Originally posted at VoyageSTL.com
Today we’d like to introduce you to Curt Price.
Hi Curt, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
The story of my podcast, Let’s Go Blues Radio, began a long, long time ago. I’m 46 years old, and I’ve been a die-hard St. Louis Blues fan (and STL Sports fan in general) as far back as I can remember. The minute I saw a Blues game on TV in a bowling alley when I was a little kid back in the early 80’s, I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough hockey talk on the radio, and when the game was on TV, I’d sit 2ft from the screen and just take it in and cheer for our hometown team. And when the evening sports newscast came on, I’d often watch Ch.5, record Ch.4, and then quickly flip to Ch.11 or any other station just so I could be sure to get as much Blues news from as many sources as I could. I was a living, breathing, hockey sponge.
It wasn’t long before I started playing hockey in the street & driveway with my brothers and friends and going to games at The Old Arena (still the best place I’ve ever seen a hockey game).
Adam Oates ended up being my favorite player growing up and I modeled my style of play after him. When I started playing organized hockey, I was obviously #12 because of Oates. I went on to play in men’s leagues growing up and in college as well. Then after graduating, it was 15+ years of men’s leagues (mostly roller hockey) in the St. Louis area. From All-American in South County to Oak Hill in Belleville, IL.
A few years after graduating college, I had a lot of fun talking hockey on local discussion forums. PostNet, then STL Today, and various others. I decided to start my own Blues fan site and discussion forum in 2001, LetsGoBlues.com. It was quite popular in its day…and it’s still active, with a loyal user base even though a lot of traffic has migrated to Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms over the last so many years.
In 2011, the chatter in the discussion forums was that there simply wasn’t enough hockey talk on tv or the radio. We had a pretty good hockey team but the airwaves were dominated by Cardinals and Rams talk…even during the hockey season. And while talking hockey online in a discussion forum was fun, there wasn’t that face to face or live one on one aspect. You had to go to a sports bar if you wanted to hear hockey talk in this town. But the quality of hockey is hit or miss in those venues.
Podcasting was still in its infancy in 2011. Some people had podcasts, but it wasn’t a widespread thing yet. And most of the podcasts back then were pretty rough. So I thought it might be fun to start a podcast specifically for St. Louis Blues hockey. I mean, after all… there wasn’t a Blues hockey podcast out there at the time. They just didn’t exist. And this would be the very first one. So I looked into what it would take to set it all up and to eventually tie it into my existing website. I was tinkering around with some podcasting plugins on my site just to see how it all functioned, and Jeff Ponder (a regular poster on my site & a knowledgeable hockey mind) noticed for a brief moment a “Podcast” link in the site menu bar. So he sent me a message, asking me if I was thinking about doing a podcast…and if so, he wanted to be a part of it. I always respected Jeff’s opinions as a passionate Blues fan, so I was like, sure thing! Jeff and I recruited Jeff Quirin, who owned bluenotezone.com at the time, as the 3rd member of our team…and then we got to planning.
The show was initially called St. Louis Blues Radio. (because we’re a Blues podcast, and the idea was that this is the kind of stuff that SHOULD be discussed more on sports talk radio… at least in our minds…so “St. Louis Blues Radio” was it.)
Things kind of took off from there rather quick as we started doing one show a week. We secured a recording studio at SIUE during our first season which gave us access to high-quality mics and a room with good acoustics. We did a number of shows there… as well as a few at Nebula in St. Louis, which was a sponsor of our show for a while and gave us a conference room to record the show.
Initially, our show would get around 150 people a week listening to the show…which was amazing for us at the time. But I’m the kind of guy who is always tinkering and looking to improve things. And with all of us having to travel each week to get to the studio, we wanted something more convenient. So we experimented with Google Hangouts On Air. Which allowed us to do the show remotely from our homes, it was recorded to YouTube, and we’d just pull the audio from that for the podcast. Of course, we had to acquire decent microphones, but if you wanna be a podcaster, you gotta have good mics.
