Alan Mason: How K-LOVE Radio Changes Lives
Updated: Sep 16
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K-Love Radio is heard on nearly 1000 radio signals in 48 states, Samoa, Puerto Rico and Washington DC. It is by far the largest outlet for Contemporary Christian music in the world. It is truly a phenomenon! It started with one radio station in California with one guy's "God inspired" idea. (Founder, Bob Anthony was our guest on episode 43 in season 2)
In this episode we get some of the inside scoop on K-Love's exponential growth in the last few decades with our guest Alan Mason. He was the COO and then president of K-Love starting in 2004 until his retirement in 2020.
You'll find out the keys that make K-Love such a powerful ministry, how music is selected and programmed, who are the Christian music superstars and what's really at the heart of the Christian music industry.
Alan shares his own personal story and the impact that his wife Becky has had on his faith journey. You'll hear how God directed him to make the most improbable career decision that didn't even make sense to him.
I think you will find that this is an awesome inside look at the fastest growing radio format in the country, what makes it work and how it is so much different than any other music format. Take a listen and you too will become a "radio insider"!!
You can watch this episode on Youtube
ALAN MASON AT A GLANCE
Christian Radio Executive • K-Love & Air1 Leader • Radio Programmer • Consultant • Contemporary Christian Music Pioneer
Topics
Christian radio • K-Love • Air1 • EMF • Radio programming • Top 40 • Christian music • Faith • Prayer • Leadership • Radio research • Retirement
His Faith Journey
Christian upbringing → Top 40 radio → Growing awareness of God's direction → Christian radio → K-Love/EMF leadership → Prayer-centered ministry → Retirement and mentoring
This Episode Explores
Alan Mason's journey from Top 40 radio to Christian radio
His years at KING Radio in Seattle
The prayer experience that changed his career direction
Becoming a radio consultant
Joining the K-Love/EMF organization
The explosive growth of K-Love and Air1
How Christian radio uses music research and listener feedback
Why Christian radio can become a companion for listeners
The role of prayer and pastors at EMF
How radio helped drive contemporary Christian music
Reaching younger audiences in the digital age
Alan's advice to the next generation of radio programmers
Questions Answered
Who is Alan Mason?
What did Alan Mason do at K-Love and EMF?
How did Alan Mason get into Christian radio?
How did God direct Alan Mason's career?
What role did Alan Mason play in K-Love's growth?
How does Christian radio differ from secular radio?
How does K-Love choose and test music?
How does radio influence Christian music?
Who are the different types of Christian radio listeners?
Why is Christian radio having difficulty reaching younger people?
What does Alan Mason mean by "Be the moon, not the sun"?
What does Alan Mason believe is the role of Christian radio?
Why did Alan Mason retire?
Podcast Transcript: Alan Mason on Christian Radio, K-Love, Faith & the Power of Music
Amazing Greats with Ric Hansen
The Early Years: From Top 40 to Christian Radio
Ric Hansen:Hi, this is Ric Hansen, and this is Amazing Greats. Thank you for tuning in.
This week's episode, we're talking with a radio great—one of the guys who was at the very beginning and was, in many ways, very responsible for the advancement of contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian radio.
His name is Alan Mason, and today we have an opportunity to dig into not only the Christian radio story, but also his life and his own spiritual journey.
Alan Mason is our guest on Amazing Greats. Hey, Alan!
Alan is a lifelong radio executive and was largely responsible for the growth and development of what became the largest Christian radio network in history, known as K-Love and Air1. As chief operating officer of the Educational Media Foundation from 2004 to 2016, you were part of the phenomenal growth years of contemporary Christian radio across the country.
Alan was chosen as one of the 50 most influential people in Christian music and was the 2007 recipient of the Scott Campbell Award and the GMA Echo Award for his impact on Christian music radio. Wow, what a résumé!
Alan Mason:It has been an amazing experience.
Ric Hansen:Yes, yes. And we're going to dig into that deeply here in a little while to find out more about what makes Christian radio such an amazing phenomenon.
