Meet David Dahl of Yargmetal and Yargcountry

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Dahl.

Thanks for sharing your story with us David. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Everyone associated with Yargmetal has a serious love of Hard Rock and Metal. We wanted to share that love of music with as many people as possible. Online streaming obviously seemed like the best way to accomplish this. Yargmetal.com is an online radio station that we knew we could have a global reach. Everybody knows this now, but the internet changed the radio business because of the low-cost entry.

In the beginning, the technology wasn’t there yet for a quality product, so we had to be patient. Bandwidth was an issue and the software wasn’t mature, so the feed would cut out and the listener would experience various problems. Since then, we’ve come a long way. Most international flights have Wi-Fi now and just last week I was able to listen to our station over the Atlantic, which I thought was pretty cool.

We also just started a country station (yargcountry.com) and it’s in the very early stages. I’m not necessarily a country music guy myself, but we’ve already managed to assemble a great team of people who are. I do listen to it though and I’m excited to see both our stations continue to grow and expand.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I’d say our biggest challenge now is figuring out how to keep our audience engaged for long periods of time. Initially, we ran into technical issues and equipment issues. The site would go dead for periods of time. Nothing worse than dead air in the radio business. We’d lose people and we’d be fighting for weeks just to get back what we had lost. This was happening sporadically and it was pretty frustrating. Even when things were hard, we didn’t lose sight of our goal and we kept working.

The question we’re asking now is this: how do we get people to keep coming back to Yarg even if they already enjoy the music. How do we maintain a dedicated listening base? We already have a great product, we just need to streamline our services to make it easy for people to come back so they can keep listening to the music with us. Our numbers show that if someone listens to us for around three hours then they’re likely to make us a regular stop.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Yargmetal and Yargcountry – what should we know?
As a global radio station, we have a passion for sharing stellar music with our listeners. We really work hard to make sure we have a quality product, and in this case, that means quality tunes.

I’m most proud of the fact we have no on-air commercials and our Apps at Google Play and iTunes are free. In many ways, this sets us apart from the competition. We’ve worked hard to find and play music that you’ll likely not hear anywhere else. For example, we play a Southern California band called Black Sabbitch, which is an all-female Black Sabbath tribute band that makes appearances in San Diego.

They really rock and I don’t think anyone else plays them regularly, if at all. This is a perfect example of what we are about. We also play bands like Sheavy from Canada, 220 Volt and Mean Streak from Sweden. I doubt you’ll hear them somewhere else, which is a shame because they are quite talented. We air popular bands but we tend to gravitate toward their more obscure work.

Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
My brother Brad Dahl deserves a ton of credit. He selects a huge portion of what we play. He also helps decide how the station runs and sounds. It’s a great relationship because even though our taste in music can vary when I need a specific format or song played, he does it without hesitation. I couldn’t ask for a better person to help me with this. He plays requests, which can be done through the App or by emailing yargmetal@gmail.com.

And we would be nothing without our staff: Rob and Ryan DeBlieck, Marcos Pelayo, David Eichstadt, Chad Showwalter, Laura Colby and Joe Masterson. They help with marketing, interviewing and the technical side of the business (hardware and software). They are all super cool people and some are a little crazy and that is what I love about them.

Contact Info:

• Address: 3823 Skyline Road Carlsbad, CA. 92008
• Website: yargmetal.com and yargcountry.com
• Phone: (619)871-3007 and (630)470-4150
• Email: yargmetal@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yargradio/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yargmetal/ and https://www.facebook.com/yargcountry/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/yargmetal and https://twitter.com/yargcountry

Image Credit:
M Shadows, Biff Byford

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