Back before there was the internet, podcasts, Spotify, and a masked DJ named Marshmello with 30 million Instagram followers, a four-year-old named Billy Goldsmith had a radio. For fun, the boy would practice taking the radio apart and reassembling it in his family’s living room in Paonia, Colorado, a tiny town in the western part of the state. At night, in his bedroom, he would pick up stations broadcasting from Chicago, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, and Salt Lake City that played rock and roll, a sound unlikely to be found on the airwaves in Colorado in 1957.
Young Billy’s mind was blown. For the next 67 years, he would dedicate himself, single-mindedly and tirelessly, to discovering and sharing music he loved. His life’s work culminated in the creation of Radio Paradise, a streaming radio station that celebrates its 25th anniversary on February 14, 2025.
Listening to Radio Paradise is like experiencing a never-ending playlist created by your friend with the absolute-best taste, the person whose musical palate is aligned with yours and yet whose selections offer surprises and delights that land in your ear like a revelation. As I write this, the artists playing on Radio Paradise’s Main Mix (other mixes: Mellow, Rock, Serenity, and Global) include Stevie Wonder, the War on Drugs, Jimi Hendrix, Gone Gone Beyond, Bombino, Explosions in the Sky, Vampire Weekend, Michael Kiwanuka, and boygenius. Tuning in along with me are 20,000 people from 128 countries, including 1,012 in the Netherlands, 111 in Ukraine, and 1 in Bahrain. Every five songs or so, one of two melodic voices pops up, belonging to Goldsmith, who’s now 71 and goes by William, or to the youngest of his three daughters, Alanna Jane Goldsmith, age 40. The Goldsmiths rarely say more than a quick “thank you for listening” and a reminder that the station is “human curated,” an important message in the age of DJ X, Spotify’s AI radio personality.
Radio Paradise’s story is deeply personal for both generations of Goldsmiths, but it’s also about technology, early adoption, and creation of a dedicated, almost cultlike community of listeners. Since its humble beginnings in the early 2000s, the station hasn’t changed its mission: to share the best music experience possible, one free from corporate constraints and available to everyone. Now, Goldsmith faces his biggest challenge yet: delivering music selected by humans at a time of nearly human bots.
Isn’t the best algorithm your friends?”
Those are six words Goldsmith shares from a low couch at Radio Paradise’s headquarters in Eureka, where the station broadcasts all day, every day out of a space rented in a former land trust building. Filled with large floor plants, comfy sofas, good coffee, and a decibel counter (by request of the neighbors), it’s an inviting and (yes!) deeply human place. As Goldsmith speaks, he leans his lanky body back in his chair and opens his arms wide. His pose, along with his flowing white mane, gives him the look of a wizard beckoning me into a magical world of his design.
“Sophisticated algorithms are actually pretty amazing,” Goldsmith says. “They are so precise that they serve you one band after another that you’re almost guaranteed to like. That’s OK, but algorithms can back you into a corner. How will you know what else you may enjoy if you’re locked in an algorithm’s little box?” And that box feels like it’s getting smaller. It’s definitely growing duller. As Kyle Chayka points out in his book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Spotify’s “data alchemists” have found that the most generic songs attract the broadest audience (a topic that Liz Pelly also explores in her new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist).
“Generic” is not a word that describes Radio Paradise’s 25-year approach to delivering music to the world. Goldsmith’s is a bet on the tortoise—that it can keep pace with, if not outrun, multiple hares, be they broadcast radio from giants like iHeartRadio, Audacy, and Cumulus Media that seem to merge and consolidate every few years or music-delivery technologies from Napster to iTunes to Pandora to Spotify, the last of which is an undisputed juggernaut with a market cap north of $90 billion. Viewing the competition from his cozy perch in Eureka, Goldsmith is unfazed. “We’ve never needed to disrupt anything,” he says. “Just add something.” It’s a worldview that Goldsmith inherited from his father.
Taking Things Apart (And Putting Them Back Together)
William Goldsmith was born in Los Angeles but relocated to Colorado at the age of four when his father, Glenn, took a job with a flower-seed company. Five years later, the family moved back to California, settling in Gilroy, where Glenn founded Goldsmith Seeds. “Gardening was all my dad ever wanted to do,” says William.
