AI DJ Case Study: How to Automate Sounding Local
How Lee Perryman uses RoboDJ to serve small Alabama towns better than his budget alone would let him
The Short Version: Lee Perryman runs 13 radio stations across east-central Alabama, with RoboDJ now on eight of them. His stations serve small towns that are always operating in the shadow of the big-market signals down the dial. Lee's approach isn't to cut. It's to give his communities more, and RoboDJ is how he does it. His team sources what's actually happening around town, the bingo nights, the football games, the car washes, the weather, and RoboDJ turns that into fresh, local content in his stations' voices all day long. The people are still the source. RoboDJ is the megaphone. Here's exactly how it works, in Lee's words and mine.
The Situation
"I'm in a small town called Sylacauga, Alabama. We operate under the Radio Alabama brand, and we have 13 radio stations around the central, east-central part of the state of Alabama. Of the 13, eight are running RoboDJ." — Lee Perryman
Thirteen stations across small towns in central Alabama. That's the operation. And if you know small-market radio, you already know the pressure Lee is under: serve real communities with real news, weather, and events, on a budget that would make anyone at a big group laugh. The corporate clusters have staff, syndication, and scale. Lee has a mission and math that has to work.
Most operators in that spot end up making the same trade: less local content, more automation, more voice tracks recorded once and rotated for days. The stations stay on the air but start to sound like they could be anywhere. Lee refuses that trade, and RoboDJ is one of the reasons he doesn't have to make it.
Two Different Bets on the Future of Radio
Here's Lee laying out the difference between where the industry is heading and where he's heading, and it's worth reading in full because it's the whole thesis of what he's doing:
"While all of the big broadcasters in the world try to figure out ways to lay people off and not compromise their quality, my goal is to create more opportunities, bring more people, and create more compelling content, and find a way to make a difference, especially in small communities where being in the shadow of the big ones has always been a challenge." — Lee Perryman
Two different bets on what AI in radio is for. One camp is using it to cut. Lee is using it to create. Same technology, opposite philosophy, and it changes everything about how the tool gets used at his stations.
Because when the goal is create more, you don't point RoboDJ at "read some liners so we can lay off the overnight guy." You point it at "get more of what's happening in this town on the air, on every station, all day, in a way we couldn't afford to do before." That's the whole story of what Lee built.
The Workflow: Humans Upstream, RoboDJ Downstream
The important thing to understand about Lee's setup, and why his stations sound genuinely local instead of AI-local, is that the local knowledge doesn't come from RoboDJ. It comes from Lee and his people. The car wash at the school, the bingo night at the community center, the Friday football game, the storm rolling in tomorrow, those aren't things an AI knows. They're things a human notices, hears about, sources, and writes down. RoboDJ's job is to take that information and get it on the air, everywhere, all day, in a way that would take a human being far more time than Lee's team has.
Here's How the Loop Works
Step 1: Source what's actually happening in the community
This is the human step, and it's the one that matters most. Lee's team stays plugged into the towns they serve. Radio Alabama runs its own community news website that captures what's going on locally, the events, the announcements, the stories that never make it onto a wire feed. Local school activities. Local sports. Local businesses. That website becomes a live feed of what's happening in the community, curated by people who live there.
For content that lives elsewhere, Lee's team also taps local news RSS feeds. Small-town papers, county sites, regional news, wherever the local information is already flowing.
The point is that the source of what's local stays human. RoboDJ never invents a bingo night that isn't happening. It only talks about the ones Lee's team has put in front of it.
Step 2: Feed it to RoboDJ
Once the community information is captured, it gets piped into RoboDJ in a few different ways depending on what it is.
Local news via RSS. RoboDJ has a built-in RSS feature that pulls headlines from a feed URL and turns them into scripts the AI DJ can read on the air. Lee points it at his community news feed, and the AI writes fresh local news breaks all day, in the station's voice, without a human touching the copy in between.
A tip that makes the RSS feature more powerful. RoboDJ accepts one RSS URL per prompt. If you want to feed it multiple sources, say the community website plus a couple of local news RSS feeds, use a free RSS aggregator to combine them into a single URL, then point RoboDJ at that. Now every source you care about flows through one prompt, and your AI DJ has a much richer picture of what's happening in town.
Events, sports, and local mentions via prompts. The specific things, this Saturday's car wash, the school football game, the family bingo night at the community center, get written into RoboDJ's prompt library so the AI DJ mentions them naturally throughout the day. Not once. Threaded through the day. Every mention lands in a fresh way because the AI is writing it new every time, not rotating the same recording.
Weather live from the log. RoboDJ knows it's rainy outside and knows it's going to snow tomorrow, because it's plugged into the live weather data. Lee doesn't have to update anything. The DJ just knows.
