Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Alex Horwell, founder of Pineapple Cast. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alex, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
The idea of starting Pineapple Cast all came from wanting to promote the music that I loved. Everything started on University of Tampa’s radio station WUTT 1080AM in the spring of 2019. This is where I started a radio show called The Pineapple. The actual origin of finding a successful show started in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania on their radio station, WWEC 88.3. In the spring of 2017, I started two different radio shows: Endless Summer (a show all about summer vibe music that I ran with my roommate/best friend to learn more about how to work the equipment) and The Pump (my main show all about fitness and motivation). One year after starting those shows (spring 2018), I transferred from Elizabethtown College to The University of Tampa and was determined to bring “The Pump” to Tampa. It was rebranded as “The Pumptastic Radio Show” and gained basically zero listens in my first semester at UT. From there, I took a break from the radio and just focused on my schooling. My two passions have always been fitness and music. It was mid-fall of 2017 that I was fooling around with ideas and decided to try making a completely different show all about my other passion, music (specifically reggae music). That’s how The Pineapple was born.
Now, with this show I also had a hard time getting listeners, but I was actually having a lot more fun with it. I would post videos on my Instagram of me playing some of my favorite bands on the air and they would actually reply to me! That was insane so me! I was on the air spring of 2018-2020, and we all know what happened in spring 2020. I wasn’t really thrilled with how things were being ran in the UT radio station from fall 2019 to our shut down in spring 2020, so I was already looking for a new platform. One month after the Covid shut down, I started to go crazy. I love staying busy and always having a purpose. I spent so much time working out and improving my physique, but no matter how much progress I made with that, my passion for music still suffered because there were no concerts, very little new music, and it just made me sad. This is where it all changed.
I reached out to my friend Chris. Chris and I had been friends for about two years at that time, and we actually met each other volunteering at Reggae Rise Up. We loved the same music and he knew about my radio show. I pretty much just called him up and was like “dude, I’m going crazy with nothing to do, so I’m thinking about bringing my radio show back but as a podcast… I need a cohost.” Immediately he was interested and that’s where Pineapple Cast was born! I sold a few posters, bought a condenser mic off of eBay, and did some research on how to get our show out there. Our first episode “The Rough Draft” aired on April 26th, 2020. It was kind of a rough start, haha. The first really 30 episodes are NOTHING like what the show has become today. It’s almost a completely different show actually. It was covid times, so we had no guests, there wasn’t a lot of new music to report on, but it was an outlet for me and Chris to just have fun and have some sort of social interaction every week. The show really started off focusing on our personal lives, new reggae music that dropped each week, and then we had a few random segments that would change. The only ones that actually still remain today are Deep Thoughts (all about random silly thoughts we have in the middle of the night) and Florida Man (all about just crazy stories where people have Florida man in their heart. But the main message of the show has always been promoting the music that we love!
Fast forward to late fall 2020, this is where the show started to pick up and changed into what it is today. Our friends Greg and Molly joined the team! Greg was actually one of the original listeners back when I was on the radio. He would send me videos all the time from shows that he went to so I could post them. I always thought he was such a cool guy. At the time they were joining we also attended our first festival, Nature Coast Music Festival… I could go on for a while about that festival but I’m just going to say definitely look it up, it was INSANE! IT was a reggae camping festival that happened in the middle of Covid. Crazy! But it was at this festival that we got our first actual guests on the show, Matty Cole of Gorilla Panic and the amazing Kenny Mullins (singer of Resinated and aka KNEX). That man is amazing. He also put together the whole festival. But from here, Greg, Molly, Chris, and I went on to interview a bunch of bands, not every week yet, but it was like one or two a month which was big for us!
From here, we just kept pushing. We were on a roll! Going into the summer of 2021 it ended up being mostly just me, Greg and Molly running the interviews, and we started hitting big interviews almost every week. Then in September, we got the BIG ONE! We got to interview the Sugarshack team and that’s when things got wild!!! Those guys are so awesome!! From that day, we actually created a really good relationship with them and travel up there a lot to watch bands record sessions. Greg is actually their official chef now which is really cool! That man is such a good cook! But I always like to think of our relationship with Sugarshack like Peter Parker and Tony Stark. We’re Peter Parker just looking up at them like, “I wanna be like you when I grow up!” They’ve inspired us and so many different people. We do things differently, but we always love how they’re always able to make every experience so magical! Since then, we’ve been getting a bunch of really awesome musicians on the show. It’s so awesome getting a chance to promote all of this talent and just really help people to discover new music. That’s what it’s all about!