But first, let's find out about Alan Mason, the man, and your Christian journey, because we always love to find out where all this came from.
As a kid, were you born into a Christian family? How did all that work?
Alan Mason:I was definitely born into a Christian family. Church every Sunday, Sunday school, the little buttons that you would get from the Methodist church.
I met a woman that I married 55 years ago last Tuesday.
Ric Hansen:Hey, congratulations! That's great.
Alan Mason:There's an interesting byline to that, too. She was Catholic, and I was willing to become a Catholic in order to marry her. We went in and saw the priest, and the priest said, "No, I don't think we're going to do this because we don't think this will work." Wish I could find that kind now.
But Becky made sure that I continued to go to church, and we tried all kinds of different churches.
I will say that coming to Meridian, Idaho, I realized that one of the most difficult, frustrating things in life is trying to find a home church. You walk into a new church 15 minutes into it and you're going, "Oh, no."
Ric Hansen:"This doesn't work."
Alan Mason:Yeah. But we're not going to get up and walk out.
So we found a great church here that's about 10 minutes away.
My parents made sure that I understood what it meant to be a Christian and tried as much as possible, even during my teenage years, to keep me focused.
But it has been a growth journey for me more than it's been one single thing.
You and I know each other from the radio era when I was up in Seattle with KING. There were 18 years with KING doing everything—I was on the air, I was a general manager, I was the group program director and program director of one of the stations.
In those 18 years, I did a little bit of everything with them.
Ric Hansen:You were playing all that heathen music back then.
Alan Mason:My first job in radio was what was then called underground radio.
So yes, it definitely was. The idea of how Christian radio could help people on an everyday basis wasn't even in my mind at that point in time.
It was work, and there was going to church, and there was being a Christian.
Discovering God's Direction
Ric Hansen:There was no real "aha" Jesus moment where you recognized a relationship with Him?
Alan Mason:No. The relationship I felt, but the first time it became really clear was when I was a program director in Sacramento at a smooth jazz station.
At that point, there were no smooth jazz stations doing well. I was blessed to be at the first station to hit number one—actually, number one and number two—in the format, which launched me into a consulting career.
That brought me to the smooth jazz station in Miami, which was part of Paxson Communications. They hired me and brought me in as their VP of programming.
That was fascinating to me because it was the first time I had seen Christian ownership acting and running an organization in a Christian way. But the owner refused to do a Christian radio station. He thought they would never work.
Ric Hansen:Is he around today?
Alan Mason:He died knowing that there was a big difference. He's not around anymore.
It was really interesting. I'm 6'4", he's 6'8", so when I'm talking to him, I'm like, "Okay."
But the first time I realized the active part God played in my life was at the smooth jazz station.
It was not a nice place to work. I remember going to Portland and walking in the snow, praying, "God, what do You want me to do? What should I do? I don't understand why I'm going through this."
At that moment, I heard a voice, and it said that I should bring other stations the success that I'd had.
So I had to stop making fun of consultants and became one.
It started out with any format—AC, rock, anything that I knew about and enjoyed. But then, more and more, as stations fell off, I wound up with a core of Christian stations.
And it was great fun because the people we find in Christian radio are largely very different from what you would find, say, in a rock radio station.
Ric Hansen:In a good way.
Alan Mason:In a good way. Absolutely, in a good way.
Then Paxson sold to what is now iHeartRadio, so I went back and did some more consulting.
I did some work for the K-Love Radio Network. I knew Dick Jenkins and a couple of other people there. Mike Novak had been a friend for a while.
And I honestly did not want to go there.
Everybody knew Dick's reputation as being a hard driver and a little bit, "I'm in charge and you're not," which is frankly what it took in the early days of K-Love to make it successful. You had to have a really strong sense, and he did.
So I decided, like I have for most of the jobs, "I need to pray about this." Becky did too.