Glenn had a remarkable talent for creating hybrids with petunias, marigolds, geraniums—producing flowers that looked nothing like their parent plants. He became one of the top breeders in the world and a legend in his industry, particularly for his breakout hit: a snapdragon that was bred to stay open, eliminating the “snap.” Glenn wasn’t one to offer advice to his son, but he showed the path to success by relentlessly pursuing his own vision with, to use a favorite term, stick-to-itiveness—a word his son never liked but one that perfectly defines William’s approach. The boy who had no interest in botany had another thing in common with Dad: an obsessive desire to take disparate parts and turn them into a more perfect whole.
William, the oldest of four boys all born within a five-year span, lived in his own world, a self-described nerd who was into maker culture before that had a name. Flowers were not for him. “We were as opposite as two kids could be,” says William’s brother Richard, who eventually went into their father’s business with the two other siblings. “My other brothers and I were all working on the farm and in the greenhouses; Bill was inside, the nerdy kid reading a book.”
As soon as William could hold a screwdriver, he was taking things apart—light switches, radios, TVs. On his way home from junior high, he would stop by the local TV repair shop and leave with a broken television. “We’d have three, four TVs in our bedroom with no cases on them, and he’d fix them,” says Richard. At age 11, William made a homemade transmitter and broadcast from a pirate radio station. When his broadcast interfered with police radios, he received a warning from the Federal Communications Commission. It wouldn’t be his last.
Research tells us that our brains’ memory systems are at their most efficient during late adolescence and early adulthood. That’s why the music we love later in life can be traced back to what we listened to most between the ages of 12 and 22.
The Bay Area music scene of the 1960s was foundational to Goldsmith’s teenage brain. In high school, he and his buddies would catch shows at Fillmore West, Winterland, and the Cow Palace. Bill Graham, rock’s first great impresario and unparalleled promoter of the San Francisco scene, would introduce the bands and performers Goldsmith still reveres to this day: Santana, Tower of Power, the Allman Brothers, Ravi Shankar, Miles Davis. (“Miles blew our minds,” says Goldsmith. “None of us were prepared for that.”)
Goldsmith preferred the school of rock to the curriculum at Gilroy High. “I just didn’t see traditional education providing a path to becoming a free-form DJ at a hippie radio station, the only job I wanted,” he remembers. In 1969, halfway through his sophomore year, he dropped out, though he got his GED a couple of years later. In 1972, he talked his way into a job at KERR, a tiny FM station in a cow pasture on the outskirts of Salinas. “It was owned by this crazy drunken couple that I never actually met. If they didn’t like something that we played on the radio, they would call us up and scream at us,” he says.
Goldsmith learned by doing, a tinkerer through and through. He figured out how to operate the mixing board, the transmitter, turntables, tape decks, microphones. Within a year, he was a late-night DJ at KLRB, a station in Carmel, spinning artists like Led Zeppelin, John Coltrane, Pete Seeger, and Tangerine Dream. He was 20 years old and already had the only job he’d ever wanted. He was also about to have a life-changing idea, something more like a vision.
Over espresso martinis with his daughter Alanna at Tavern 1888, a beloved spot (now gone) in the historic Eagle House, a few blocks from Radio Paradise’s studio, William reminisces about that vision he had at age 20: “I had this fantasy of sitting in a vast room filled with computers and spinning tape reels, having every song ever recorded at my fingertips. Maybe I could even run a radio station where I could play absolutely anything I wanted. And then to have that station fed through a satellite all over the world so people could listen to it.”
This was an impossible dream in 1973, the stuff of science fiction. “There might have been psychedelics involved,” interjects Alanna, who is assertive and outspoken compared with her laid-back father.
William responds with a broad, sly smile. Whatever the source of that epiphany, it would one day become real.
The path to Radio Paradise was anything but linear. Goldsmith ventured to roles at various stations, from Honolulu’s KPOI to WCAS in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He took on side gigs in electronics and TV to make ends meet—a necessity given the low salaries at independent radio stations in the era before corporate takeover. The decades came and went, along with so many artists and fads, and Goldsmith gravitated back to California, landing at Gilroy’s KFAT, then at KPIG, an indie station outside of Santa Cruz.