Fast forward to today, we’ve really started to expand. We no longer brand ourselves as “a podcast by reggae fans for reggae fans.” Our message now is “Listen Local.” When you think of it, everyone starts at a local level! Without local musicians, there is no giant headliner. Every musician you love was playing gigs at a local bar at some point, and what we do is try to find those people and give them the promotion they need. And with this new message, we’ve grown beyond reggae. People don’t realize it but the St. Pete/Tampa area is home to SO MANY amazing musicians! Many of which can’t even be categorized in one genre. Look at a band like Anthill Cinema, they’re INSANE. Everyone in that band is an outstanding musician. Their music is like rock, funk, and a bunch of other sounds. We saw them at their latest album release party with rapper Jon Ditty and they played a cover of a song off the Superman: Man of Steel soundtrack, like with electric guitars, drums, keyboard and all, it was the most epic thing I’ve seen in my life. This is why we do what we do! We want to help undiscovered talent blossom! That’s our goal!
I also want to share that we were just officially named #1 Podcast in Tampa Bay by Creative Loafing’s Best of the Bay.
Awesome – How did you get into your industry?
It’s really interesting when I think about how I got into the music industry, It really comes down to growing up loving live music. When I was younger, I played guitar all of the time and always used my love for music as an escape. I remember also going out to dinner with my parents and always going somewhere that had someone playing music. I grew up in a resort town in New Jersey so live music at a restaurant was very common. I was always gravitating to different genres when I was younger and never really found a style of music that I really loved until I got into high school. I remember playing pool in my friend’s basement, and someone put on Dirty Head’s “Cabin By the Sea” and I was hooked. They were the ones that got me into the reggae scene. From then on, I knew I had to go see them live. It was awful when I lived in New Jersey because the closest venue was about 2 hours away. Once I moved down to Florida, in college, finding the music I love got much easier! There were multiple venues all within 30 minutes away, and the reggae scene was much bigger.
As far as what we do for people, we promote! We do our best to get the word out for bands who are extremely talented and don’t have enough listeners. So many people, these days, just turn on the radio and stick to listen to whatever is playing. They don’t realize the amazing music that can be produced from a band that lived right down the street. With our newer “non genre specific” approach, we’ve created a new goal of trying to put people on to genres they may have never listened to o their own. Everyone knows about today’s pop, rap and rock, but what about funk? What about reggae and underground rap. There are so many great musicians out there that are amazing because they don’t even fit into a single genre. We always love promoting the local levels of music the most because they’re the ones we can see grow first hand. It’s so rewarding seeing a band you love grow and get bigger and bigger because of your support.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
Promoting is what we do, and we’re always looking for more creative ways to do it. The most basic way that we promote things is by talking about it on the show, but when we need the extra kick, we do some skits on instagram. I have a short acting background from high school, so this definitely comes in hand when putting together these videos. I like to use character acting to make funny videos to promote events. Two of the best character that I’ve come up with are Sahara Steve and Local Man. Sahara Steve is our camping festival expert! It thought of that idea in fall 2021. We had this crazy camping festival that we would go to called Nature Coast Music Festival. This festival was always huge for us because it gave us the chance to get a ton of content. I wanted to give them some extra promo because it was such an exciting event for us. I started to think of the idea of having a crazy tour guide for camping festivals who was obsessed with blueberry goat cheese. The goat cheese joke came from one of our friends talking about it for months and then forgetting it at home when leaving for the festival. But so, with this character, we created all of these wacky skit getting people hyped for the festival and teach them a little bit about how to best prepare. He was a fan favorite! He even got the chance to come out on stage during the festival and announce the headlining band.
Local Man is a little bit of a different story. We had Sahara Steve who everyone loved, but I wanted to keep him just for our camping festivals. We needed someone who could be our main character. A symbol of the “Listen Local” tagline. This is where Local Man came in. I absolutely love super heroes, and have always wanted to be one. What we do is helping people and it makes us feel like heroes every once and a while, so what if we had a character who was a super hero with the power to inform the public of local live music? Yeah that was Local Man! I designed a full costume for him, wrote some skits and now he’s our Pineapple symbol of freedom!
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
We’ve had many different scenarios where we had to be resilient. The most common one is when we get cancelations from guests who come on the show. This can be extremely stressful, especially when the cancelation is last minute. We’ve had situations where we’ve stood outside of venues for hours waiting for a prearranged interview that never ended up happening. When things like this happen, it’s very dis-heartening, but the best thing we can do is dust ourselves off and move forward. It’s all about not letting one cancelation discourage you from continuing to produce content. You have to keep moving forward and looking for the next move! Every experience is a chance to learn and adapt, and we’re always taking those moments and learning what we can from them.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linqapp.com/pineapple_cast?r=link
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/thepineappleofficial_?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/pages/category/Radio-Station/The-Pineapple-458781544654923/