Live from Your Basement...

By Rebecca Winters

Dreaming of radio stardom, or at least a few real-live listeners, Dan Schulz and Scott Wirkus broadcast the first Dan & Scott Show from the basement of an empty retirement home in Jackson, Wis. It was April Fools' Day, 1996, and Schulz and Wirkus, then 31 and 30, had maxed out their credit cards, quit their jobs at an ad agency and printing plant, and moved in to produce an Internet radio show.

These days, the Dan & Scott Show, a polished but off-color tribute to goofy guys' prank calling from dorm rooms everywhere, airs to an audience of 100,000 on a talk-radio website called eYada.com The site is different from the hundreds of AM and FM stations that now simultaneously stream their programming onto the Web. Schulz and Wirkus describe their show as "a thumbing of the nose at anyone who smells of authority." Like all Net radio, they don't answer to the FCC, and they toss the F word liberally in segments like "Penis Talk" and "This isn't phone sex, you dumb f___!"

Just days after Schulz and Wirkus started at eYada in February, one of their guests was Rick Rockwell, the notorious bachelor from Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Rockwell made a plea for more prospective brides, earning the Dan & Scott Show national media attention. "We started out at this stupid retirement home," says Schulz. "Now we're on Entertainment Tonight."

Long before they had even one fan, Schulz and Wirkus dreamed of being the morning team at a radio station. When it first became possible to send live audio over the Net, "we said, 'You know, this Internet thing is hot. I bet in six months we'll be rich,'" Schulz says. "That started two years of bill collectors' pounding on our doors, of family begging us, 'Please, don't do this. You had good jobs.'" Living on Spam and Jolly Good Soda, the two talked up their show in online news groups and at local colleges. As its popularity grew, the show hopped to different sites, finally landing at eYada.

Net radio made Schulz and Wirkus minor celebrities because traditional talk radio, dominated by endless rebroadcasts of old standbys Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, had no room for new players. "To get on the radio today you have to wait for somebody to die," says Bob Meyrowitz, founder of eYada. To deejay a Net radio show, though, you just need a computer and a perky connection to the Web. A company called Live365.com made Net broadcasting free and much easier than it used to be. Live365 has more than 5,000 broadcasters, with shows like Upbeat '80s and ALL Shania ALL Year Round. But even the most popular rarely draw more than 100 listeners. "Is it possible for any guy to do a show at home?" asks Meyrowitz. "Yes, and probably his mother will listen. Does anyone else care? Probably not."

Yet on the Net, where an audience can easily communicate in chat rooms, personalities emerge from the clutter. "If someone is truly engaging, word tends to get out," says Chris O'Hanlon, founder of SpikeRadio, a network in L.A. It sure worked for Schulz and Wirkus. "The lesson is, if you work hard and are a total wiseass, you can become a star on the Internet," says Wirkus. A visit from a rich bachelor helps too.

--By Rebecca Winters