Mike Santos is a self-described “radio production ninja.” What exactly does that mean? It means Mike is responsible for so much of the content you hear on the radio each day. Here’s a bit of his resume…

He’s served as Creative Services Director for Entercom here in Denver, which means he conceptualized, wrote, and produced on-air marketing and positioning for Alice 105.9, KOSI 101.1, and 99.5 The Mountain. He served as Commercial Production Director and Imaging Producer for Carson Daly at 97.1 Amp Radio in Los Angeles as well as Producer for The Daly Download with Carson Daly – This Week’s Top 30. And he’s currently the Breakfast Image Producer for The Kyle and Jackie O Show, Australia’s #1 radio show.

Although for you truly to get a sense of what Mike Santos does, it’s probably just easier to link to some of his work. You can check out a broader sample of Mike’s stuff by checking out his Soundcloud page, but I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting some of my favorite stuff:

He produced this intro for Justin Timberlake’s appearance on Carson Daly’s show, that Justin described thusly: “That is by far the best introduction I’ve ever heard on radio ever in the history of ever.”

Here he is doing likewise for Gwen Stefani who said, “That little intro was so cute. Thank you!”

And to get a little more current, here’s an awesome show intro for The Kyle and Jackie O Show from February of this year.

Most notably to you, perhaps, is that Mike Santos also produced the intro for this very show. That’s right. You hear Mike’s voice before you hear mine every single week. He cut the entire intro together, voiced the last lines, and basically made this show’s intro sound better than I could have ever hoped for.

He returned from Australia to Denver for a brief period, and I was lucky enough to steal an hour of his time and talk shop. We dig into how he got into radio, the tricks of the trade to radio production and a lot more. His insight into how the radio sausage gets made is fascinating, and I even throw in a couple of old production pieces he made for me while we both worked at KCSU during college. The lead photo of this article is more than a decade old of the two of us at some party in probably 2003.

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