By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Josh David has been providing a soundtrack for Grand Rapids for more than a year. Most of that time out of the den in his house.
Now Towpath Radio, and its sibling country spin-off River Rat Country have a new home.
Both stations are internet radio, so they have a hyper local focus but can each listeners around the globe.
The station registers 5,000-6,000 sessions a month.
The audience may not be large, he said, but the numbers don’t capture all the folks who hear the station playing in shops in the village. More and more stores, he said, inquire about how to play the station. And more businesses are advertising as well.
“People are latching onto this project,” David said earlier this summer.
While Towpath Radio isn’t intended to be a big money-maker, the advertising revenues do help to cover the station’s costs including music licensing. Trying to turn a profit would make it “more like a job.” But for David and the volunteer disc jockeys who host shows this is a passion project a throwback to the former days of radio before automation and corporate-think took over.
The new studio resides in a small barn off an alley in downtown Grand Rapids. The former radio professional said the studio is built like any of those he had worked in during his 15 year career that started while he was still a student at Springfield High. It’s actually a little larger than the one he worked out of in Petoskey, Michigan.
The other disc jockeys still use the remote technology to do their shows.
The radio is now registered with an organization that catalogs internet radio, and has its own uniform call sign, WTRP-DB Grand Rapids, which stands for W-TowPath Radio – Digital Broadcast.
Still to be finished is more welcoming entryway for the public.
The initial concept, which David developed while on sick leave because of suspected case of COVID-19 that proved a false alarm, was a station that played the hits from the 1950s through 1980s. River Rat Country launched in spring, features classic country, or as the promo says “country with a twang.”
He’s added news coverage, picking up minutes from meetings, and now with the studio he wants to do more live interviews.
This summer when a tractor-trailer crashed into a house in the village and the driver, suffering from a mental breakdown, fled, and was later found dead, David was able to report the incident as it was happening.
“We’ve been able to be the voice for this part of the county, reporting on the new housing development that’s going into Grand Rapids, along with stuff county and statewide,” he wrote earlier in the summer.
Having a studio isn’t the end of the dream. He’d like to expand to help people in the community record their own podcasts. That would be one way to bring the community into the project.
The larger dream, David said, was eventually to have a studio right on Front Street, with a more public presence.