We didn't really want to go back to California, and I didn't really want to get into a situation where Dick would be deciding my future.
But the harder we prayed, the more we both knew the right thing to do was go there.
So that was the time when I took a job and I really didn't know why I took it. I just knew I was directed to go there.
Over the 19 or 20 years that I was with EMF, I kept moving up until the last four or five years, when I was president with Mike Novak as the CEO.
I think we made a pretty good team. We're both radio people, and we knew that we could affect people by what we did on the radio.
But we never realized what you could do if you built a Christian radio network or a Christian radio station that affected people in ways beyond, "That's a great song."
If you've listened to Christian radio, you've heard the stories because we all have amazing stories coming in about how what happened on the radio affected them.
It took a while for us to quit saying how what we did on the radio affected them, because it wasn't us.
We put the pieces together for this event to happen, and it happened with them.
Then, working inside an environment that wound up at the end with, I think, about 500 people—all of them Christians—it was amazing. If you ever had a need, if you ever felt a need, somebody was there to serve it.
At EMF, the staff went in three times a day and prayed for our listeners.
Prayer as Part of Christian Radio
Ric Hansen:Really? Just to qualify, EMF is the parent organization for K-Love and Air1. They have other entities as well, but that's where you worked.
Alan Mason:Yep. That's what the Educational Media Foundation was at that point.
Ric Hansen:By the time you left, you had quite a prayer ministry there.
Alan Mason:By the time I left, we had a staff of 11 pastors.
Their job was to take prayers from our listeners and talk them through the best we could, sometimes transferring them to somebody who could help more.
But that was an amazing feeling—knowing that I'm going in, I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to pray for these people.
Ric Hansen:And there are people back in the other building who are helping them grow in their faith and often overcome some sort of crisis.
That was amazing when I listened to K-Love and they said, "We have pastors available right now." You can call and talk to somebody if you've got a problem.
I love that. And that goes one dimension beyond radio's initial purpose, if you will.
Alan Mason:Yeah. Well, in secular radio, we want to let them have a good time and alter their mood, maybe.
Ric Hansen:But the whole concept about being a companion—one of my mentors and radio guys, and you know the name, is Pat O'Day.
This whole concept behind radio was, "We're their companion in their car."
Well, that's not really existing much anymore in secular radio, but it's a key element in Christian radio, if I'm right.
Alan Mason:Right.
I've done consulting work with a lot of Christian stations, and you hear stories over and over about how we've got a phrase for it now: "right song, right time."
People would be going to work and they'd hear a song. I remember one woman from Houston who turned right around and went home and apologized to her kids for being angry and short when she left.
Tell me another radio station that causes something like that to happen.
I had this real benefit. You cannot work inside creating a Christian radio station and not have your faith strengthened when you're surrounded by people who get together all the time and pray together.
You know what we're doing, and you realize that all the good stuff that's happening out there isn't really us.
We're setting the stage. We're creating the situation where people can hear something that actually does change their lives.
The Growth of Contemporary Christian Music
Ric Hansen:And that's mixed with the incredible lyrics of songs, one right after the other, with different and great messages. Most of them, by the way, seemingly pulled from Bible verses. That's kind of the theme of Christian music.
Alan Mason:Yeah, you're hearing that more and more now.
There have been trends in music during the time I've been in Christian radio.
About three or four years ago, it really started to drift toward praise music, and you hear that much clearer now.
But there were days in the old days where we played songs like "Jesus Take the Wheel" because it was really hard for us to look at each other and say, "That's not a Christian song."
You don't hear that kind of crossover much anymore because it's become, I guess, more pure.
But we launched a praise-and-worship station with Air1 because we saw the growth, and they've had their own growth with an even somewhat younger audience.
There are some amazing people inside that K-Love and Air1 building now, even though it's now in Nashville, who are doing a great job—especially the people who work in programming.
A good portion of the people on the air are friends of mine that I'd worked with somewhere else, and there's a terrific vice president of programming who keeps everybody focused on the right thing to make sure we don't get too involved in it being radio.
