Synth Zone UPDATE! 24hr Radio Stream 2024, TikTok LIVES, and live shows!

Hey everyone! We hope you're having a great week! We wanted to give you all an update on what's been going on for the last couple of months, and what we have planned for the future! Since 2020, Synth Zone has been through a few obstacles that really impacted on how listeners receive and interact with our show. For 2024, we have a huge marketing campaign to help rejuvenize Synth Zone as a show and a 24 hour online radio station!

Synth Zone 24hr Radio Station (Streaming Online)
The Synth Zone 24hr Radio Station started in July 2021 and ceased operation around August of 2022, due to the rising inflation cost of the online servers that was running station. Today, we were able to successfully find a replacement server and can have the station back up. BUT! We reached another obstacle, even with support of all the various Synthwave labels and independent artists for allowing us to play their music on our station; we still need an a license to run the station. Our SESAC music license unfortunately expired, and have also increased due to inflation.

This led into our next objective, which is to secure our SESAC license and Global licenses to make sure everyone around the globe can have access to our station! We believe Synth Zone as a global entity, since the scene lands on all different parts of the world; we want to make sure that EVERYONE AROUND THE WORLD can hear us! To keep it transparent, these licenses cost around $500-$800 a year; and varies per country. We're currently working on talking to potential sponsors and advertisers that would like to work with us to help us secure our licenses and keep our servers operational. 

We're hoping to have the station up and running in January of 2024. It will run like a traditional radio station, there will be live shows, music breaks, adverts, and sponsored shows running 24 hours a day purely dedicated to the Synthwave scene. Once the station is operational again, we have a few promotional ideas that we will implement to help with growth. This will include an app, live streams, artist interviews, and giveaways. We want Synth Zone to be the most underground Synthwave radio station in the world!

Synth Zone Merch
Also starting next year, we're going to be creating more designs and have more frequent Synthwave inspired merch coming in 2024. We would also like to make it affordable, so we're working with different graphic designers on this idea as well. All current merch will constantly go on sale in preparation for new merch designs.

LIVE ON TIKTOK
A few weeks ago, we've gained access to the TikTok live (a feature unlocked after reaching a 1000 followers), and we've been playing classic PS2 games like The Warriors, Bully, GTA: Vice City, and currently GTA: San Andreas and we've been gaining tons of traction and viewers on the daily basis. It's been really fun to interact with the classic gaming community, but we would like to do Synth Zone DJ streams on TikTok live as well! We're making plans to create a live stream schedule for those as well. It will run simultaneous with the online radio station. WHAT ABOUT TWITCH? Currently, we've been receiving a lot more viewers on TikTok rather than Twitch, but we haven't given up on the platform. We would love to stream on both, but we don't have the bandwidth to run both currently. We're hoping in a few weeks we can experiment on both, but we're going to take our focus to TikTok since that's where most of the traction is coming from.

LIVE Shows!
In 2019, we took a big leap by being apart of different live synthwave shows throughout the west coast of the United States; and it was amazing to be apart of those shows and getting to host most of them. In 2020 (before the pandemic), we were scheduled to do more shows; but was unfortunately halted due to the globlal circumstances of the Covid-19 Pandemic. 2023 felt like the first year in awhile where it was safe again to start running shows, but it was a really slow year; with only major acts really piercing the scene. For 2024, we're reaching out to different show promoters in all parts of the USA and Europe to bring more live shows to all of you! We want to help bring more underground Synthwave shows into your neighborhoods, and make sure we have top-notch acts that we've connected with over the years to help bring those show ideas into reality.

Synth Zone on Mixcloud?
We've been hearing a lot of feedback from all of you about the Synth Zone mix show being on Mixcloud, and we understand the frustration of Synth Zone not being available on other platforms like Apple Podcast and Spotify. We've been working to resolve this issue, but unfortunately the policies on both platforms are really strict when it comes to music being played on a podcasts. Synth Zone has always been a "mix show" which is purely music based, and the format has been the same since 2016; and even though we could adapt? We wouldn't know how it would effect the quality of the show. That's why we've been thinking about an App, where you can listen to the Synth Zone Mixshow and the 24hr station anytime, anywhere. If you have any solution for this or ideas? We would love to hear it!

Thank you again for all the love and support, if you have any questions or concerns? Please leave a comment or shoot us a message anytime! We would love to hear from you, and we would love to see you be apart of our growth! We will be making more frequent updates going forward as we execute our goals.

- Ray "Rayzor" Garcia