Becoming an online DJ is not a way to get wealthy, acknowledges Rich Vance, an Oak Harbor native who has produced “Briefcase Full of Rock” from his bedroom for nine years.
In fact, Vance, 46, figures he loses about $10 a month from his home-based radio show, which streams blues and “classic rock” all day every day.
But making money isn’t the point.
“I touch people’s lives and make a difference,” he said recently. “I’m the guy who plays that one song that makes your day, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world. I call myself the Minister of Rock because it is a ministry — just not in the religious sense.”
Vance plays music over the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week at www.briefcasefullofrock.com. He plays about 12 songs per hour from a hard drive that holds 3,000 songs, he said.
That’s 288 songs per day and 2,016 songs per week. He hand-picks each of them, though they play randomly and automatically.
For most of the week, that’s what you get on the site: one song after another with no vocal commentary. The usual audience consists of “two or three people, I’d say.”
But on Saturday nights, from 7:30 p.m. to midnight, Vance goes live to a relatively large crowd — as many as 30 people.
Wearing a headset, he broadcasts over the Internet in real-time, making use of a site called Second Life (www.secondlife.com), which lets computer-users chat, flirt, make song requests and even dance together — all virtually. Most participants live in the U.S., though some are in Europe.
During the show, Vance chooses songs from his entire three terabytes of storage, which he said represents more than 500,000 songs. That makes for a lot more variety than is possible during the rest of the week.
The live show takes the form of an online pool party. Once visitors download and install the Second Life software, they can flirt, dance and swim together. Each visitor to the site is represented by an avatar — a character that looks real, moves realistically and is capable of nearly every action a real person could make.
“It’s called Second Life because you can create an entire world,” Vance said. “It’s not a game, where you have set goals. You can buy a plot of land and build a house, or a K-Mart. You can hang out and have an affair with someone in California if you want.”
In short, the Second Life virtual world offers possibilities not available in the real world.
A friend he met on the site was once a keyboard player in a band and an avid dancer, he said. A car accident destroyed her ability to dance, but she dances virtually now through Second Life and other sites that feature dance clubs.
“Rich is a great DJ and really inspires me to dig in and dance my pixels off!” said a Sonoma County, Calif., woman who participates in Second Life under the screen name Phoenixa Sol. “I don’t know how he comes up with the perfect music for holidays like Labor Day and Grandparents’ Day.”
In fact, Vance met the woman who got him started in online radio during an online dance session.
“We talked about music for two hours,” he recalled.
Vance, who is physically and mentally disabled and lives mainly off Supplemental Security Income, has a “deep, abiding passion for music,” especially blues and classic rock, he said. He doesn’t play an instrument but has been a fan and collector all his life.
He’s made a living washing dishes and running a database for a real-estate agency, but what he’d really like to do, he said, is work as a professional DJ. Turning his hobby into a business would require making money at it, which would, in turn, require advertisers.
But it seems unlikely his small number of listeners could attract advertisers, he acknowledged. His only other option is working for an FM station. But there are none on Whidbey, and “I doubt I could start one.”
For now, he’s content to go online live once a week with his usual opening: “Hey, it’s your Minister of Rock, DJ Rock and Roll, and it’s 7:30 Saturday night — time for another pool party!”
