Co-written with Scott Fybush:
One of the joys traveling the country is still finding the unique radio programming in each city. Last month there was the station owner doing multiple live shows from a county fair simultaneously on his Hot AC and Oldies stations in El Centro CA and the Mexican CHR proclaiming itself “Arbitron Rated #1” in 2026. When we arrived in Las Vegas this week ahead of NAB Show, of course we spent some time sampling iHeart’s new “Neon 93.1” and Lotus’ upgraded “98.9 Hank-FM“, but had already streamed them when each launched.
So scanning the FM dial in our rental car, we were quickly drawn to something new on 99.7 HD2. After hearing a pop-punk song that about internet service followed by a reggae song about bandwidth, Scott Fybush and I discovered a blog post from local internet service provider ISP.net introducing their new station that launched in January and we quickly realized they had discovered a way to make radio marketing fresh.
The post started, “Let’s face it: the worst part of radio is the music. You’re driving down the Strip, trying to focus on what really matters—high-speed microwave internet reliability—and suddenly, some Top 40 hit interrupts your train of thought.” They described the programming as “a revolutionary listening experience designed for the true isp.net superfan. We’ve cut the clutter, the DJ banter, and the art, leaving only what you crave: unadulterated, non-stop promotion of our service offerings.”
Whether it’s a reggae jam called “No Buffer, No Cry,” the metal anthem “Don’t Fear the Outage” or the grunge track “Smells Like Low Latency,” “ISP.net Radio” had the radio in our rental Kia rocking on the way to the east side of downtown Las Vegas to meet up with CEO C.J. Sattler and CTO Kevin Hayes.
“You’re the first radio people who’ve noticed this,” Sattler tells us as we settle into the gaming chairs that line the conference table near the entrance to one of the company’s two data centers.
What’s now ISP.net is the successor to an earlier wireless internet provider that had taken on a big project, providing microwave data links to connect all the pieces of the “Highway Stations,” the chain of FM signals along the I-15 corridor that have been on the air since 1980, tracing their roots to Howard Hughes.
In exchange for internet service for the station’s current version (on HD1, it plays dance music as “Vibe 99.7,”) KHYZ offered ISP.net the use of its HD2 channel – and after a year of playing “normal” music, Sattler and Hayes decided to have some fun doing something different.
After spending a weekend kicking around ideas and terminology from the tech world, Sattler plugged in to Claude and Gemini with prompts to create lyrics for “songs” that would sound familiar, but not quite so familiar as to create copyright issues. Armed with lyric sheets talking about DNS servers, spectrum analyzers and the overpriced convention hall internet service, Sattler then used Suno AI to make the music, and ISP.Net radio was unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
While they weren’t first to use AI generated music to promote a brand 24/7, what ISP.net and Slice last year are showing is there are no wrong ways to market on the radio now. Content and marketing lines should be blurred. Listeners don’t want 8-10 minute stopsets, they’re used to influencers selling them on social media whether they want to or not. Alan Jackson was “Crazy About a Mercury” decades ago. Now perhaps eliminate the middleman and find a songwriter to pen a three minute advertising jingle to be the song of the summer.
If so, perhaps 99.7 KHYZ-HD2 will help be the reason why.
Click here to listen to ISP.net Radio.
