DJ William Goldsmith on the human art of internet radio

William Goldsmith wasn’t sure why he’d signed up for a music theory course. As a teenager, he wrote songs as a hobby, without much ambition. He kept playing keyboards and guitar but didn’t aspire to virtuosity. In his mid-30s, after enrolling in community college on a whim, he followed a fellow student into a class: ‘She was signing up for things that looked like fun; she was signing up, so I signed up, too.’ He ended up committing to four full semesters of theory, as far as he could go without formally entering the school’s music programme. The next step would have required piano fluency and sight-reading.

‘Yeah, that’s not me.’

What captivated Goldsmith was how music fit together: the relationship between major and minor keys, the way shifts in modes and intervals alter a listener’s mood, the coherence that emerges when songs share a tonal centre even when they span genres. Only later did the pattern in his own choices begin to reveal itself. ‘I was struck by how many interests I had pursued or skills I had acquired that made absolutely no sense at the time,’ he says. ‘There was something larger at work here – my unconscious, some outside entity, fate, or something. There was intent and purpose behind those odd little callings or passing fancies I felt.’

It’s August, and nearly 40 years have passed. We’re ensconced in Goldsmith’s weathered RV, parked in Reno a few weeks before Burning Man, where he will help run the festival’s radio station. A Day-Glo tapestry screens off the cab; shades are drawn. A thicket of electronics crowds the narrow space: a Mac workstation, two squat servers, a boom-mounted microphone, KEF loudspeakers, and a basket of headphones. The air conditioner drones against the desert heat. Goldsmith, long white hair falling to his shoulders, leans toward the screen. The vibe is equal parts Mad Max and Marconi.

Goldsmith’s workstation running the DJ Tools platform he created

For the past quarter century, Goldsmith has been building something deliberately irrational: an internet radio station curated by a single mind. Launched in 2000 and known to its worldwide fans simply as RP, Radio Paradise came online when the music industry was in the throes of disruption: the rapid rise of MP3s and peer-to-peer file sharing, the subsequent collapse of CD sales, and the unbundling of albums through iTunes would soon lead to instant access to virtually all recorded music. Fast-forward to the present: 100,000 new tracks are released to music streaming services each day, and the global music catalogue now exceeds 250 million songs. As our collective library grows faster than our ability to absorb it, automation via algorithm might seem rational. But Radio Paradise and its founder are committed to a different ethos: deciding what song comes next should remain an exercise in human judgment.

Goldsmith was born in Los Angeles in 1953, the eldest of four brothers. His father, Glenn, was a pioneering flower breeder whose award-winning hybrids – marigolds, petunias, snapdragons – spread across fields from Guatemala to Holland to Kenya. As the eldest son, William was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. ‘Of course I was a great disappointment,’ he says. It was radio – ‘the miraculousness of hearing somebody’s voice from so far away … the further away, the better’ – that caught and held his attention. At age 11, he hacked together a functional transmitter. ‘Got in a bit of trouble over that,’ he recalls. Representatives from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) came to his house, spoke to his mother, and were led to his bedroom, where they gave him a lecture. They wanted to make sure he understood the seriousness of the transgression but seemed highly amused by the whole situation.

A few years later, as he entered his teens, radio began to change. FM had long been an afterthought – either duplicating what was broadcast on AM or focusing on ‘fine arts’ programming that drew niche audiences – but in the mid-1960s the FCC moved to curb AM-FM simulcasting. This forced stations to come up with new formats.

For a time, that meant freedom. As the radio historian Michael C Keith explained to me: ‘Most of these stations early on left it up to the DJs to construct their own playlists. One from 8 pm to midnight would bring in his stash of music, and then another from midnight to 6 am would bring in his stash of music.’ During the brief flowering of what became known as freeform radio, DJs served as arbiters of taste, championing album cuts and, as Keith put it: ‘very much exerting effort to avoid top-40 hits.’ FM also offered something AM could not: stereo sound, arriving just as a new generation of listeners started buying LPs mastered to be heard that way. As a result, FM gained traction.

Goldsmith became fascinated with ‘combining different genres of music in a way that made sense’

Yet, as audiences grew and money followed, freedom gave way to formula. What remained of that earlier openness, that fine disregard for mainstream taste, concentrated on the lower end of the FM spectrum – a narrow band of frequencies reserved for educational and public stations that the Replacements would later immortalise in their anthem ‘Left of the Dial’ (1985). As a 16-year-old in the mid-1980s, that’s where I ended up, tuning into a wavering late-night signal from 90.1 WDCE:

And if I don’t see ya

In a long, long while

I’ll try to find you

Left of the dial.

