So, I owe the world a bit of an explanation about what happened to CHILLFILTR® Radio.

I just got the first of probably many messages I will be getting from listeners around the world who are now realizing that their favorite streaming radio station is no longer.

Sometimes businesses have to make difficult decisions when it comes to longevity. The CHILLFILTR® Radio product, such as it was, was expensive and actually not doing for me what I was hoping it would do. So let me talk a little bit about the discrepancy there. What was I looking for, what did I get, and what didn't I get.

What Happened?

What I was looking for was an ability to share great new music with the world, and largely that was successful. I should probably point out that our best year had been 2025, and 2026 seemed to show a bit of a slackening in terms of our listener numbers.

But most importantly, I started running promo spots to encourage donations to support the channel at some point in the end of 2024. So for almost two full years of running those spots, I'm almost ashamed to say that only two people made donations of any sort. That amounts to basically one per year. So my attempt at recovering some of the upfront costs for running this channel routinely ran at less than 1% of the real cost. LOL.

The amount of money I threw at this thing over the five years that it has been running is probably somewhere close to about $15,000. For obvious reasons, I can't afford to carry that burden any longer. That's the main reason. I got tired of explaining that expense to my wife.

But I think it speaks to a larger problem, one that all of us are suffering from, which is that it's just impossible for new products to find a place in the current ecosystem that allows them to grow and build and thrive. I learned this the hard way through my adventures in content management, that what looks like an open ecosystem is almost always a viciously guarded circle of friends that never has room for new members. It's just insanely hard to compete in a marketplace where the chosen ones have unlimited funding, and the rest of us have to scramble to connect with our listeners and encourage donations and investments. It's just grueling and exhausting and largely ineffective.

As much as I really enjoyed having a 24-hour streaming station, the costs were prohibitive, and the listeners that were enjoying this service for many years just could not find it in their hearts to do any donating. I hate to say that, but it's true.

You could make the argument I didn't market it correctly, or that I could've changed the product to be more annoying and run ads every 10 minutes instead of every hour, but that would create a product that I myself wouldn't want to use, which largely defeats one of the original points of the broadcast. I was trying to create a playlist of music that I myself would want to listen to. I think that's why it was so good.

The only issue, really the only problem, was just that I couldn't find a way to monetize that channel in a way that would cover the expenses. That's it. That's what happened.

And the final piece of the story is that now that I've connected with actual terrestrial radio, and I'm doing my weekly show on Wednesday nights, it makes more sense to take all of the resources that had been supporting CHILLFILTR® Radio as a streaming station, and reinvent it as a weekly broadcast that I can syndicate, and use that to build a small indie ecosystem around all these musicians. That's what I was hoping would happen with the larger radio channel, but again, I just couldn't find a way to explain effectively to my listeners that if they didn't support it, it wouldn't be around forever.

The Lesson

So the lesson is learned. I've already had a message from someone in the Netherlands who is sad that the station is gone from Radio.net. I would expect to get at least a few more of those. To anyone reading this, I'm sorry. I enjoyed CHILLFILTR® Radio as much as you did, but I couldn't make the case for spending more than $200 per month to keep it running.

I hope those of you that enjoyed the broadcast will consider listening to The Weekly Catch. We have two hours of weekly content that can be found online or from the Spinitron feed.