Try @ TXST

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi y'all. My name is Giselle and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University. You're listening to Try at Texas State, and today's episode is all about our radio station, KTSW 89.9. KTSW has been around since the ’90s, a college radio focused on showcasing underground bands and live music events, keeping the Bobcat community up to date on recent happenings at the university from news to sports and everything in between. I got to speak with Dan Schumacher, the general manager of KTSW since 2001. Dan is a tattooed, energetic music connoisseur from Nebraska, and he's so much cooler than you and I both.
Okay, let's get going. Hi Dan.

Dan Schumacher:
Hi Giselle.

Giselle Kowalski:
How are you?

Dan Schumacher:
It's Thursday. It's almost a weekend. It's been a pretty good week, so I think, yeah, pretty good.

Giselle Kowalski:
One day closer to Friday. So for those that don't know you, can you please introduce yourself and tell me what you do here at Texas State, how long you've been at KTSW and what your role is there.

Dan Schumacher:
My name is Dan Schumacher. I have been at Texas State University for just over 22 years. I'm the general manager and faculty advisor for KTSW 89.9, the other side of radio, the student-run radio station here at Texas State, and then I'm also a senior lecturer in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Giselle Kowalski:
Wonderful. How long has KTSW been around?

Dan Schumacher:
KTSW signed on the air April 15th, 1992, and its predecessor, KAT Radio, started about 10 years before that back in 1982.

Giselle Kowalski:
Very cool. Awesome. So going more into you, how did you get involved in the radio industry?

Dan Schumacher:
Way back when I was growing up, we would listen to the radio a lot. I've always been a big music fan since elementary school basically. My dad taught music, so I kind of had that built in, but I took it from there. I tended to have a voice that was really good and a personality. I am very outgoing, raging extrovert basically is how I refer to myself sometimes. I had DJ'ed in different establishments around my hometown and it was like when came time to go to school, it was like, "What do I want to do? Well, I just want to be a DJ I think, and get into radio," and so it just happened to work out. Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's awesome. What was your DJ moniker?

Dan Schumacher:
DJ Dan.

Giselle Kowalski:
DJ Dan. Simple, straight to the point. I like it. I know you guys have other positions other than just DJ'ing, so can you kind of go into that because I'd love to learn more about what other positions and roles students can have at the radio station?

Dan Schumacher:
Absolutely, yeah. We need to be much more than a radio station because radio... the opportunities in radio these days are not as plentiful as they were when I was younger, even when I was going to college. And the students have changed and the opportunities have changed as well for our students. So we give them opportunities to learn to do social media in a professional setting. You record in studios doing audio and video for in studios, sports broadcasting, so they have the opportunity to do talk shows, to go out and report on the games, do sports photography. We have a podcast and of course we do live play-by-play broadcasts as well. We have music programming. Music journalism is a thing in our blog, regular writing for our blog, commentary, opinion pieces, those kinds of things.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, I was checking out those album reviews. Those are awesome. I was reading up on that one. You guys recently did the "Barbie" one and I thought that was really cool. So whenever you see the logo, KTSW 89.9, it says the other side of the radio. Can you explain what the other side is?

Dan Schumacher:
The other side of radio? Well, college radio typically is an indie type of format, an alternative type of format. It is something other than the mainstream, and that's something we try to emphasize. The walls have been broken down a little bit. When we talk about traditional radio, it's very formatted. We are very broad. We sometimes play the same artists that are on commercial radio stations, but we want to play tracks by them that are not the ones that are on the more popular stations or the more popular tracks. We want to play stuff that maybe is a bit more challenging and artists that people are not familiar with. So it gives us a chance to expose our audience to local artists who are looking to try to establish their careers, get people to show up at their shows and track their tracks on Spotify or whatever platform they have basically so they can derive some income from that. Want to work with the lesser recognized artists so it's outside of the mainstream, it's a little more fringy.

Giselle Kowalski:
So speaking about those lesser known artists and the San Marcos bands you guys have, did you have any of these San Marcos bands come in and play for the first time on your radio and then make it big?

Dan Schumacher:
Before I was here, I know that Blue October there-

Giselle Kowalski:
Blue October.

Dan Schumacher:
There it is. Blue October was a band that was based in San Marcos.

Giselle Kowalski:
I had no idea.

Dan Schumacher:
And actually I was digging through some files the other day and came across the interview, the Blue October interview from way back when. So this is part of my archiving of a lot of the things that the radio station has and getting them on our website that I want to do. But Blue October is a band that when they were based in San Marcos, they would come on the air and did IDs and those kinds of things.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's mind-boggling to me. That's crazy. I used to listen to them in middle school a lot. That's wild.

Dan Schumacher:
Yeah, I've been a bunch over the years that have kind of gone on to find at least regional, if not even national success. So it's cool.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's fantastic. But speaking about those events that you guys have, you're saying that you had it in Old Main, but you guys hold live events too, correct?

Dan Schumacher:
That's another thing that the students do. It's promotional activities, promotional events, it can be something on campus. We go off campus from time to time and promote events. A regular event that we've had for a little more than a year has been Third Thursday at The Porch.

Giselle Kowalski:
For sure. So going more back to your students, I know a lot of your staff right now is mass comm majors, but do you have to be a mass comm major to be a part of KTSW?

Dan Schumacher:
No, you do not. When we send our email out to all undergraduate and graduate students a couple of times a year when we're doing our hiring periods for the spring semester or the summer or fall semester, we open up to all students.