Wild Bill, as he was known on air at KPIG, was rapidly growing his legend as a maestro of free-form, eclectic radio. “There’s an openness in California that includes its music,” he says.
Another decade, another vision. In 1995, when most people were still accessing the internet via screeching modems that tied up their phone lines, Goldsmith somehow knew that a radio signal could be streamed over the internet. No one at the time was doing it, so Goldsmith taught himself how to code and took KPIG online. Broadcasting from tiny Freedom, California, one of the world’s first full-time streaming radio stations was born. Soon, Goldsmith began helping other stations set up their own online streams. A quarter century after he first imagined his dream radio station, it was now possible to play any song and share it with the entire world.
Paradise Founded
The year 2000 was a good time for Goldsmith and his then-wife, Rebecca, to launch their own station: Radio Paradise, named for the small Northern California town they called home. Achingly slow modems were already beginning to give way to DSL lines capable of streaming high-quality audio.
Radio Paradise would not answer to corporate sponsors or program directors with “zero musical taste.” Even better, it would feature “no pesky ads desperately selling their crap to the masses,” Goldsmith says.
The station continues to have no advertisers, no corporate underwriting, no marketing budget, and, crucially, no algorithm. Unlike NPR stations’ multiple pledge drives a year that can fill 10 to 20 minutes of each hour, Radio Paradise’s pledge drives take place over just two weeks a year and for just 20 seconds an hour.
The station’s connection to its audience has been as much a key to its success as its content and curation have. And Goldsmith’s belief in a business model based on audience support has never wavered. Back in 2001, when the station was seen as more of a quirky curiosity than a pioneer, Goldsmith told the San Jose Metro, “I gather information, and I pledge not to use it for a targeted market, and that’s got to be worth something.”
It is. In 2004, nearly a decade before Patreon made it second nature for anyone to toss a few bucks into a creative endeavor, listeners donated $120,000 to Radio Paradise, enough to cover the costs of bandwidth and song royalties as well as the minimal operating expenses of running the station out of a detached garage at William and Rebecca’s small three-bedroom house. By 2023, approximately 10 percent of the station’s 500,000 monthly listeners made contributions totaling $1.4 million annually. The 90 percent who don’t pay receive the exact same experience as the paying audience.
Finding Gold in Eureka
The Goldsmiths, along with a staff of about a dozen full- and part-time employees, find music in many of the ways we all do. They use Shazam (“a thing of great wonder and beauty”), Spotify (“Pretty fucking fabulous; though in a few years, 50 percent of its mixes will be produced by anonymous AI-generated sludge with no real emotional depth or real human feeling”), and old-school radio-dial station surfing while driving, which is how William became a Selena Gomez fan.
The crew also sift through CDs and MP3s sent by musicians, publicists, record labels, and members of Radio Paradise’s community Listener Forum. Scrolling through the thousands of posts offers a glimpse into a vibrant community of audiophiles in all their passionate, messy glory. It’s also a fascinating look at another one of Goldsmith’s discovery tools: human taste.
When a CD or digital download arrives, it first has to pass the album-art test: “If the cover is bad, there’s no chance that someone produced a quality piece of music and then released it with that cover,” Goldsmith says. Then there’s the five-seconds test: “If the first five seconds of the first song on an album is crap, I’m out.”
Would Radio Paradise play a song that most of the staff don’t like because it’s popular or works within a larger playlist? “Fuck no!” says Alanna, who serves as Radio Paradise’s CEO.
Alanna’s matter-of-factness was hard-won. At 16, she joined her mom on a spiritual pilgrimage to Bosnia and Herzegovina (then a few years removed from war), where she fell in love with a local tour guide. She moved there at 19 and, by the time she was 23, had two children with him. At 26, she left him and the country, spending the next four years fighting for custody of her kids in the Hague. (That’s the short version.) Like her father, and his father before him, Alanna knows who she is and what she wants, but finding her way back to California was a longer journey.