I still remember that feeling of discovery – the sense that this music had found me.

Fifteen years earlier, Goldsmith was hearing something similar for the first time. He encountered freeform radio when he was 16. It was high summer, and he was pulling weeds in one of his father’s fields. As the DJs riffed on new album releases and bands coming through town, he imagined them holding court in an air-conditioned studio. An indifferent student who chafed at rules and directions, he had not yet discovered a path that felt his own. In that moment something clicked. ‘I had a picture in mind,’ he tells me. He became fascinated with ‘combining different genres of music in a way that made sense’ and began programming his own small-scale radio stations. ‘Freeform radio is what I always wanted to do.’

After high school, he got his first radio job in Salinas, California. He started as a DJ but a few months later became programme director, a role that still meant being on the air. This was one of the better-paying jobs at the station, but still not enough: when he was 21, he found himself with a small child and two young stepchildren. ‘There was a point when I started taking my responsibility toward them a little more seriously,’ Goldsmith recalls. ‘Even back then, radio paid for shit.’ He wasn’t formally trained, but he leveraged his broadcast know-how into engineering jobs at radio stations. The compensation was far better than for DJ work.

His goal was to push audio quality to its limits, but delivering CD-like fidelity at scale was financially impossible

Drawing on his engineering experience, he began considering new ideas while working his way through the world of low-budget radio: ‘I assumed that if I was ever going to get a station out on a really wide-ranging basis, which is what I wanted, the satellite was going to be the way.’ His plans began to take shape in the mid-1980s, when he was working for a satellite receiver company. By then, he says, there were ‘no jobs to be had doing fun stuff on the radio.’

The internet, not satellites, eventually gave him the reach he sought. ‘The very first time I heard audio of any sort over the internet, I thought, OK, I’m going to make this work,’ he tells me. At KPIG in Freedom, California – a scrappy station known for its irreverent ‘Fat Fry’ mix of folk, blues, rock and Americana – Goldsmith found a way to bring radio online. In August 1995 he helped stream a live protest concert featuring Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt. The technology was rudimentary, but to Goldsmith it felt revelatory: ‘Almost immediately I realised: there’s a very low barrier to entry here. I could make my own station.’

While continuing to work at KPIG, Goldsmith took a remote job with a Chicago company that provided streaming equipment to radio stations. When the dot-com bubble began to deflate in 2000, his employer fell apart. ‘They no longer had any work for me, but they still sent me a check every month,’ he says. ‘In effect they paid me to put Radio Paradise together.’ His daughter, Alanna Jane Goldsmith, remembers the project taking shape in the garage: humming computers, stacks of unorganised CDs, cables snaking everywhere. ‘He was very much like a mad scientist,’ she says. ‘He’d disappear for hours on end.’

The next lucky break arrived almost immediately after Radio Paradise went live in 2000. Early listeners flocked to it. Goldsmith’s goal was to push audio quality to its limits, but delivering CD-like fidelity at scale was financially impossible. In early 2001 an unsolicited email arrived in Goldsmith’s inbox: Shoutcast was offering to carry the stream for free for a handful of stations, and Radio Paradise was one of them.

The effect was transformative. ‘We started getting up to five, six, seven thousand people listening at a time,’ he tells me. ‘I figured that it would have cost us $25,000 to $50,000 a month to pay for the bandwidth that we were getting for free. There’s absolutely no way that we would have acquired momentum if that lucky break hadn’t come along.’

In the RV, on the computer screen, six song waveforms wait for human input. Goldsmith doesn’t start with an artist or a genre. He begins with the seam between songs.

‘Harmonic mixing,’ he explains, ‘is a thing that happens in the EDM [electronic dance music] world. Nobody applies it to this kind of music.’ The method – sequencing songs by musical key, as pioneered in EDM – creates a subliminal flow even non-musicians can feel. Goldsmith’s goal is emotional coherence: he wants his listeners to be carried forward, without hearing the seams.

‘My rule on a segue,’ he says, ‘is that at no point should there be two things happening that are in competition with each other. There should be one dominating, or they should be blending into something compatible. Then it becomes a thing of its own.’ Because Radio Paradise has no commercials, listeners can settle into the stream for long, mesmerising stretches.

As a listener, while playing guitar along with Radio Paradise a few years back, I noticed that five songs in a row were all in the key of F-sharp minor. I did the math: assuming an even distribution of 24 possible major and minor keys, the probability of five consecutive songs all in F-sharp minor is about one in 8 million.

