately even though he was traveling, ended his message with: “The magic of RP is the people who run it. They are amazing people with a great ear for music and putting perfect playlists together. And the bonus: No advertising! Long live RP.”
That sounds like a great place to end, but I want to return to Alanna talking about the best compliment that listeners can give Radio Paradise. It’s similar to the best compliment we at Upscale Audio want from our customers, in that it’s not about sound quality or stream resolution or signal-path synergy. It’s about music.
Says Alanna, “The number-one compliment our listeners give to us is being turned on to music that they would have never found otherwise. And then they go beyond and say things like, ‘Anytime they're in town, I go to their concerts, and that's because of Radio Paradise’.
“It's beautiful.”
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If you’re already a fan of Radio Paradise or have rapidly become one, you can support the station here. We sell a wide range of streaming components that come with internet radio installed, and will let you listen to Radio Paradise in all its FLAC glory. Talk to our digital specialists to join the community!
Feedback? Story ideas? Write to playback@upscaleaudio.com. Send us your guesses for the only two countries where Radio Paradise has not played, and we'll pick a winner from the correct entries and send you an Upscale Audio T-shirt.