Heart To Heart with Erik Woods | Cinematic Sound Radio Hiatus

| TRANSCRIPTION OF EPISODE |

Hello everyone, Erik here, and I’m just kind of in the middle of something. It is related to the radio show and I have a little time on my own this weekend and just kind of reflecting on my message that I put on Twitter and Facebook about this hiatus that I’m on.

I thought that you, my listeners, deserved an explanation and I’m a terrible, terrible writer and usually, in these cases, people will write a note. And I’ve done that in the past. It’s just that I’m not a very good writer and it takes way too long and I can usually say the things that I’m thinking faster into a microphone, of course, then I can typing on a keyboard. And I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time and that is whether I say something or do something. And there have been tweets from followers and Facebook messages and emails and they’re wondering you know how I’m doing and things of that sort and it’s easy for me to just say I’m fine but I’m not.

I have first world problems and that’s basically what this is and it feels so silly for me to do this and kind of complain about things and whine about things when really I have pretty good. I’m living in a four-bedroom house. I mean, it’s not mine, I rented but still, it’s a really nice home. I live in a great neighborhood. I got two pretty good kids. Got a great wife and you know I am still working on doing the things that I want to do. Not as much as I thought I would.

Now looking back over the past year coming up to the one year anniversary of me getting laid off from a job that I loved and I mean really loved and was ripped away from colleagues… who I never called colleagues… ripped away from a great bunch of people who I loved to go to work for and that sort of stuff really haunts me to this day. And the reason that it continues to pop up in my head is that I never did find another full-time job and that was because a month after I was laid off I started working for this fantastic guy out in Elora – about a half hour from where I live – and he’s not in a position to hire me full time but he’s trying to throw as much work at me as possible. My hope is that eventually, that will lead to either regular hours that I’m working throughout the week or that he eventually hires me on as a full-time member of his team. I don’t know if either or are going to happen but I kinda hope that it does. So, work has always been on my mind and it’s always something that I think about every day and the fact that there is a point where work dries up for him then I’m not going to be able to pay my bills and do things of that sort and then that directly affects me, my mood, my brain, the way I react to things and it really doesn’t take much for me to slip into a depression where I pretty much just want to give up.

How does this all reflect back on the show and Cinematic Sound and me doing this today? Well, when I get to that point I then feel like if I’m doing a radio program, and I’m not sure how many of you know the process or what goes through to make this show that I do, that I love and am proud of. You know it takes hours. Many hours! There’s a lot of writing. There’s a lot of research. Many people have said that I have an encyclopedic knowledge of film music and film scores and movies, well, I really don’t. I’ve seen a lot of movies but I haven’t seen A LOT of movies. I listened to a lot of scores but there was a lot that I have that I’ve missed. I have six thousand scores and a good chunk of that number I haven’t listened to. I mean am still discovering music to this day even though I’ve been doing this show for almost 22 years.

Anyway going back to the amount of work that has put into this program that I do. I don’t make any money off of it and I don’t think I was ever expecting that I would make money doing this show. It would be great if a radio station picked me up. I’m not saying that I’m not going to work toward something like that – although that’s something that I’m thinking that I might do – but I live in Ontario or near the Greater Toronto Area, there’s really only one classical station that I would pick up something like this but I’ve never tried syndication. I don’t know how much that pays. I don’t know what that does and I never really thought that I should ask people for money for the show and that just brings up a whole other set of problems and the issues concerning my show, which I really don’t want to go into here today. I always felt that over the years my reward was the free music and I’ve been getting free music for 20 some odd years now. I’ve got a lot of music and I’m grateful for that. And my goal of this show was never to make money but it was to promote film music. Then my job was to take the music that these record labels were sending my way and I would promote the album as a thank you for supplying the music. So I’m getting all this free music that had to pay for. But on the flipside, I’m hoping that somebody listens to the show and listens to an album and they hear it, like it and then go and buy an album. That’s how I have been running Cinematic Sound Radio since the beginning.

Even when I was on Mohawk College Radio, that was the whole point, I just wanted people listening to this and to enjoy it. I might be naive. Maybe I’m not digging deeper and being more ruthless and cutthroat in trying to actually make something out of this and that’s quite a possibility. We could probably go and do that sometime later.

But, anyway, back to the amount of work that it takes. It takes maybe 10 or 12 hours to produce a show. A lot of that is done after hours, late at night. Sometimes right up to the last minute. I usually have to submit shows to WROCK Radio weekly and sometimes I don’t get to show them until early Saturday morning. That’s not when I want to give them the show because my show is scheduled on Sunday and the last thing I want to do is have people do work over the weekend trying to get my show up on their station. But that’s just the way it works and there are some days where I’m not motivated to do it.

I love doing this show. I really do.

But again going back to the show being free and me spending so much time on it when maybe I should take those hours and look for something that’s going to bring in cash, that’s going to help provide for my family and that’s where last week when I came to the realization that I’m spending a lot of time working on something that is essential for me and it’s free. And if I can go a little bit deeper into this and the reason why I’m also thinking of just kind of giving this up for now.

The numbers. When I’m talking about numbers again. Numbers… don’t take this the wrong way… don’t necessarily mean a lot to me because again I’m not bringing any income and I’m not monetizing the show, so numbers… I don’t care if I get 5 listeners or 5000 listeners BUT I actually DO care. Let’s just go back a little bit further where my show isn’t on a podcasting service so I’m not 100 percent sure whether the analytics that I’m getting, the stats that I’m receiving from my hosting server, which is where the entire shows is hosted, are accurate to the amount of listens and downloads that I’m getting. It’s really cryptic and I’m trying to use their stats software and I honestly don’t think it’s giving me the right numbers.

So then I moved on to something called Podtrac and if I insert Podtrac’s little tag at the beginning of my MP3 file and then what I’ll do is that every time that that track is played with that tag it will then send out the information back to Podtrac and it will tell them you know whether someone listened to it as a stream or downloaded it. I am hoping that this software is a bit more accurate than what I was getting from my hosting provider. So I started this maybe three months ago and I’ve started adding this little tag to all the shows that are part of