In the 70’s and early 80’s, Joe Bourdow owned a commercial radio station.  It was something he enjoyed, but he found himself transitioning into a career in print advertising.  After 30 years in the field, Bourdow retired from his executive position with Cox Media Group and Valpak in 2012.

Here and there, throughout his professional life, Bourdow did some sports casting for MLB affiliate baseball clubs.  He spent weekends doing play by play announcing for the Carolina Mudcats, and he got to cover 6 or 8 games for the Durham Bulls. 

“And that was a great experience,” said Bourdow.  “I think that radio ties in to local community service.  But also when I retired, I was no longer on airplanes every week flying around the country, I began to take more of an interest in St. Pete and some of the good things that are going on…”

One of those things was a major college football all-star game.  The East-West Shrine Game played in St. Petersburg from 2012-2020, and Bourdow put together a radio program covering the game, broadcasting it across the country.  150 stations picked up the event, including Sirius XM radio during its nine-year run. 

Bourdow found himself becoming more familiar with the internet, with digital audio, and wondered if there was an opportunity to do something locally.

“So I just remember one day saying that what St. Pete needs is a radio St. Pete,” said Bourdow.  “Because you have a combination of the corporately owned commercial radio stations.  You have very good public stations in Tampa (WUSF & WMNF).  But their focus is more broad, not so much on St. Pete.”

So, Bourdow started an internet radio station focusing on St. Petersburg.

Around the same time, unbeknownst to Joe, former DJ Rick Crandall was working on a website of his own.  Another fan of the local music scene in Tampa Bay, Crandall wanted to give a platform for these musicians, who played everywhere live but weren’t being heard on the radio.

Lucky for Bourdow, if anyone in Tampa Bay had talent for going against the tide, it was Rick Crandall.  In 1966, he was the first American DJ hired aboard a ship, a floating radio station in fact, called Swinging Radio England.  The ship stationed itself 4 miles off the east coast of England, broadcasting top 40 hits that were banned by the BBC.  Suddenly, millions of Brits had access to the same rock music enjoying meteoric popularity in the U.S., including jams from the Rolling Stones and the Hollies.  The DJ’s were labeled “pirates” because they were spinning records that were distasteful to people in power.  But, because Swinging Radio England was based in international waters, the British authorities had no power to stop them.

Crandall spent a few months on the ship, and then returned to the states to complete his college education.  He worked in different radio stations around the country, eventually settling in Florida, his career in radio programming spanning 25 years. 

One thing that stuck with Crandall during his tenure as a DJ was seeing how hard it was for up and coming artists to get attention.  In an interview with the Tampa Bay Times, he recalled many musicians asking to have their music put on the air of his radio station, but his fellow station employees were dismissive about it.

“After a while, I started thinking there’s something fundamentally wrong with that,” he said. “Broadcasting is supposed to operate in the public interest, to serve the local community. Yet we never play local artists on the air. I had this uneasiness until it dawned on me to put on an Internet radio station where nobody can tell me what to do.”

Crandall built a website called “Music Tampa Bay” and started recruiting musicians around town to be a part of it.  It was a bare bones operation, but it was something.