Harmonic mixing regulates the intricate system he has built to programme Radio Paradise

The platform that Goldsmith built for himself, which he calls DJ Tools, allows for this sort of nuanced curation. Unlike commercial radio software optimised for rotation schedules and demographic targets, DJ Tools does not generate playlists; instead, it facilitates, as he puts it, ‘serendipity, discovery, and intuition’. More concretely, it gives him a way to assemble and perpetually refine sequences, until disparate songs bind together.

Like the balance wheel in a Swiss watch, harmonic mixing regulates the intricate system he has built to programme Radio Paradise. One ‘block’ of music – an integrated sequence of five to six songs playing over 30 minutes or so – might transition from Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London’ (1978) to the Senegalese singer-songwriter Cheikh Lô to Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones to the Turkish psychedelia of Islandman.

Goldsmith says listeners are prone to infer hidden meanings or inside jokes in his sequences. But he insists these clever pairings are often discovered after the fact, not planned in advance: ‘Oh, look what I did there. I probably wouldn’t have done that if I’d been aware of how obvious the connection is.’

I hover over his shoulder as he refines an upcoming block, soon to be streamed to listeners around the world, from Afghanistan to Zambia. ‘I usually go through the entire day and take a look at it,’ he says. ‘See if there’s anything getting tired, anything that needs to be retired, or if there’s anything new and cool that could fit into a particular slot. Or I’ll add or get rid of DJ breaks’ – the brief, often epigrammatic asides he drops between songs. The breaks, he tells me, are meant to be ephemeral. Initially he tried to make them recyclable, generic enough to fit multiple contexts without sounding wrong. Now he is moving away from that practice. Reusability, he says, can introduce a certain blandness; a one-off break sounds more human.

Next, he plays me a segue built on rhythm: ‘I’m lining up the first beat of this with the last beat of that, so you’re into the next song. And there’s no point at which something ends and something begins. It’s just: boom.’

‘One thing that most radio programmers have been taught,’ Goldsmith tells me, ‘is that a radio station needs to start fresh every day; it needs to be different.’ According to the industry mindset, every morning required new playlists, new rotations. And in the digital era, Goldsmith says, ‘the only way to accomplish that is with algorithms.’

His solution was to reject the premise entirely: ‘What if instead of starting fresh, we just took a certain number of days and then just repeated that?’ The result was an inversion of radio logic: a station built on recurrence. ‘When you got to the end of what you’d worked on,’ he explains, ‘you’d just go back to the beginning and start over. That’s what each Radio Paradise channel is: an enormous looped playlist.’ The Main Mix, his original and most fully realised loop, runs 27 days, with the initial block of songs returning almost a month later, shifted forward by 19 hours so no sequence repeats at the same time of day.

‘That’s the dream implementation – to make the software as available as possible’

Early on, DJ Tools was a platform only Goldsmith could operate. ‘People would watch me work on my interface and go, What the fuck are you doing?’ he recalls. For years, Radio Paradise remained inseparable from his hands on the keyboard. ‘I would listen and then type in numbers, building up a model of what I wanted it to sound like: I’m adding 300 milliseconds here, so I’ve got to take that away there. And I’ll do all that in my head. I knew that was suboptimal.’

Today, he says, his ambition is to transition from being the sole curator to providing user-friendly tools that allow others to create radio in their own voices. ‘That’s the dream implementation – to make the software as available as possible. There are hundreds of really talented DJs out there who have nowhere to practise their art.’ Over time, other curators have become collaborators: Josh Cunningham, whose father also programmed and managed radio stations, runs Beyond, a channel that explores the frontiers of improvisational music, a collision of jazz, hip-hop and electronica; Goldsmith’s daughter Alanna produces and hosts Radio 2050, which blends music with conversation and interviews, a hybrid aimed at imagining a better future. Goldsmith sees them as central to where Radio Paradise is headed.

‘This will carry on without me,’ he says.

The collective project at Radio Paradise raises a broader question: what role remains for human judgment in a world increasingly organised by algorithms? The more our world is machine-optimised, the more some of us seem to crave what feels unmistakably human. Hand-assembled mechanical watches did not disappear with the rise of digital timekeeping; they became symbols of a certain contrarian taste. Goldsmith foresees a shift: ‘I think the hunger for guaranteed human content is going to increase – dramatically increase.’ But he doesn’t frame the future as a zero-sum contest. ‘Some algorithmic playlists are perfectly suitable for background music,’ he says. Yet his resistance to automation is not dogmatic. He will consider outside feedback – even recommendations from Spotify – but everything passes through a subjective filter.