How Christian Radio Uses Top 40 Principles
Ric Hansen:You want to avoid that altogether.
One of the things we were touching on is music. I wanted to make a comparison.
Top 40 has always had its hot hits—10 or 15 songs that get played repetitiously through the day because they're the most liked and loved songs. Then you've got the B songs, which are also good but aren't as hot, and then you have recurrences and oldies.
Does Christian radio have some kind of format like that?
Alan Mason:Almost the exact thing.
One of the things we saw was tremendous growth in Christian radio in the 2000s and since.
Part of that was that we brought the structure that was lacking from radio—the production values.
If you go back and listen to the way songs were produced in the '70s, it just wasn't the same. It didn't sound the same on the radio.
So we brought those production values and learned through the music and other research we did that these people also have favorite songs. They want to hear those more than other songs.
You'd be real comfortable sitting down with a clock and seeing what was going on. It's the same kind of thing we've done for years.
Ric Hansen:Yeah. Well, that's interesting.
I listen to K-Love, and I guess local radio stations do different things on their own, I'm sure.
But K-Love seems really kind of more oldies-based. There are songs that I haven't heard for a long time, but they're coming back more frequently.
I love that because familiarity is what, as radio guys, we know is the magic ingredient. People want to hear songs they know, love and can sing to.
That's what I love about K-Love.
And then all of a sudden a new song comes on, and like the old Top 40 days, it was, "Wait a minute, do I like this or don't I like this?"
Pretty soon, it's in the mix, right?
Alan Mason:Yeah.
Ric Hansen:So contemporary Christian radio really was kind of the vehicle that drove the Christian music industry. Am I right?
Alan Mason:Yep, definitely.
There were trends, you know. I wish I could have answered the question when label people would ask me, "Okay, what's the next trend?"
I'd say, "Well, I'll let you know when it gets here, because you didn't know."
It's stabilized with praise and worship pretty well for some time.
As you might expect, K-Love does a really good job of music testing.
I don't know if you're familiar with the digital dial system, but I think they're using that again. It's a little dial that the listener has in their hands. If they like the music, they turn it up. If they don't like it, they turn it down.
That's something everybody can understand.
With traditional music testing, one means you don't like it, two means you like it a little bit better, five means you love it, three means you don't care one way or the other.
That's not how people do music. They don't translate like that.
"I love this," or, "I don't love this."
So that really helped. We put the music in the hands of the listeners, and by and large, that's what they decide now.
Does K-Love Drive Christian Music?
Ric Hansen:Alan Mason, a Top 40 guy turned Christian music radio programmer, on Amazing Greats.
Is it K-Love that kind of drives the hit Christian music for the rest of the industry? Other radio stations—is it kind of the hub? If it's on K-Love, it's a hit kind of feeling?
Alan Mason:Yeah. There are a little over a thousand signals for K-Love now, and they drive a lot of sales and a lot of listenership.
So naturally, the labels and other radio stations pay attention to what's going on there.
But everybody is doing something a little bit different.
KLTY in Dallas is one of the premier radio stations that was that way forever in the format.
I remember a time when I was consulting the smooth jazz station in Dallas and KLTY was a Christian station, and I kept going, "How are they doing this? How does this work out?"
They always managed to be a couple of rankings ahead of us.
They have been one of the pioneers of the format and remain that way.
KSBJ in Houston is another station that's had a great impact on that market.
Understanding Christian Radio Listeners
Ric Hansen:You had mentioned Mark Ramsey in our conversation prior to this, and I thought it would be interesting for our audience to know a little bit more about him.
Mark Ramsey is a radio guy, but he does a ton of research. You're talking about research—he does a lot of psychographics and demographics in Christian radio.
Tell me that story again. You had three different kinds of categories of Christian listeners.
Alan Mason:Yeah. Mark realized, "Well, we've got a lot of demographic information, but we need to really know a little bit more about these people."
So he created three psychographic categories.