Here's Lee describing this exact loop in his own words:
"The ability for RoboDJ to be able to take my automation system, look at the music, know what's playing… have RoboDJ know what song played. Know what song is about to play. Know that it's rainy outside. Know that it's going to snow tomorrow. Know that there are other general station liners that I want it to use that are part of my imaging and branding and be able to joke with people, tell them a recipe. Talk about the car wash that's coming up this afternoon from the school. Talk about the football games that are coming up. A human being would take more time putting that information together before they even got to the point of putting it on the air." — Lee Perryman
That last line is worth sitting with. A human being would take more time putting that information together before they even got to the point of putting it on the air. That's the whole efficiency argument in one sentence, and it's not about eliminating the human. It's about freeing the human up so what they know actually reaches the audience.
Step 3: RoboDJ amplifies it across the log, on every station
Once the community information is in, RoboDJ takes it from there. The local news gets read as fresh breaks all day. The events get mentioned throughout the log. The weather gets woven in. And because Lee runs eight of these, every one of those stations gets its own local content stream, without Lee's team having to voice track eight sets of breaks.
Same source material, tuned to each town, running on every station, all day. That's the leverage. And it lands on the air sounding like this:
Audio: A RoboDJ Community Bulletin Board segment on one of Lee Perryman's Radio Alabama stations. The events came from Lee's team sourcing what's happening in the community. RoboDJ turned them into a real on-air feature.
And here's what a local weather touch sounds like, the kind of small "somebody knows I'm here" moment that separates a local station from background music:
Audio: A RoboDJ local weather break, live-connected to real conditions so the DJ knows what's happening outside right now.
The Result
Lee's stations sound more local, not less, since RoboDJ went on the air. The DJs mention the events happening this weekend. They know it's raining. They know about the school car wash. They tell people about the football game. It's exactly the kind of hyper-local content that used to require a full-time announcer per station, delivered across eight stations at once, and Lee's team is the reason any of it exists in the first place.
Here's Lee on the competitive quality he's getting:
"Adding RoboDJ makes me sound very competitive in a way that many of the people I would have hired to voice track or to do it live would not have sounded as good. Which doesn't mean it's perfect, but it's more perfect than it was." — Lee Perryman
And here's the reliability piece, which matters more than any feature list once you're running eight stations on something:
"I'm stunned that I've been running it now on, you know, eight radio stations and it has never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever not worked… It's just amazing to me that, compared to other software, it just doesn't break." — Lee Perryman
But the line that says it all is the one where Lee describes what listeners think of his AI DJs:
"I've got people who call every day wanting to know how I found that talent, and I just can't tell them that that person is not real. I don't want to hurt their feelings." — Lee Perryman
Why This Matters for Small-Market Radio
Lee is very clear about why this approach matters, and it's not about the technology. It's about what the technology lets him do for his towns:
"I can't just turn on radio stations and play music and expect people to knock on the door wanting to buy advertising. It doesn't work. You have to create the culture of purposeful listening and engagement, and you have to find something to give people in exchange for the time that they're giving you for listening." — Lee Perryman
That's the whole game for a small-market station. The community has to feel served. And RoboDJ, used the way Lee uses it, is a way to serve them at a scale a small-market budget wouldn't otherwise allow. It's not the source of what's local. Lee's people are. It's the megaphone that gets what's local onto the air, on every station, all day.
Lee sees the bigger stakes clearly:
"The technology is evolving every day, and if we're not going to be there, we're going to be doomed because somebody is going to come up with something while we weren't learning and weren't paying attention, it's going to radically change the way things work." — Lee Perryman
Small-market operators who wait get left behind. Small-market operators who use this to serve their communities better than they could before, the way Lee is, are the ones who'll still be on the air a decade from now with an actual audience.
Lee's Closing Thought
"RoboDJ has excited me into being able to do more, because I have a tool now that lets me pursue my dreams...making things better than I would have been able to do on my own." — Lee Perryman
What This Means for Your Stations
If you run small or medium market stations and you're trying to figure out how to keep them sounding local on a budget that keeps getting tighter, this is the play. Not cutting people. Amplifying them. Your team sources what's happening in your towns. RoboDJ puts it on the air, on every station, all day, in a way that would take a human being far more time than you've got.
Listen to more samples and watch Lee's video here! And when you want to build this loop for your own stations, Talk to Jeff about RoboDJ Pro. He'll walk you through the setup with you and there's no contract, ever.
Built by Jeff Scott, RadioDJ Dude/RoboDJ. RoboDJ Pro is the AI radio DJ system built for small and medium market station groups that want to serve their communities better without cutting the people who make that possible.