‘If it doesn’t make me feel something, it’s wrong,’ he tells me. ‘I can’t fake it.’

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of thinking about taste. One is to treat it as canonical: a fixed oeuvre with judgment already settled, where discernment consists of recognising and preserving what has been established. The other, closer to the pragmatist tradition, is to treat taste as contingent, formed through experience – a perpetual process of revision, in which judgment is made and remade over time rather than simply inherited. As John Dewey wrote in Art as Experience (1934): ‘The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others …’

‘People need to hear it enough to get it. They’re not getting it, so I need to keep at it’

Goldsmith is unequivocal: ‘My personal taste is such a moving target and such an evolving entity of its own, and I don’t require it to make any particular sense.’ What matters is sensing what feels right to him now – what is ‘appropriate to resonate with this moment, right now’ – and curating the mix accordingly. Like the freeform DJs who once programmed from their own record collections, Goldsmith’s judgment is constantly tested and refined in the act of assembling each block.

DJ Tools pulls in ratings data provided by RP listeners, giving Goldsmith a read on which tracks polarise the audience. He uses the numbers selectively. If a new song settles at a middling average after a few hundred ratings, he takes it as a sign the track isn’t essential. But his own taste still prevails.

‘If something is a nine or a 10 for me, it doesn’t fucking matter,’ he says. ‘People need to hear it enough to get it. They’re not getting it, so I need to keep at it.’ Goldsmith views his stance as ethical rather than aesthetic. ‘It’s part of my job description,’ he says. The modern media machine, he argues, does the opposite, ensuring people rarely encounter music they haven’t already decided they like. ‘They’re in their little bubbles of sameness,’ he says. ‘I don’t think that’s healthy for any of us.’

When Radio Paradise went live back in 2000, the internet, while rapidly maturing, still felt like a frontier hospitable to DIY builders and hobbyists with conviction. It was precisely this loose, semi-commercial infrastructure that made RP possible. But as capital poured in, the web’s economic and legal structures grew more rigid – and less forgiving.

At that time, internet radio existed in a grey area, with no settled structure governing what webcasters would be required to pay to stream recorded music. Goldsmith knew that eventually RP would have to pay royalties; he did not know how high they would be. In 2002, just two years after Goldsmith began broadcasting from his garage in Paradise, California, federal copyright regulators finalised the first royalty rates for internet radio.

‘We took one look: it was absolutely unworkable, undoable,’ he recalls.

What eventually steadied the project was community – but only because Radio Paradise had already ruled out other options. Built from the ground up to be commercial-free, the station had no advertising model to fall back on, and no incentive to chase scale. Survival depended entirely on whether listeners believed in the project deeply enough to sustain it.

‘I’m here for the people that are along for the whole ride – who are curious about where things go next’

In the early days, support arrived before the appeals. ‘We didn’t ask at first,’ Goldsmith recalls, but people just started sending money. Some sent checks. Many used PayPal, which was gaining traction among listeners. When the royalty rates were formalised, Goldsmith broadcast blunt explanations of the structure and its likely consequences. Listeners responded. Early fundraisers included raffles for trips to Costa Rica or music festivals, but one year, when no compelling prize materialised, the contributions were exceptionally strong. The psychology became clear: listeners weren’t buying a reward.

Goldsmith thinks of listener support as participation, rather than patronage. ‘Human nature is defined more than anything else by cooperation,’ he says. ‘That was our superpower – how we survived.’ Voluntary contributions, in that sense, were a shared undertaking, with obligations that cut both ways. ‘I had to give myself permission to potentially annoy the people I’m depending on for money,’ he says. There are listeners who attach themselves to particular genres or eras. ‘If something changes, they can get uncomfortable. But I’m not here for those people. I’m here for the people that are along for the whole ride – who are curious about where things go next.’

That trust surfaces in the way listeners work the station into their lives. One wrote that she had discarded her collection of 1,500 CDs during a renovation. ‘I was only comfortable doing so,’ she explained, ‘because I can count on Radio Paradise to be the soundtrack of my life.’

Goldsmith sees his relationship with listeners as reciprocal. ‘That money, it’s a gift,’ Goldsmith adds. ‘I felt like that gift came with certain obligations. And one of those obligations was to continue to improve the product.’

Listener support wasn’t money extracted from the attention economy; it was trust extended in advance

Once Radio Paradise had achieved stability, a scenario emerged that tempted him to break the compact. Goldsmith and his wife at that time, Rebecca – a co-founder of Radio Paradise – were seriously debating their future. As he described their thinking: ‘You could just automate the whole thing so you never had to touch it again.’ They could keep the systems running, fix only what broke, and let the income taper slowly. ‘It would probably continue to throw off a really nice income,’ Goldsmith told me, ‘that would super slowly decline over the next 20 years or so – and still end up at a really comfortable level.’