I don't want to get too far into the science end of this thing, but you could do that by where they naturally fall. You don't say, "You're going to be here, you're going to be here."
It's been interesting to me that the psychographic category called "Innocence" has been the fastest growing of the past, say, five years.
They're the ones who tend not to be disaffected by church. They're not getting what they wanted from going to church, so they're in many ways using us as church.
Now, we would prefer that they also go to church and establish a church. But you're not going to force anybody to do that.
It's been interesting finding out that those people we would all say are Christians are quite different.
There's also a category that is a self-identified Christian. They've said, "Yes, I am a Christian." But because of their responses to the questions, they're in a category called "The Hopeless."
They are more spiritual than they are Christian, but they self-identify as Christians.
And the third category is called "The Faithful," and I think that probably says it all.
They do have a home church, they go to church regularly, and they're involved in small groups—as deeply involved as you can imagine.
The people in the middle who get their faith fed from radio are really important to us.
And it's quite a responsibility when you think about it when you're doing the programming for a station like that—that you can change their lives by what you play and what you say.
I can't say that about any other format I've ever been in.
Christian Music Superstars
Ric Hansen:Absolutely. That's incredible.
The superstars of Christian music have evolved over the last decade, two decades, three decades.
When I was going to church at a Catholic church, it was all about hymns and gospel songs sung by the choir.
For me to walk into a contemporary church and hear the hits, if you will, was life-changing for me because all of a sudden this became relevant.
This is stuff that I loved and wanted to believe, and it was being sung to me in a great way.
So I guess the question is: How do some of the artists differentiate themselves by becoming kind of the superstars—the Chris Tomlins and the Toby Macs and the Lauren Daigles?
What separates them from the rest of the pack?
Alan Mason:A lot of it has to do with the messages in their songs.
You've got three really good, strong praise-and-worship types here.
But you've also got for KING & COUNTRY, who I think is probably the leading musical group right now, who are just brilliant at expressing their faith in different ways.
There are a lot of really strong artists who have developed over the years.
You don't see a lot of them fading. You see a lot of them trying different styles of music, all in the Christian realm.
Some work and some don't, but the consistent people have been around for a while.
Ric Hansen:Yeah. And I was wondering about the value of live concerts in their stardom.
Did the live concerts come first and then superstardom, or does superstardom come first and then they start doing concerts?
I think what happens on the radio drives concerts.
Alan Mason:Because, frankly, nobody would know about them unless it was happening on the radio.
Some come out, sing the song, and it's a beautiful song. They express the emotion.
And if you've ever seen for KING & COUNTRY, they put on a show that's worthy of any rock band you've ever known. It's just brilliant the way they do that.
Ric Hansen:Oh, I know. Their percussion section—and the concept of the two Australian brothers who are here just making big waves in Christian radio in America—is a great story as well.
And TobyMac is kind of an innovative force in Christian music. He has been for a long time.
Alan Mason:Yeah. He went through some hard times too when his son died, for example.
He read it out in his music. He expressed what he was feeling in his music.
He's one of the coolest and hippest people in the format, and he just is and has been for as long as I can remember him being in the format.
He's able to break some barriers that you wouldn't find, and he does reach younger people.
The Challenge of Reaching Younger Audiences
Younger people are having a hard time being reached by Christian radio because they're spread out on their own new media.
So if you want to know who the audience is, it's generally baby boomers, and they're the ones who are the huge fans.
If you have a successful station, you find out that about 25% of your people produce 75 to 80% of your quarter-hours.
Ric Hansen:Wow. Interesting.
Alan Mason:Interesting format. It's not a Q-driven format. It's a fan-driven format.
Ric Hansen:Which means they listen longer—not more people, but they always listen longer because they're huge fans.
Alan Mason:They're at your promotions, they're on your telephone. They're not passive about their Christian radio stations.
Ric Hansen:We're hearing the inside radio journey of Alan Mason and the phenomenon of Christian radio and music.