The youngest of five children, Alanna describes her childhood as “pure chaos.” Unsurprisingly, music was a constant battleground. Her brother, Hopi, was into Megadeth—“and played it loud! Then Laurel would switch it to 4 Non Blondes.” Alanna herself cycled through genres like she was changing outfits: Garth Brooks and Brooks & Dunn during her country phase, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry in her oldies period, Wu-Tang Clan and Tupac in her rap era, and a stint with the Chieftains and Loreena McKennitt during an Irish music moment. “One year,” she adds with a laugh, “I listened to nothing but Tchaikovsky and Beethoven.” (It’s hard to imagine what Spotify’s DJ X would do with that genre-exploding mix.)
Her father wasn’t much of a presence. The boy who couldn’t stop tinkering with radios became a man fixated on revamping indie stations across America, often at the expense of his family, which he now regrets. “We didn’t really see him much,” Alanna says.
In 2022, everything changed for dad and daughter. That was when Rebecca, William’s second wife, stepped away from Radio Paradise and the couple decided to end their relationship as well. William gave her nearly everything: their shared savings, their house. He kept Radio Paradise.
He was 69 years old, and he had yet another big idea: Radio 2050, a talk-and-music vertical featuring conversations with people working on small-scale solutions to the biggest problems facing the planet.
His first call was to Alanna, who was living in Eureka and working as the executive director of Humboldt Made, a local economic development nonprofit. Despite years of distance, they talked for hours about Radio 2050. They kept talking throughout a spontaneous spring trip to New York City to see David Byrne’s Broadway show American Utopia. It was the first time they had spent more than 12 consecutive hours together.
William moved to Eureka shortly after their trip. There, he joined Alanna and his two other daughters, as well as nine of his grandchildren. Always keen to recombine disparate parts, William bought a large house, creating what he fondly refers to as “a family hub.” Nestled among the redwoods, the home has a fire pit and a hot tub and is surrounded by deer, foxes, bears, and skunks. Filled with books, instruments, children, and grandchildren, the place is its own little paradise.
Most days, Goldsmith can be found in Radio Paradise’s cave-like broadcast studio, with its redbrick walls, state-of-the-art acoustics, and back-end technology of his own design. On the walls of the station’s small kitchen are a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” a framed Abbey Road album cover, and a letter that reads:
Six weeks ago, I came to France to be with my dad. He was dying of cancer. The pain overwhelmed him at times. I introduced him to Radio Paradise some months ago. He loved the Mellow Mix. During his last days at home, I put Radio Paradise on for him every day. He told me that listening was like “being bathed in peace.” When he was admitted to the hospital, we took a Bluetooth speaker so that he could continue to listen. He was listening until the day before he died. Thank you for bathing my dad in peace. Listening to the Mellow Mix gave him moments of escape and respite from the pain. You have my heartfelt thanks. —Caroline
Many Radio Paradise listeners likely have their own version of that story. I know I do. During my visit with the Goldsmiths, I took the opportunity to share how the station’s Main and Mellow mixes became the soundtrack to my deepening relationship with my girlfriend—a love that blossomed during the pandemic. Another reason I wanted to meet the creator of Radio Paradise was to ask him how “Words of Wisdom,” a big-feelings ballad by Jump, Little Children, ended up on the Mellow Mix.
I first heard “Words of Wisdom” shortly after my father died, and the song’s chorus—“If you will go and not return / Leave me some words of wisdom / If I cannot follow anymore / I promise to teach what I have learned”—was exactly the words I needed to hear during a difficult time.
Goldsmith told me he’d received a CD from a fan of the North Carolina band. Even though the first track didn’t pass his five-seconds test, Goldsmith broke his own rule and listened to Jump, Little Children’s whole album. The boy who once tinkered with a radio so he could expand his own musical universe was now a man willing to change his own very human algorithm for selecting music. Whatever he heard in it inspired him to add “Words of Wisdom” to his ever-expanding, hand-curated playlist and beam it out from his wizard’s lair, where it found its way to me at the moment I needed it most.•
Larry Smith is the founder and editor of the community storytelling project Six-Word Memoirs and the cowriter, with Melanie Abrams, of The Joy of Cannabis.