Around season #2, Jeff Quirin left the show as life tends to get in the way sometimes. And I asked my long-time friend, passionate hockey fan, former CBC goalie, and hockey encyclopedia Bill Day if he would join the show. He agreed and Bill has been with the show ever since.
It was also around this time that I decided to change the name of the show to Let’s Go Blues Radio. This would tie it into my website more, AND we didn’t want to confuse anyone who may think that the St. Louis Blues organization was in some way responsible for the content of our show.
We continued the remote broadcast setup when Bill came on board, and it continued to work VERY well. And I noticed that during post-production on the audio file, there wasn’t much editing to do. We didn’t have many lulls in conversation, there weren’t many screw-ups… we had a show that flowed really well and sounded really good. And I attribute that to the guys on our show really knowing their stuff and being able to talk at length and in detail about the topic at hand.
With that going so well, I floated the idea of doing a LIVE broadcast on YouTube. And after some discussions, we went for it. And it went really well. So well that we eventually ditched our previous format and morphed our show into a straight-up live broadcast every week where people can not only listen to our show but also watch us on YouTube because we all used webcams. We had listener interaction during the show. Which was fantastic. And for a number of years, we’d let some listeners come on the show with us to talk hockey live on the show! And that has been the basic format of the show ever since…although now, our interaction with our listeners is restricted to the YouTube & Facebook comments made during the show. Having listeners join the show live on air ended up extending the show quite a bit, so we had to limit that aspect of it.
Our show has grown exponentially since then and we’ve been doing shows year-round now as well. During the offseason the past few years, Jeff Ponder (who spent some time as a credentialed Blues media member and has some contacts) has done weekly interviews with some fantastic guests.
We’ve had top shelf hall of fame guests on our show like Bernie Federko & Grant Fuhr… fun names from back in the day like Ken Wilson & Zip Rzeppa… and some other guests we’ve had on are: Chris Kerber, Greg Millen, Jeff Brown, Joe Micheletti, Ray Ferraro, Lubos Bartecko, Lou Korac, Erica Weston, Angella Sharpe, Jeremy Rutherford, Ben Hochman, Tom Calhoun, Carlo Colaiacovo… and the list just keeps going.
Nowadays, we generally get around 3-5k podcast listens per month, which is where the vast majority of our listeners are. And we tack on another 300-400 monthly views on YouTube. Back during the Blues cup run, we were getting 7-8k listens. So as interest in the team picks up, so does our listener count…which is expected. I like those numbers a lot because we’re a niche podcast… a hockey podcast… for one team… in the midwest. Our target market isn’t huge… so I’m proud of the numbers we bring in. Especially when you hear other podcasters with niche shows being happy about getting 50 listens after a month.
We’ve had some fantastic sponsors come on board, especially recently. Manscaped, Center Ice Brewery (in St. Louis), and ID Life. And we sure do have a lot of fun promoting their stuff. The ads we create and run for them have the same vibe as our show. Loose and funny, but with some amazing info.
Today, you’ll find a bunch of Blues podcasts out there. Most don’t last too long. They’ll do a handful of shows and fizzle out. A couple are pretty good and we’ve become friends with them. A number of others have mentioned that they heard our show and saw how much fun we had doing the show, and decided to try it themselves. But I’m proud to say that our show is the original St. Louis Blues hockey podcast. We’ve been going strong since 2011 and we have an absolute blast on the show. We have fun, we kid around, we drink beer, and we bring solid hockey talk…. we also bring it in hockey trivia contests, where we tend to beat other Blues podcasts. (true story… you know who you are fellas! Wink, wink!)
Talking hockey is a blast. But talking hockey with guys who REALLY know & understand the sport because they grew up with the sport, have been around the sport for decades, played the sport, lived the sport, etc… and getting into some fantastic discussions & breakdowns (and the occasional healthy debate) is what it’s all about. I love talking hockey with Jeff & Bill every week. And I hope those who listen come away feeling good about what they heard, have a better insight on the topics we discussed and want to tune in again.
