Anyone Joining me for starting up an online radio?

[theyomag62]

Hi,
I was thinking whether it would be possible to have a online radio which plays open source music and promotes musicians. This is very exciting for me because i've always wanted to do so. Also i'm planing not spend much / any money on it. all the money will be from adverts revenue and other funding. so anyone game? PM me thank you.

P.S if you have any ideas please share with me. Would be great to hear form you.

[cybrax]

It could be done and from modest beginings have grown some fairly decent sites, SOMA fm being a good example both in terms of what is achievable and the problems involved running an internet radion station on a tight budget.

Couple of obvious problems:
A little over an hours worth of music is around about 10 megabytes of data (though it varies considerably depending upon quality). So if ten visitors listen for an hour each that's 10visitors x 10 Megabytes or 100 MB of your monthly bandwidth allowence used up. There are workarounds that would enable it to be done from a free hosting accounts but it's not easy. Normally I would say farm the storage out to google's free hosting service but that does have limits as well so another layer of workaround would be needed to compensate for that.

You could hotlink or embedd content from the Internet Archive though not sure they allow such things for commercial purposes, you would have to read their Terms and conditions carefully.

Open Source music - beware of the Creative Commons small print.. not every artist has sanctioned the use of thier material for commercial use, so you may need to contact them individually.

Adverts: standard Google adsense advertisments are not suitable because your vistors will have the same window open for long periods and so the ads will not change, you get the one page 'impression' count and earn 0.0001 cents (or less) no matter how long they listen. Auto refreshing the ads with your own script is not allowed but google does have a special AJAX adsense version for just such instances.

[ayesh]

If you have a good knowledge in streaming media, that's the industry for you.

However I think adverts is not the way to earn. Most radio stations supports streaming through non-http protocols so your ad views will be low.

First, study a good station like last.fm. Learn their business model, streaming protocols, etc.

Good luck!