Thousands Tuning In To Hear Oklahomans Music

Tens of thousands across the globe tune in to hear only Oklahoma musicians every day.

"Wow, we started with maybe seven listeners and now it's just exploded. We've got about 200,000 listeners worldwide in Dubai, Finland, Sweden, Scotland just everywhere people love Tulsa music," said Dustin Parkhurst.

With two podcasts, IRokRadio.com and HometownHeroesTulsa.com, listeners can tune in to the tunes of Green Country anytime they want.

"Podcasting allows the listener to pick a show or subscribe for free.  You can listen to it when you want. It's like TiVo for radio. People can come back and listen to it whenever they want to," said Davit Souders.

Parkhurst is the producer and engineer for both.

"Davit approached me about doing the podcast and he actually bought me a 'Podcast For Dummies' book. We both went through it and highlighted stuff and we thought, let's try this, and it just took off," said Parkhurst.  "We just put all the music together and we just run it like a regular radio show and condense it all to mp3 and throw it up on the website for people to listen to."

The new format gains new listeners every day. Both Davit and Dustin were surprised at the success.

"I thought maybe we'll do it for a few months and see how it works and now we're on our 95th week coming up to our 100th show and we're still just growing. It's great," said Parkhurst.

"Every genre is represented well in Tulsa from mariachis to Celtic to punk rock, rock country blues, ragtime music - every aspect comes from Tulsa, Oklahoma and we get to play it," said Souders.

The idea behind both podcasts is to create Oklahoma awareness around the globe.  When they get email people in Scotland saying they love learning about Tulsa, Oklahoma, it's easy to see they've accomplished their goal.

"Our music is as good as anywhere in the world and we get to prove it every single week," said Souders.

By Margaret Stokes, NewsOn6.com anchor/reporter & Chris Howell, Video Journalist.