The falling away of young people from Christianity, whether it's attendance at church or whatever, seems to be supported by what you're saying.
Although they may not be radio guys or gals, they may be Christian guys or gals who are listening to it on Pandora or Spotify or one of the streaming services.
Is that fair to say?
Alan Mason:Yeah. Spotify does a really good job.
They have a great Christian section there with styles of Christian music that you would never have thought you would have heard of.
So it all works together.
They are reaching a somewhat younger audience, but the older audience at the same time.
You and I grew up in the radio era, and radio will always be our preferred media.
Millennials and Gen Z didn't. They grew up in a digital environment. They're digital natives, not people who had to learn how to work a computer.
I don't know how it works that I have a three-year-old great-granddaughter who already knows how to work the iPhone and play games on it.
It's very different.
Radio companies are going to need to address that and realize that they need to create media for that generation rather than trying to talk that generation into listening to radio.
Christian Radio, Culture and Division
Ric Hansen:I think part of the issue, too, is the downside to a streaming service as opposed to what you're talking about with K-Love and Air1.
They don't get the companion along with the music, which, like we're talking about, is a powerful ingredient in what Christian radio is.
I don't know that they'll ever be able to really do that in a streaming scenario. Maybe they can somewhere along the line.
Alan Mason:Yeah. There will be relevant hosts, announcers, whatever you want to call them, that are relevant to that audience, and they will get attention.
It's really hard to be everything to everybody.
Culturally, I don't know if you're aware of Barna Research or if you've had anybody from Barna on here.
They do a lot of research in the Christian world.
Right now there's a lot of worry about pastors who are stuck in, "I'm not sure what to say, because if I say the wrong thing, they're going to be mad, and if I say another wrong thing, they're going to be mad."
And then the Christian nationalists are going to get mad at everything I say.
We're losing pastors going off to other types of work because they don't know how to overcome the division that's not only in America, but also in their churches.
Ric Hansen:Well, that was one of my other cultural questions, and you're beating me to all my questions before I even get there.
What about the political nature of Christianity today?
It seems like, just like in the overall culture, there's a split, a divide between conservative Christians and the more liberal Christians.
Do you sense that that's true, and what's your thought on that?
Alan Mason:Yeah, it has become largely conservative.
And that's what happened to "Jesus Take the Wheel," because it was not by a Christian artist. It's about an artist who may have done some things that they shouldn't have, and they've been ruled out.
The conservative end has a lot of control right now of what's going on on Christian radio.
If you've been in this situation before, you say the wrong thing on the radio and somebody will call you and tell you all about it.
And they have that in spades if they happen to trip into the wrong area.
Now, if you start in a biblical sense, Jesus was really big on saying, "Love everybody. Love as you love Me, love others."
By doing so, that's how you'll become known as My followers.
So there's a real dichotomy there.
You can't go on the radio and say you love everyone without fielding a lot of calls. They're going to wind up turning into something bigger—a boycott, a protest.
So it's a tough, much tougher place to be now than it was six or seven years ago.
The Early Pioneers of Christian Radio
Ric Hansen:You come from a group of heathens that started all of this contemporary Christian radio stuff, including one of our prior guests, Bob Anthony.
Alan Mason:Bob had great influence on me.
Ric Hansen:And Mike Novak, you've already mentioned Mike Novak.
So it's kind of the Three Amigos who were formerly Top 40 and then went to Christian radio and kind of brought Top 40 with them in a lot of ways.
Bob was, I guess, the guy who originally started what is now K-Love because he left KFRC, a hot Top 40 radio station, out of the blue with a call from God and decided to make one little radio station a Christian station with a contemporary format.
Then it's grown substantially from there.
You were a part of the explosion in the 2000s.
Alan Mason:Yeah. There's another name there called David Pierce.
David is chief of media now of K-Love and Air1, and he was at KLTY in the beginning.
He is one of the true pioneers of the format who's still in there and still going.
