TARA DYER STOYLE: 2020 will be Year of The Queen Bee

In Last Sunday’s Albany Herald, Carlton Fletcher wrote a story about the new radio station that will be located inside the Pretoria Fields Brewery … Q102/The Queen Bee.

I want to thank him for such a well-written article, and I want to thank Tripp Morgan for investing in something invisible and having the confidence in me to build it into something amazing and manage it.

One thing I have done all the years I’ve been affiliated with radio is listen. And what I’ve heard has been people complaining about the state of radio and offering advice about how to make it better. Not only did I listen, I took it to heart.

We’re keeping the station’s genre a bit of a secret for now. What I can tell you is that it will be a culmination of hundreds of hours of selecting and loading thousands of songs that were each hand-picked for the listeners.

When I first started writing for The Herald, I wrote a column called “Radio Is Not Dead, It’s Been Corporatized.”

We plan to launch the station the first week of January and give corporate radio a run for their money. Besides being locally owned and operated, we will be very involved with the community. And all of our on-air staff (me, Kenny Mitchell, Nikki Miller, Carlton Fletcher, BoDean and The Poachers, This Solid Ground) are from around here.

There will be commercials — because we have to pay the bills — but we will limit those. And the music will be so damned good you won’t mind sitting through a few advertisements.

The studio will be accessible to the public. We invite you to come in and sit at the studio bar, plug in your earbuds and interact with the people on the air while drinking your favorite beer.

I started in radio when it was fun for the people on the air and for listeners. I want this community to have that feeling again.

It is election time so let me campaign … In January, when you set your radio presets, I hope every button will lead you to Q-102. I promise to play familiar songs you love, new and classic songs you’ve never heard, regional bands and up-and-comers who deserve to be on the radio, unique covers and live versions that aren’t played anywhere else. And enough music to ensure you won’t hear the same songs over and over.

I’m excited about the future of radio, and I hope y’all are too.

I hereby proclaim 2020 … The year of The Queen Bee.