On not-so-sucky air

Todd Miller pinpoints the beginning of his future career in radio to the days he pretended to be an announcer as a kid.

“As young as five or six I always had a little fake microphone in my hand and I had a turntable and I would play my 45 records and sort of introduce them,” he says.

Decades later in 2008, after hosting a radio show for four years, he decided to start his own radio station from his studio near Yonge Street and Finch Avenue. Though excited before launching RTDS, which stands for Radio That Doesn’t Suck and streams online from rtds.ca, he was worried people wouldn’t tune in.

“There was that fear that nobody would find us,” he says. “It started with a group of people that were here. We were talking about it and everybody told their friends and they told two friends, like that commercial on TV, and that’s how it really grew.”

The station plays a variety of musicians from soulful Ray Charles to heavy metal acts like Motörhead, as well as independent bands. Instead of playing solely hit songs, he says they feature an artists’ entire back catalogue and will soon be adding a talk radio stream.

“We play anything and everything — as long as it’s good,” he says. “We also have hosted shows so we have people that do voice tracked shows from all over North America and they have the freedom unlike traditional radio to pick all the music they play.”

Although he’s not required to play the minimum 30 percent Canadian content like all over-the-air stations are, he says he plays closer to 70 percent.

During the name brainstorming he says he was coming up with ideas with a group of friends when they all agreed traditional radio at the time was lacklustre.

“It had to be something about radio and then because radio sucked we just sort of said well, it’s radio that doesn’t suck,” he says. “So it’s meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek and it’s meant to be a bit of a dismissal I guess, a joke about terrestrial radio.”

He says RTDS strives to be the soundtrack to people’s lives 24/7 and wants them to be able to listen and enjoy it throughout the day and not get bored because they don’t only play one style of music and don’t repeat the same songs on a heavy rotation.

“We’re not just playing rock … it’s all mixed — jazz, comedy, spoken word — it’s all mixed in together,” he says. “So it surprises so the only thing to expect is the unexpected.”

Although Miller proudly proclaims they broadcast from Willowdale, he says he’s also able to run the station from other countries and can take requests even when he’s travelling.

“I can plug the microphone right into my phone and broadcast remotely, it’s incredible,” he says. “The only thing I need to worry about is getting sand into my equipment.”

Miller, who is also a musician and uses the studio to record, says people recognize their logo when he sports their paraphernalia to concerts and pubs.

“People are just coming out of the woodwork and saying they listen, which is incredible and it’s really rewarding because it’s not that they just saw our name on a bus going by. They had to go to the Internet and search out Internet radio.”

Some moments that stand out in his mind include receiving the first email from a listener, and now getting messages from people as far as Italy and Russia.

“One of the coolest moments would be, if you go to our website and look, there’s a little virtual map where it says where people are listening from and there’s one off the coast of Africa,” he says. “It displays little flags of the country of origin and it’s showing the UN flag so I’m thinking is it a war ship off the coast of Africa? It’s pretty cool that we’re being listened too on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.”