MusicMaster Blog

It was 1983 when Joe Knapp’s first music log ran on WZZU/Milwaukee. Now, 25 years later, more than 2,500 broadcasters in radio, TV and the Internet use the MusicMaster founder/president’s music scheduling software. “From the Ohio Scientific and Radio Shack TRS-80 computers we started with to the software we have today, it’s been quite a journey,” Knapp says.

Joe was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1953. Throughout his childhood, Joe was fascinated with radio and music. His father, John Knapp, a radar operator for the Navy during World War II, showed him how to turn an old radio into a transmitter. Though the Knapp family struggled to make ends meet, John managed to buy his young son some used electronics textbooks, and then looked the other way when Joe, at 11 years old, built and ran an illegal radio station in his bedroom.

The FCC engineers, however, were not as forgiving and shut him down. Taking their suggestion, however, Joe brushed up on broadcasting law and passed the First Class license exam at 18 and quit his hamburger-flipping job to find work in radio. A year later, after working on mobile telephones for Ohio Bell, he landed his first radio job helping build WSUM-AM in suburban Parma, Ohio. When Joe started, it was just a muddy field. When the station signed on, he was behind the microphone doing evenings.

Joe’s radio career next took him to WBKC-AM in Chardon, Ohio where he became chief engineer and afternoon drive jock. Soon he had landed his dream job, at Malrite’s WMMS-FM/Cleveland, a station he’d been a fan of since they’d moved to album rock. He helped moved the Buzzard studios downtown, but left after the company transferred him to WZUU-AM-FM/Milwaukee. Joe’s next project was doing afternoons at crosstown WQFM, which included programming, production and promotions. After getting fired, he tried in vain to find another programming gig but ran out of money. After reconsidering the stability of engineering, Joe became chief engineer for Booth’s WZZP-FM/Cleveland. He tried going back to WMMS, but they sent me to Milwaukee to rebuild the WZUU studios, which is where he began work on his music scheduling program. Joe had been manually prescheduling WZUU’s music, a task that he thought was unnecessarily time-consuming. Knowing that computers would soon become essential radio components, Joe had been teaching himself computer programming. Now, he realized that music scheduling primarily involved decision-making, and that was what computers did best.

Another change in Joe’s life came when Malrite sent him to New York to help build WHTZ (Z100). Eventually, Carl Hirsh put him in charge of the project. At 3:30 a.m., Joe’s voice was the first heard on that station doing a station ID, followed by “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra. He was asked to stay on, but Joe and his wife decided that Milwaukee was a better place to raise kids.

Back in Milwaukee, Joe continued improving his software, which started on an Ohio Scientific Challenger 8P computer and was originally called Revolve. He sold a copy to WCXI-FM/Detroit, then began rewriting it for the Radio Shack TRS-80, then for the IBM PC. In 1985, he licensed it to Tapscan to sell with their software as MusicScan. In 1994, following a bitter legal dispute, that deal ended and Joe formed his own company, changing the program’s name to MusicMaster and later rewriting it for Microsoft Windows.

It’s a word you probably use at least once (if not a dozen) times a day, yet you may not have stopped to wonder where the radio got its name. In fact, when radio was born it was fitted with the clumsy moniker ‘wireless telegraphy.’ We’re lucky things have changed, or else our DJs would have a mouthful, ‘You’re on WOR – News Talk Wireless Telegraphy…’ (Not to mention they’d be spinning wax cylinders). And yet how, we wondered, did this fortunate change come about?

Radio is actually a prefix, which was first attached to the word radioconductor (AKA coherer), a device that is altered by and therefore can detect electromagnetic waves. The prefix is based on the Latin word ‘radius’ which means ‘beam of light or ray’, and the resulting English verb ‘radiate’ which not only means ‘to emit’ but refers to the spread of alpha, beta and gamma waves from decaying atoms. This process of ‘radiation’ creates electromagnetic waves, a certain frequency range of which are called ‘radio waves.’ These were first noticed by James Clerk Maxwell and later generated in the lab by Heinrich Hertz. It was the European scholars studying Hertz’s work who began to use the ‘radio’ prefix. In 1890, Edouard Branly called his coherer receiver a ‘radio-conducting tube.’ Just over a decade later, a 1903 issue of The Electrician, a London magazine, was filled with radio-related words, including ‘radio-telegrams,’ ‘radiograms,’ and ‘radiographic stations.’ As the terms gained wider popularity, the various endings were dropped, leaving behind the term ‘radio.’ The first reference to ‘a radio’ as a noun (as in that big wooden box in the corner or the small plastic box in your car’s center console bluetoothing to the stereo)…well, that was the work of an advertising man named Waldo Warren.

An early appearance of the truncated word ‘radio’ is found in an interesting editorial by LeeDeForest, from a 1907 edition of Electrical World. He warned that unless government strictly oversaw regulation of the airwaves, “Radio chaos will certainly be the result.” Despite DeForest’s dismal outlook, the practice of radio has expanded greatly in the past one hundred years – and so have the terms. Radio’s given name ‘wireless’ now refers to that magical internet stream that you try to mooch off your neighbors so you can watch YouTube for free, and ‘the radio’ is the device or chip that your computer uses to do so!

The MusicMaster Nexus Server gives third-party software products instant, real-time access to MusicMaster’s database and scheduling intelligence. Primarily designed as an automation interface, the Nexus Server can easily connect with other software systems, such as traffic and billing, research analysis, and web services

With MusicMaster’s new Nexus Server, real-time access to your music scheduling data and scheduling rules becomes available directly through your automation system. Automation systems that are integrated with MusicMaster through the Nexus Server bring the power of MusicMaster from the PD or MD’s desk into the studio with a dynamic connection.

MusicMaster’s Nexus Server is an HTTP service application that can process requests from third-party systems across a local area network or the Internet, giving them access to MusicMaster’s music scheduling data and business intelligence. One Nexus Server can process requests for multiple MusicMaster databases.

Radio and our other music providers, have been asking for this functionality for some time. What is unique about the MusicMaster Nexus Server is that it has been designed to integrate with any systems wishing to do so.

Check out the Book of Excuses and find out what might be holding you back from embracing the future of music scheduling.