The Radio Nemiers Case Study

Radio Nemiers is an alternative rock and metal radio station. Modern. Independent. Music from more than 50 countries.

It is community-supported. It is internet-only. It streams HLS over a CDN and plays on the official website. No FM. No AM. No DAB. No Latvian-language daypart.

Music only. No live hosts. No live shows.

The editorial sentence the rest of this site keeps pointing back to: genres are tools, not walls.

Where it came from

In 2018 I was deep in my rock and metal DJ phase. The bar Nemiers in Riga asked if I knew anyone who could build them a radio station. I did. I had three stations under my belt.

You could call Nemiers a rock bar. It was more than that. A place without borders. A place to feel free and safe. A place where everyone was welcome to dance on the concrete countertop while the countertop was burning and the bartender spat fire. That place was fire.

The bar wanted a station to play on its own speakers and to stream the live events out from inside.

When I sat down to design it, I thought back almost two decades. The legendary Radio Wazee. US, online, alternative and modern rock, broad. In 2000 I was a radio host at Rietumu Radio in Liepāja. Rietumu is also where my tech career started: first Linux installation, first stream across LAN, first database, first programming steps. And I was a regular Wazee listener. The bands I discovered on Wazee stayed with me for life. Their range went from The Dillinger Escape Plan to Dashboard Confessional. Their slogan was a line from Cake's Comfort Eagle:

We are building a religion.

I latched onto that. Not the religion part. The defiant variety. The refusal to play a single shade of one genre. That refusal is the core of Radio Nemiers.

In its ninth year the bar lost its battle with COVID. Keep the station running on my own, or... Yes.

Radio Nemiers is what is left of bar Nemiers. It holds the fire.

The bar is gone. The spark is not. It lives in everyone who was there. It still burns inside Radio Nemiers.

The numbers

After the bar closed I streamed Radio Nemiers from my apartment in Riga. Then from Germany. For six months it also streamed from Dallas. That last one was a rushed call.

The current shape:

• 5,000+ tracks in rotation
• 500-600 new tracks added every year
• music from more than 50 countries
• a 3-day internal rotation window
• a rolling 25-year "current" window
• 24/7 automated playout, zero human intervention required to stay on air

Technology breaks on its own. "Zero human intervention" is the design goal, not a promise.

The constraints that shape everything downstream

Fully automated. The library is the hardest part of any automation. Get the library right and almost everything else falls into place. Radio Nemiers automates label submissions and song rotation. The clock runs without me. The clock is the supervisor.

Online only. No FM. No AM. No DAB. Cost is the obvious reason, but it is not the real one.

FM, AM, and DAB are sunset technologies. They will keep working for another decade or two. Their listener base is fading. Look at any household with children under 18 in Europe. They all have internet. Many no longer have a radio in the house.

I am 46. Statistically, I have thirty years left, maximum. I am from the generation that grew up listening to radio. I rarely turn on FM today. In twenty years, every station still in the radio business without changing will be gone. The survivors will be the ones who figured out they were in the content and community business.

Debating FM vs DAB is arguing about which horse is faster while the car already exists.

The 25-year window. Search "rock radio" and you get a thousand stations playing the same Metallica, Pantera, AC/DC, Iron Maiden rotation. I grew up on that music. The past is only beautiful in memory. Life happens now.

The math is weird, but it works. Most people start marking songs as their own around age 16. Nine years on, they are 25. Sixteen more, they are 42. The rolling 25-year window keeps the station feeling alive to the same person across all of their young adult life.

This radio is for the people who ride skateboards, BMXes, and inline skates. For the people who stage-dive and want to explore the world.

The 3-day rotation window. Every new track gets 42 spins in active rotation before it moves into the general categories. The general categories run on a 3-day cycle. A song can repeat inside one cycle. Once the cycle closes, the song locks out for three days before it is eligible again.

This came from a software constraint. Radio Nemiers runs on RadioDJ. Good playout software. Like every non-commercial radio tool, it has gaps in what Programming actually means. So I worked around it with the window.

I have my own academic-sounding term for this: loyal listener syndrome. The music director is the most loyal listener on any station, and they hit fatigue first. Three days is my own ceiling before it starts to bite.

Genres as tools, not walls. There is no genre constraint on Radio Nemiers. A track just has to deliver the feel of rock or punk. Take Jane Remover's Backseat Girl and sace6's nepenthe. Both blur the line between genres in ways a commercial station would never touch. Not loud, not screaming, not a safe bet.

Genre gatekeepers will not like that policy. Nobody jumps from pop to black metal overnight. Variety is the vessel; the trip is a slow river.

Global by design. Radio was a local medium for most of its history. The internet ended that. Location does not matter unless the station is built around a specific local audience, like national broadcasters.

Some directories still ask for location. There are two sides to that. One, it groups stations by region, which is useful. Two, it invites misreading.

Radio Nemiers shows up in some directories as "Latvian alternative rock radio." That phrasing collapses badly. A reader assumes the station plays Latvian alternative rock. It does not. It plays a small amount of Latvian music, and almost everything else is global.

The non-obvious negations

The four that surprise people:

• Not Latvian-only. A small amount of Latvian music plays. Most does not.
• Not physically located in Latvia. Streams from Germany. Has streamed from Riga and Dallas in the past.
• Not corporate radio. No committee meetings. No best-practice gatekeeping.
• Not a classic-rock safe-bet station. The 25-year window enforces it.