I don't know if you've heard of a guy named John Frost, but John is the premier Christian radio consultant, and he also has had a huge impact on the format and the people who are programming today.
So we need to keep those people around.
I keep poking them a little bit about, "Hey, who's your replacement?"
You have to realize you won't be around forever.
Retirement and the Next Generation
Ric Hansen:So you are one of the ones who has decided to sit on the retirement couch in beautiful Meridian, Idaho, and now sit there and kind of observe.
What would be the one thing you might tell a young program director who is running a radio station in Iowa or someone in Bellingham?
Is there a tip you'd give them? Is there something that you would say, "This is important"?
Alan Mason:Yeah. It's something an old friend named Tommy Kramer has said:
Be the moon, not the sun.
Reflect what you're hearing from your listeners. Don't try to be the thing that changes the listeners' minds. Reflect what they're doing.
There are a lot of people who think in Christian radio, "We need to do more. We need to get them into church."
Well, I'm not sure that was our job.
I think our job is setting the stage.
Let's not forget that while what we do is important, let's leave some room for Jesus in there too, because He's the one who really makes the change in the people outside the audience.
A Time and Season for Retirement
Ric Hansen:Speaking of a great metaphor, there's the metaphor for Jesus Himself. For us, He's the sun. We're just the moon. We're hopefully reflecting what He's all about.
I totally love that.
How about a God wink? Something along the line you said—if you already mentioned a couple, but maybe you have any others where God really showed up this time?
Alan Mason:I mean, this is craziness right here.
This is an oddball thing for a radio person. I gave three years' notice on my retirement, and that was spurred by what I felt.
There's a message I got: There's a time to leave. There's a time and a season for things. There's a time to leave, there's a time to let other younger people come in and learn and do the same way you did.
So it was an odd retirement in that I didn't leave going, "Finally, I'm free. I can do whatever I want."
And I also wasn't inordinately sad.
I still do a few projects, and I don't talk about the stations I do them with. That's not important. The fact that they get better is important.
But yeah, I'm largely retired.
I took my second two-week vacation just last week. I've only done that twice in my life.
When you're in radio, you can't do it. A week is a long time, and I've got to get back and see what's going on.
Ric Hansen:Yeah.
Alan Mason:It's changed it.
My wife and several grandchildren and several great-grandchildren are the center of our lives right now.
But as you have done, you can't really totally get away from radio.
You can't get away from what you've done all your life.
Ric Hansen:My podcast is my release here.
Alan Mason:That's a great idea, too. It's a good one.
You're right on the leading edge of a very important way to reach younger people.
Two Radio Guys, One Christian Calling
Ric Hansen:Yeah. Well, coolness. This has been a great conversation.
You are one of those guys who everybody I talk to in radio says, "Oh, yeah, I know Alan Mason," especially in the Christian realm, but also in secular.
It's just a real honor to be able to chat with you, get your story and find out a whole lot more about Christian radio than we knew before.
Thank you so much for your time.
Alan Mason:And I thank you for the opportunity.
And I don't know this—everybody else doesn't know this—you and I worked in the same market and never met in that market, but we knew each other.
Ric Hansen:And we competed against each other.
Alan Mason:Yeah.
Ric Hansen:For those who are local in our area, Alan was right at the helm of KING Radio when they were Top 40, and I was across the street at KJR at the time.
So yeah, we knew the names of one another, but didn't really know each other back then.
Alan Mason:And I'm glad to see that we're both doing Christian things as we get to this stage in our lives.
Ric Hansen:Yeah, and we're both still alive.
Thank you, Alan. Have a great rest of your day and a great weekend.
We'll have this published shortly.
Again, God bless.
Alan Mason:Thank you. Thank you. No problem at all.
Ric Hansen:Great conversation with Alan Mason, our guest on Amazing Greats.
Thanks for tuning in. My name's Ric Hansen.
Remember to hit subscribe, hit like, share with your friends, and we'll see you back here again on Amazing Greats on the next episode.
God bless.
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