Since we launched Radio Milwaukee in 2007, our mission has been to foster community engagement through music and stories. A pillar of this mission is our commitment to providing a platform for local musicians to share their work with an engaged and supportive listener base. Radio Milwaukee’s local music scene support has manifested itself through the following ways:
- Every hour, we play at least one song by Milwaukee musicians.
- Every Thursday at 5:30pm, we host 414 Music Live – a performance by Milwaukee musicians in front of a live audience, broadcast live on the air and streamed live digitally.
- Our annual Radio Milwaukee Music Awards, which celebrates Milwaukee’s growing music scene through awards along with a night of live music for the community to attend. Listeners and fans vote on categories such as Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Disc We Missed.
- Most recently, we launched 414music.fm, a new channel and digital stream broadcasting only Milwaukee music 24/7 – the first of its kind in Milwaukee.
We focus on devoting a good portion of our content and experiences to local musicians on an ongoing basis. We attend over 20 events in the community each summer to help grow our awareness and engage with new listeners. One focus for our engagement this year is connecting with others on discovering new music in real time. This includes having a discussion with locals about which popular artists they listen to, and then identifying a local artist that might align with their musical taste. To play off this further, one of our staff writers has recently launched a series of Milwaukee Music Recommendations Based on National Artists’ which follows a similar theory.
To take advantage of emerging technology and our highly engaged social following, we experimented with streaming our 2016 Radio Milwaukee Music Awards show live on our Facebook page. This proved to be a success, giving our program an impressive reach of over 380K individuals, which is the most substantial reach we’ve earned to date. To play off this momentum, we invested in new video equipment to allow our team to continue live streaming all of our studio performances online, including all of our weekly 414 Live shows. And with this new capability and proven success, we joined the VuHaus video streaming network which connects us to music fans across the country as well as other well-established public media platforms in major cities. This video streaming partnership allows us the opportunity to stream our 414 Live shows on the platform, giving our local artists a wider base of viewership and opportunity to be noticed by other stations.
We’re proud to use our platform to broadcast, stream and discuss Milwaukee music because it rivals music from any city in the country. Something special is happening in Milwaukee’s music scene. There’s more talent, more collaboration and better music than ever. We hope the continued support and activity surrounding 414 Music efforts will help amplify the scene for years to come.