Giselle Kowalski:
What kind of steps are you guys taking to keep radio alive right now?

Dan Schumacher:
I think especially when we're talking about our younger demographics, our younger audiences, they're looking for more than just kind of what radio has done for so many years. First of all, we kind of want to bring some of the things back from the past that were popular, like call in to make a request. We're trying to make that connection with students, so trying to make it very personable. So yeah, we offer that extra interviews on the air, interviews with people from campus, around town, other students, whatever it may be.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. No, when you talked about the call in thing, I thought it was super cool because I got to visit with my intern Tony, and we got to sit in on the Other Side Drive with Reese, who is DJ Lilz.

DJ Lilz:
It's a beautiful Thursday afternoon. I'm DJ Lilz.

Tony:
And hi, I am Tony.

DJ Lilz:
That is our resident DJ-

Giselle Kowalski:
And I got to call in a song and I thought that was great because the last time I did that, I think I was probably 6 and I did it on Disney Channel.

DJ Lilz:
By the way, this is Other Side Drive, so you know what to do. You can call in and request a song at 512-245-3473.

Giselle Kowalski:
Speaking about the Other Side Drive, what other shows do you guys have?

Dan Schumacher:
We have Bobcat Radio, which is a Texas State and San Marcos High School oriented sports talk show from 11:00 to 11:30 Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We have specialty shows where students will propose a two-hour show and sometimes even a one-hour show of some particular genre of music or our music department has started producing a kind of new music show as well, which is an hour or two hours, or there'll be a local show where they will interview bands and have interviews that go on the air and there will be performances as part of that as well. We do syndicated programming in the morning from seven till eight every day, which is programming that's produced by other radio stations around the United States. And we even had somebody from overseas that was producing a program at one point in time that was going on the air, and that's everything from science to a show called A Way With Words.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh my God, that's my favorite.

Dan Schumacher:
A Way With Words is a blast.

Giselle Kowalski:
When I was doing my research before we went into this interview and I saw that you guys played A Way With Words, it warmed my heart because I was an NPR kid, so my mom... for radio, my dad would be playing classical music, all this Tchaikovsky and stuff like that in the morning to calm him down before work and then my mom would be playing NPR super loud while she was making breakfast. So that's my childhood. What advice would you give to a student that wants to get involved into KTSW who has never even worked or touched radio work ever before in their life?

Dan Schumacher:
Apply. Yeah, look at all the positions. When we take applications, which are usually during October and March in any given calendar year, look at all the available positions and see what it is that might interest you. Be prepared to make a full semester or a full term commitment. I say term because sometimes students come in just for the summer and they're here for summer one and summer two and try something out, see how it clicks. And we hear this from time to time where they're actually regular more often than that, where a student will say, "I came in and I was going to do this, and I started looking around or I talked to somebody who was doing this and I thought that was great. So I thought I would try that out," and that just clicks.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, it's very much going in line with the name of the series, Try at Texas State, just try it. You never know what could happen out of it. And then you have documented growth too, just like you were saying, you can see your growth from maybe if you started as a freshman and you go throughout it as a senior, you can look back and hear your shows from then to now. That'd be wild. That'd be so cool.

Dan Schumacher:
Yeah, well that's the thing, yeah, it's something your friends can be out there listening to you and goof on you later when you mess up or whatever. Or you save your air checks and put them in your personal archive and 20 years down the road, you've got your kid saying, "Hey, listen to me. This is when I was in college."

Giselle Kowalski:
That's awesome. So before we wrap this all up, I wanted to ask you if you could give me any recommendation of an album, an artist, or a song that I should listen to, what would it be?

Dan Schumacher:
Oh my goodness. Let's see. A band that I sometimes fall back on, the second radio station that I was the advisor to, it was actually where I did my undergraduate work at a small state college in northeast Nebraska, Wayne State College. When I advised there, there was a band that came out from Chicago called Soul Coughing.

Giselle Kowalski:
Soul Coughing.

Dan Schumacher:
They kind of hit the big time maybe on their second or third record with a song called Super Bon Bon, but their first record called Ruby Vroom is truly just weird.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, whenever I left from visiting y'all, I was listening to the radio station and I definitely wrote down a couple of the songs and put them on my playlist. So I will definitely be looking up Soul Coughing.

Dan Schumacher:
It's a big old world of music out there. There's a lot to discover.

Giselle Kowalski:
There certainly is. Well, thank you Dan. I really appreciated it.

Dan Schumacher:
Yeah, you're welcome Giselle. Thanks for having me in.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, thanks.
Thank you so much to Dan Schumacher for coming on the show and giving me all the inside scoop of KTSW and thanks so much for that one song recommendation for Soul Coughing. Yeah, I definitely listened to it. I don't hate it actually. I liked it a little bit. I'm still kind of diving into that alternative rock type of beat. I give it a seven and a half. So yeah, definitely check that out. I'll update you if I find anything else cool, because I have been listening to Other Side Drive every now and then. And you know what? There are definitely some songs that I've been adding to my playlist.
Anyways yeah, thanks Dan. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Try at Texas State Podcast. Make sure to tune in next time to learn more about something else you can try on campus at Texas State. And also remember to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube at TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the hosts and guests not of Texas State University. Again, I'm your host, Giselle Kowalski, and I'll see you all next time. Bye y'all.