Developing a Station 101 [Research & Development]

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Jay
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Developing a Station 101 [Research & Development]

Post by Jay »

Intro
So you have found yourself wanting to start a radio station and maybe you have tried without much luck to get one off the ground. Well here I am going to try to demystify some of the unknowns of starting up your very own webcast. I and and a friend started one called XRM Radio and have managed this stream for nearly 10 years both on and off the web. This station has been the test bed for many of the concepts and ideas you see on this website. Before it makes it's way on to your station it must be successful on ours. XRM Radio started out as a pirate broadcast known as KXRM during the mid nineties and we played Alternative/Rock. Without much known about our audience we continued to play what we felt was good music. Then in 1999 we went online when we found a smart and reliable streaming system called SHOUTcast. We utilized the SHOUTcast system to do a hit or miss; what works and what doesn't in radio. We took KXRM and chopped off the K and added Radio to the title to form xrm radio back in 2001 and found that Alternative Rock had a place online. We now run 3 streams 2 of which are in the top 100 stations at shoutcast.com with the limiting factor being bandwidth, which has been provided to help promote and test the stream providers you see at www.radiotoolbox.com/hosts/

Getting started
A lot of people incorrectly assume that the first problem in webcasting is the technical side. This is very incorrect. The hardest problem to tackle is deciding what image you want to serve to your audience. This will be the determining factor in all technical and management problems you will face. Your image is the face you show to the public. Are you going to be hard hitting or soft? What demographic will you serve? Will your station be expected to turn profit? All of these questions are typically easy to answer up front, but getting them to fit in with one another is much harder. Some demographics are harder to target while others are easier on the Internet. When we set out to redesign KXRM to XRM we were undertaking many changes, for one we had been running a style of music called downtempo which we had been broadcasting since 2000. This music can best be quickly described as jazzy electronic music. This stream was originally setup for the sole purpose of reaching a small demographic, very small (to fit the bandwidth allotment I had). The projections I had figured were correct and the station would typically only see at peak 15 simultaneous listeners. When we began the host test program we had determined that we would have to use the bandwidth if we were ever going to be able to provide reliable statistics and reviews so we had to change our focus to getting listeners and potentially many of them. With the downtempo stream not cutting it, it was time we move to a much wider audience, after researching with friends who use the Internet and different web search results I determined that we would split XRM down the middle and run one Dance stream and bring back the Rock/Alternative stream as the other half. The demographics for both streams would be male 18 - 35 because as we all know this demographic is the largest group on the Internet. This would potentially reach the largest audience. Further broken down the electronic stream would reach the club going, euro-dance fans of this age group, and the alternative stream would stay true to 90's alternative which this group was very much missing due to poor music being spit out today. In essence it was fitting a large profile for what we felt was needed. A piece of our experience with what was going on in the industry went into these factors.

Using this example you can see fairly quickly that it's necessary to first determine your audience. Once you know who your audience is the rest just falls into place. Bandwidth costs will be related to how big your audience is. Determining ad or revenue making power will all be related to the audience. If you have no audience then the station will not cost you anything. If you have a large audience then it will cost you so you need to determine a way to generate revenue to support the station. If you are going to pay out of pocket and not expect anything in return then you need to know your limits and work your audience to those limits. An excessively full server is not a good way to get repeat visitors.

Should I expect revenue?
Revenue should be based on a few already established advertising programs. You should consider building a website with the ability to drive traffic if you plan on making revenue. In stream advertising is an untested market and will generally cause more heartburn then it is worth unless you plan on hitting pavement and doing all of your advertising in house. Shooting off emails to random companies will not be a good way to do this. They will want to see your face, prospects and projections and what they will get out of their deal with you. You will also need a system to track stream traffic on particular ads because numbers are more powerful in the start up game. My personal advice would be to start small and use website ads and good website traffic to handle revenue while you make your way to the top. Be careful with ad revenue mechanisms, improperly placed ads or excessive ads will drive traffic away rather then to your station.

Donations
We have a fairly bad taste in our mouth about donations. If you need to rely on donations to keep your station floating then you should consider advertising instead. Revenue will be more steady as most people will only consider donating a few bucks annually. Plus it is far easier for them to listen or click on ads and give you money that way. Generally this approach doesn't scale well either. Also just because you aren't a business doesn't mean you can't have ads.

I am awesome and will spend out of pocket on my stream!
In this case you really need to love your station, play what you want and lower your expectations for a large audience. Most people's personal tastes do not please the masses. This is why requests should be scrutinized.

So now that we have some of the logistics out of the way, let's take a look at your station plans. If you have no interest in building an audience then it might be time for you to stop reading. The rest of this article will be related to building, maintaining and protecting your audience.

Stick to your guns young one
One of the hardest things for some people to do is stick to their mission. Once you have laid out the objectives of your station you need to stick to them. If you are going to play rock alternative then you have to stick to rock alternative. Sometimes as individuals we feel that we want to put something on the air because we like it. However, it could be inappropriate or out of place on your station, which leads to destructions of station image. Your station needs to be predictable and it needs to be focused. However you choose to focus your station you must stick with it. If you play hard and heavy then always play hard and heavy, if you play top 40 then always play top 40. You can even span generations of music using this method. Your station must have a sound, a voice that tells the listener immediately what it is your are here to do. If the next song that comes on is not what they expected they will leave. Breaking new music is sometimes the hardest thing to do on a station that does well. However, if you trust that the sound meets the expected taste of your audience (that leader of friends scenario I mentioned) then it will in all likelihood be a good choice.