Financially, the plan was sound. Morally, it wasn’t. To Goldsmith, the idea felt like a breach. Listener support wasn’t money extracted from the attention economy; it was trust extended in advance. ‘You had to invest to get there,’ he said. ‘You had to continuously invest.’ To uphold his end of the bargain, Goldsmith chose the harder path: to remain present.

Now in his early 70s, he neither romanticises sacrifice nor postures as a tortured artist. ‘For the entire time, I had enough money to do what I wanted to do. Money manages to find its way to us. I’ve come to trust this,’ he says. He has taken risks and often played it close to the wire – especially now, with development costs approaching $20,000 per month – but RP endures. Still, he pauses when I ask what the path has cost him. ‘I was a shitty parent in many ways,’ he says bluntly. ‘I’m different now than I was in my 30s and 40s.’

Alanna, who reconnected with her father as an adult, does not soften the point. ‘Yeah, that’s a correct assessment,’ she told me. ‘He was not very present for the majority of my life.’ But she also describes a long, difficult healing process: in her early 20s, she says, he was willing to sit through ‘conversations of just me verbally vomiting all over him’ – and he listened. ‘To his credit, we became fast friends,’ she says. The passage of time has yielded perspective. His children grew up watching their father refuse the safer route. ‘Watching dad live his dream,’ Goldsmith says, ‘that sends a message.’

And Alanna received it. ‘He set the example,’ she says. ‘You can do something you’re passionate about. You should only choose to do something you’re passionate about.’

As I write this, a song by the British band James – ‘We’re Going to Miss You’ (1999) – is streaming to more than 18,000 Radio Paradise listeners in 153 countries. That’s nearly twice the current population of Paradise, the town where the station first went live at the turn of the millennium. The Goldsmiths moved away in 2016; two years later, the 2018 Camp Fire burned down most of the town. By contemporary media standards, 18,000 listeners is modest. But given the path Radio Paradise took to get there – with Goldsmith refusing advertising, engagement optimisation and growth-at-all-costs logic at every turn – the number feels astonishing.

Goldsmith’s discipline is simple: keep asking the only question that matters in radio – what comes next? The long loop is an ethic as much as a format: come back to what was good enough, then make it better. ‘I want to do the best possible job of executing the radio station that I have in my mind,’ he says. ‘It’s the station I would personally want to listen to – but there’s more to it than that. It’s also something I deeply want other people to hear. There’s a tremendous amount of music out there now that has the ability to connect with people in a way that they really need to be connected with. And there’s no viable method for people to be exposed to this stuff. You can’t trust Spotify’s algorithm to accidentally hand the right thing to somebody.’

‘When you’re selecting music that ultimately has emotional impact, only a human can do that,’ he insists. ‘There’s a therapeutic element to it. My mission in life has been to help make people feel better, happier, through music – through picking the right music, and combining it in an artful fashion.’

‘My eye says that’s right, my ear says it still needs to come in a little sooner’

Connecting people, he believes, is radio’s true power, even if it is now waning. There’s a difference between people listening to the same music at the same time, and individuals retreating into their own headphones and personal playlists. Radio created – creates – a common world that changes how a room feels, how a day unfolds, how people talk to one another.

In messages sent to the station, listeners describe how that shared experience takes hold in their lives. One listener in Belgium recalls:

Back in 2010 I was in art school. Our little class of six pupils had all different styles, and we only agreed on one thing: we would listen to Radio Paradise while working. The music playlist was as diverse and alternative as we were. Now 15 years later it gives me nostalgic feels, and I’m sure we all listen to this radio station to this day, although we grew apart.

Back inside the RV in Nevada, it’s hotter than it was an hour ago, but tolerable. As a teenager, Goldsmith imagined DJs in their climate-controlled studios. Now he’s inside one of his own.

Leaning back in his chair, he listens to a song segue. After a few seconds, he reaches for his mouse, nudges the onscreen waveform slightly, and hits play again. ‘My eye says that’s right, my ear says it still needs to come in a little sooner.’

He makes another adjustment.

‘I feel it in my body,’ he says. ‘A wrongness of something that does not fit.’

He listens once more. ‘Every piece of it, every song I pick, everything I say: it’s all in creation of this larger whole that is a thing of its own.’

This time he doesn’t reach for the mouse.