Some people join fraternities. Some people start garage bands. In Johnson City, Tenn., three college kids are re-shaping the face of talk radio from the comfort of their very own living room.
Remember the last time that you were driving in your car scanning the radio desperately hoping that you would maybe find something worth listening to?
With pop radio being what it is today, for me that scenario happens all too often. What if, in such a situation, you could simply push a button on your iPod or CD player and tune into an informed and entertaining radio show produced by three of East Tennessee’s own?
From Johnson City and Elizabethton, Brad Eshbach, Ryan Curtis and Jake Hathaway make up Bandwagon Radio, East Tennessee’s premier (and only) Podcast radio show.
For those of you who may not be familiar with this new form of mass media, a Podcast is a radio show that, rather than being transmitted via radio waves, is hosted online to be downloaded and enjoyed at the audience’s convenience.
While the name wants to imply that listeners must have an iPod, this is not the case.
Podcasts can be downloaded and experienced fresh off the hard drive, or they can be transferred to a CD or other MP3 player. As Eshbach puts it, “It’s talk radio meets TiVo.”
Podcasts are also not limited to talk radio. Many political figures are beginning to produce their own shows, and the President’s weekly address is currently available for download.
Even corporations are starting to tune into the fact that Podcasts are rapidly becoming an effective media vessel for a very large contemporary audience.
Anyone with a computer and a microphone can theoretically start up his own show, which, as these three men agree, is “both the beauty and the bad part about Podcasts.”
Eshbach, Curtis and Hathaway however – by taking advantage of their resources and investing some effort – are putting together a weekly production that has a little something for everyone.
Every Sunday afternoon these three gentlemen convene around their laptops, a few microphones and a digital recorder in order to reflect on current events, tech news, weird news, movies, music and anything else in the world that catches their attention.
Hathaway emphasizes that Bandwagon Radio tries to discuss things that are going to be “relevant to everybody,” such as “who tried to rob a bank with a banana,” for example.
In the past, pioneering entertainment media has mostly been limited to underground college radio stations and NPR.
The Podcast is changing all of that. Traditional radio stations are often limited to music, and NPR does not always have a lot of material that the average college student would be interested in.
What Bandwagon Radio has done is create a single source for news, entertainment and opinion pieces all geared toward the concerns of today’s local college population.
It’s all available anytime at the click of a button, and there aren’t even any commercials.
Bandwagon Radio as well as countless other Podcasts can be easily found by downloading the newest version of iTunes, an all-purpose file sharing/media player program, and searching for “Bandwagon” in the Podcasts section.
Bandwagon Radio also has a web site – jumponthebandwagon.net – that has a direct episode download link (there is also a link for downloading iTunes).
Bandwagon recommends using iTunes over the web site, however, because iTunes can be set up to automatically download every new episode for you. Otherwise you would have to manually check the site for updates.
Despite some initial hosting problems, Bandwagon no longer has difficulty getting a new episode up for download every Monday.
Bandwagon Radio is not out to get famous or rich, they said.
The biggest goal for the show’s three producers is to use the medium at hand to effectively communicate with their audience and to have a good time in the process.
So for those of you who are looking for something worth listening to, turn off your traditional frequency modulation and jump on the Bandwagon.

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