We don’t do this for the money. Most podcasters don’t. Our show is truly by the fans, for the fans. We honestly just love talking quality hockey… and this all started because local radio stations just weren’t talking hockey, and when they did, they often couldn’t speak their mind and be honest about players or ownership. We don’t have a corporation to answer to…so we can tell it like it is without the hammer coming down from above. So we decided to do it ourselves and put it out there to see if anyone else wanted to listen. And as it turns out… they do.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
One struggle was when Google Hangouts On Air went away and we had to find a new vessel to use for our live shows. As it turns out, many podcasters were doing things the way we did them in terms of using Hangouts On Air to do a show with hosts joining remotely. Thankfully, there were a handful of options to pick from and we found one that works very well for us and our show. Maybe another struggle was when our podcast host had some major issues and nothing was getting published. New shows weren’t being sent out. And it took about two weeks for them to fix it. Since our show is very timely and needs to get out quick, we couldn’t hang around and wait. We had to switch hosts after about a week. So migrating all of our content during the 2019 season, right before playoffs and the epic Stanley Cup run, was a bit of a crazy time. I heard they lost A LOT of customers over that. But our show didn’t miss a beat.
And I guess with any podcast, you’re susceptible to technical issues (technological differences as we say on the show). Especially with our show that is live streamed. So we’re at the mercy of internet connections & any computer or software hiccup that may pop up. It happens from time to time. If we weren’t a live show, it wouldn’t be a big deal…but when you’re live, you gotta fix it fast.
I know when Jeff was doing a recorded show for the interview series, he realized at the end of the interview that his recorder had stopped recording. The guest was very gracious and agreed to redo the interview. I think every podcaster has a story or two like these.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Lets Go Blues Radio?
We’re the original St. Louis Blues Hockey Podcast. Going strong since 2011. We talk hockey in a live weekly hockey podcast, specializing in St. Louis Blues hockey talk.
I own LetsGoBlues.com, I co-host the Lets Go Blues Radio show. Produce the show, create the on-screen graphics, post-production, editing, I run the Twitter account, manage some of the advertisers, create promotional material (sponsors and our own), video & audio production, t-shirt, sticker, etc. design creation for our shop.
What sets us apart from others is our live weekly shows & our hockey IQ. Few podcasts do live shows. And I’m proud to say we do it, and we do it well. I’ve seen other shows try to do live shows, and they’re pretty rough with a lot of downtime and awkward moments. And what also sets us apart is that we’re heading into our 10th season. We’re not just the longest-running Blues hockey podcast, we’re one of the longest-running podcasts out of all hockey podcasts…ever.
We take pride in what we do and we have a ton of fun doing it. Hopefully, our listeners are entertained and come away with a better understanding of the topics we discussed on that week’s show.
Our show is a year-round show, with shows every week. Live during the season and in the offseason some are recorded interview shows, and also some live shows with all of us in studio. It just depends on how much there is to talk about and how many guests we have lined up.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Humor. It’s all about having fun…and translating that fun into entertainment for those listening.
I think you’ve got to be entertaining with a sports podcast. It’s real easy to get droll and boring when discussing sports, stats, recaps, etc.
You’ve got to have a personality that makes things entertaining. I try to make things fun for our audience.
If you sound monotone/boring/serious during the show, you’re going to have a snooze-fest of a show. People just aren’t going to listen…and if they do, they’ll zone out.
I think if you really know your subject matter, it’s super easy to be laid back and have a sense of humor about stuff. I approach my podcast like I approach life. I have fun with it. The day it stops being fun is the day I stop doing the show. We’ve been going for ten years now…and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon because it’s an absolute blast.
Having quality co-hosts is a must. Jeff & Bill are fantastic to work with. We play off each other very well, we come prepared, we know the subject matter like the backs of our hands, and our senses of humor work well together. I think that translates into a successful show for us.
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