Red Zone: Internet Radio Station Uses Search and Viral Marketing to Find Audience

Viral marketing and search is helping Internet radio station MyREDLounge.com find an audience for its cool – or is it hot? – jazz, swing and blues format.

The station’s first incarnation was as Red 104.4 FM, a terrestrial radio station in St. Louis, MO, debuting in early 2004. When the frequency was sold to another company, Emmis Interactive kept the rights to the format. “We felt it had more mass appeal than just a single market signal,” says Deborah Esayian, vice president of Emmis Interactive.

The target audience for MyREDLounge skews age 30 to 50, and is about 60-65% female. Listeners tend to be upscale consumers who have an epicurean bent and enjoy wine and eating out, she says.

So far, about 8,500 “REDHeads” have registered with the site. Monthly, Esayian estimates that 40,000-70,0000 listeners stream the station.

MyRedLounge’s name was chosen to reflect the idea that the music is to be enjoyed by a community, she notes. “It’s a place to unwind and relax.”

The format is naturally viral, she continues, because people who like the music enjoy sharing it with others and talking about it.

Contests have been used to help refer people to the site. And offline, a sampler CD was distributed by street teams in the St. Louis area, to get the word out that the once local format is now available worldwide on the Web. This promotion may be expanded to other markets, notes Esayian.

Emmis has only recently began marketing the site to potential advertisers. Esayian says the company has spent the last year getting the product right, doing viral marketing and experimenting with both paid and viral search, working with vendors like Oneupweb.

Searches for artists like Tony Bennett or Michael Bublé are what typically lead listeners to the site, she notes.