• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 8, 2015

DJ Skee calls it “a key moment in my life.” A teacher where he was to speak introduced him to her class as a disc jockey for a radio station. “I could see the look on their faces,” he said. “It was, ‘That’s so uncool.’ "

For a guy who has been on radio since he was 16 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, that was crushing. But he understood -- though he is only 31 and arguably missed a lot of radio's golden age. The fact is radio has lost ground to almost everything from YouTube to Pandora to Spotify.

Eventually, that led DJ Skee, whose real name is Scott Keeney, to found Dash Radio. com, a curated digital service that he says is a lot more like radio used to be before it became so tightly formatted. Its unlike Pandora and others, which use algorithms to decide what you want really want to hear.

At Dash, the disc jockeys play what they want, and there are 60 to choose from, including Snoop Dogg and East Village Radio. Dash existed once before as a pirate station and has been resurrected here. The marketers of the unhit-film “Entourage” have a station, though one would wonder, for how much longer. So does the Grammy organization, the Discovery network and the L.A. hip-hop collective called Odd Future, among many others.

Dash officially left beta testing last week and already claims 1 million users, with an unusual variety of investors, include Facebook alumni Kevin Colleran,  Sam Lassen’s Slow Ventures,  NFL MVP Adrian Peterson, NBA star Ronny Turiaf,, and the law firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich &  Rosati, among many others. Radio imaging company Benztown is one of the advisors.

Pretty much exactly like the way YouTube’s multichannnel networks operate, Dash doesn’t own the stations. It just provides a platform and takes a share of the advertising revenue. The music is the business of the disc jockey. Keeney’s role, besides his own Skee channel, is to find the talent.

One advertising rule: “We’ll do real ‘DJ reads,’ " he says, referring to the nearly vanished mode in which the announcer reads the pitches with a lot of leeway. “There’s nothing that kills a party quicker than hearing a bunch of music, and then suddenly an obnoxious 30 second commercial.”

But unlike radio, the stations can present videos of their own, another place for commercials to live.

Keeney certainly knows the business. He was a Sirius personality for a decade and a major attraction of KIIS-FM, one of the most listened to stations in the nation. His bio is a complicated mix of entrepreneurship, which includes Skee.TV, which claims to have gathered in 1 billion views. He’s working it. It’s available via iOS an Android apps, Apple CarPlay and soon via the Sonos in-home wireless audio speaker system and the upcoming AT&T Drive.

“Radio is dominated by 10 formats,” he says. “It’s the same thing everywhere. There’s the same syndicated format that forces stations to play the same 15 songs.” That's a lament from a guy who prospered in that format and was a featured jock on IHeartRadio before splitting for a new venture.

And he knows radio still has a lot of power. “Even today, with all the other stuff out there, it’s still the No. 1 discovery platform for music. I want Dash to be like radio once was. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re just trying to create incredible content.”

pj@mediapost.com