Hey mister DJ, play a song for me
Be careful with requests, most in the traditional radio industry do not honor requests. When I worked in radio we were told never to handle requests. Why would you not want to make that listener happy? For the same reason I told you above. One listener's taste is hardly idea for 500, so in a large scale audience ignore live requests. However you should always listen to suggestions for additions to your programming. You might be thinking to yourself, "But Jay, I hear requests played on the radio all the time!". Guess what? Live requests are about as real as David Blain's levity trick. They get many calls all day long asking for one thing or another. Certainly you'd think that one of those calls would request a song already queued up in the program list. Marketing time baby, marketing time. Helps the station and it didn't cost a thing to air that caller asking for the song they were already going to play anyway. The end result is listeners thinking, "What a cool station they played that guy/gal's request". When in actuality it was a stunt to make you believe they care.

Stats stats stats
A lot of emphasis is put on stats in this medium because we have the power to garner them. Although if you cannot read your stats properly some things might scare you.

Peaks and valleys
A station which displays peaks and minimums during it's day to day operations is a sign of a healthy station. Unless you are not supplying enough bandwidth for your demand you should typically see a sin wave graph behavior in your listenership. In other words, you reach the peak of your listenership at Noon and the low at Midnight. Your results may vary based on locale and what your target audience is but typically major demographics like the ones we target see this type of behavior. It's normal and there is nothing to fear. You may not see this until you gain some real listening power but once you get here you know you are getting somewhere.

Song degradation
Sometimes you might look at your good old graph and see that certain songs are driving your audience away. Typically I only worry based on two criteria. How long the song has been in rotation, and how well the song has done in the past. It's very smart not to read too much into these little phenomenons. However if you see it happen all the time it might be time to pull the song.

Unexplained dropouts
Yes, this is a network and therefore a router going out in Chicago could mean trouble for your stream unless you have many relays spread throughout the globe. If you see unexplained dropouts in listenership you can associate it to many different thing. Your listeners can't get to your server, often caused by nasty latency or other net oddities. Holiday season; in our target market much of our audience has holidays at Christmas and thanksgiving and in some parts of the summer. So many of them (college or grade school) will be away from a computer.

The important thing to remember is to not take stats as the end all be all deciding factor in station management, it should simply help you to confirm decisions you have pretty much already made on your own or to help you reconsider decisions. It should never drive the station.

What about marketing?
Yes, this is very important. If no one knows about your station then how will you ever grow an audience? The easiest thing you can do is attach yourself to already existing and very popular websites. Use their station directories as leverage to get your station off the ground. Great resources I have found are WindowsMedia.com Itunes and SHOUTcast.com. These sites are heavy hitting and garner tons of traffic which is just waiting to find you. Out of those three SHOUTcast is the easiest to get on, you only need to use a shoutcast compatible server to get listed in their directory. The other two have submission requirements which will have you tied up in red tape for quite a while. There are also many other online directories both manual and automated sign in processes. If things go the way I want them too we could soon see this list expanding. :)

Your only other option is to utilize old web techniques and grow your website to reach an audience via search engines and links. This requires smart development of a website oriented to your demographic as much as the station itself. If you go this route the process may take a little longer.

My favorite is a combination of the two. These will provide the quickest routes to success and will light the word of mouth fire.

In Closing
I am sure some will disagree with our views of setting up a station, there are many different ways to do the same things. We just found this method the best. If you find anything incorrect in this article, or any oversights, then please email me

Feel free to leave a comment if you feel that I have missed something. Do not reply with questions. Questions should go in the Audio Streaming forum. Questions will be split from this thread and moved to appropriate forums.
djclae
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Post by djclae »

I'm going to add a 5-slot Icecast relay just to get the station also listed in the Icecast directories.

I'm not sure if Windowsmedia even has an open station directory anymore. I can't seem to find it at all on their site. If you know where it is, please post the link.

I've attempted to contact iTunes twice about getting listed with no luck. I suppose it didn't help that I didn't have a very stable stream at the time. Now that I do, I guess I will keep trying. Our older, more popular, worse-quality competitor is listed in iTunes out of the box, and I'm sure it only contributes to the untouchability of their station. If anyone has gotten successfully listed on iTunes, please tell us all how you did it. Thank you.
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Jay
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Post by Jay »

Just as an FYI, Steamcast supports SHOUTcast sources and methods and also lists at both shoutcast.com and icecast.org.
- Jay
djclae
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Post by djclae »

Steamcast is interesting. I will definitely look into it. Right now I am very concerned with stability of the station. Listing in both directories without more than one stream could spare me the trouble of partitioning off 5 slots to a separate stream.

Again, I'm really looking for advice for submitting the listening to Windowsmedia and iTunes. I can't even find the radio directory for Windowsmedia.
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Jay
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Post by Jay »

Windows Media is pretty much closed to only WMS platforms. Even then it can be tough as you have to proove your worthyness. I wouldn't waste time with it until you have a major following.
- Jay
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