Today, you might notice something different about the site-formerly-known-as Broken Dial. Honestly, while I took the name “Broken Dial” and ran with it from our inception in September of 2006, we never liked it. It didn’t make sense to Inside Pulse readers (but I can only explain something so many times, hell, Scott from Stereogum would be super annoyed if everyday he was explaining his site name) but it never felt like “home.”

I want to address what we are doing here at Radio Exile and how it differs from Broken Dial. Broken Dial was written, served and created by software that was made specifically for Inside Pulse. One day, it just broke. It’s been a mess, you might have seen that the staff and I weren’t doing quite as much writing. It’s disheartening to come in 6th in BT DMAs for Top Blog (out of lots and lots of entries) and then have the server die. Then the site was broken. Then the backend. We lost a ton of momentum and we needed a change.

We wrote less and less because we all have weird schedules and lives and it was almost impossible to manage it all and get everything done right.

So, I pitched the idea of taking everything off the Archway system. Yes, I know that Daniels and Widro made it, but if all your energy is going into fixing something that used to work and you cannot make it work anymore, why not just find something else that DOES work?

Having now explained the “why,” let me tell you about our name change. We (Greg, Elie, James and myself) felt that our name needed more “oomph.” Matt Michaels (who runs Pulse Wrestling and Moodspins and a million other things) suggested that as the indie blog on Inside Pulse network, our name should speak a bit about what we don’t like about radio and why what we see as “really good music” wasn’t making it out for mass consumption. That vehicle of music delivery, it’s broken. There are great stations and programmers out there, but more often than not, they struggle financially and since not many people buy the physical manifestation of an album or a single, they are up against tough odds too. That’s what Broken Dial was about and what we want to do better with Radio Exile: expose new artists to the fans and people we know. It’s why I am going to Norway this week to cover the by:Larm festival and conference. We want to see what Europe has to offer and when you are given the chance to go “free of charge,” you go and you write about it and vlog it.

With Radio Exile, we are talking about our journey away from popular music: the people we meet, the bands we interview, the friends and contacts we make that you might have to dig a bit harder to find. It will be about how we consume our music and the value it plays in our day-to-day, how we present ourselves to you and where we go and what we do to give you some of the best music coverage on the internet.

That’s what “Radio Exile” is.

Now don’t ask again.

Last 5 posts by Shawn M. Smith

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