If you’re a bit like me, and love radio, there’s a chance you might want to create your own radio station! There are a couple of options you may explore in order to set up your own radio station. Two options I know of are Radionomy and Live365. In this article, I’ll focus on Live365.

Live365

First of all, there’s Live365 (www.live365.com). I myself have hardly any experience with Live365, and my little experience is also outdated, so I can only give you the bare facts. I will focus on the Personal Broadcasting Packages. There are also PRO packages available for professional broadcasters, with completely different conditions.

Live365 is not free. The cheapest plan is US$5,95 a month, which is called the Intro Level, and for that money you’ll get 200MB of storage and a maximum of 6 listeners (3 Basic and 3 Live). The listening hours per month are limited to 2,232 for this plan, which is derived from the maximum number of simultaneous Basic listeners: 31 x 24 x 3 = 2,232.

A storage size of 200MB translates to a total play duration of 7 hours at 64 kbit/s, but for better sounds quality you should use 128kbit/s, in which case the stored audio is only 3.5 hours long. Or, put another way, you can upload approx. 62 songs each lasting on average 3.5 minutes. From my experience, this is simply not enough to offer a somewhat varied playlist to your listening audience, unless you’re willing to upload different songs every day!

Live365 offers the ability to use MP3Pro, which can be used at 64kbit/s with a sound quality that’s allegedly as good as a normal MP3 stream at 128kbit/s. This way, you could squeeze approx. 125 songs in your catalog, still based on an average duration of 3.5 minutes per song.

To give you an idea, radio stations with a very narrow focus have some 250-500 songs in their catalog. Other stations have 1,000+ songs in their catalog. This gives you an idea of the number of songs that are played, the actual number of songs in their music library might be much bigger than that.

There is no limit to the actual playlist length, you can repeat any and all stored audio clips as often as you like. “Real” radio stations play popular songs (current hits) much more often than other songs, don’t they? You can do the same, although this greatly depends on the type of station you wish to create. I don’t think you can pull this off if you’re operating a ‘golden oldies’ station.

You DON’T have to pay any royalties yourself, Live365 does that for you. This is important information, so I’ll repeat it:

You DON’T have to pay any royalties yourself, Live365 does that for you.

Live365 offers several broadcast packages. The cheapest, as I already mentioned, is Intro. The other levels are P1 (US$9.95 /month) through P6 (US$99.95 /month). Each higher level gives you more storage space (up to 6GB), more simultaneous listeners (up to 160) and therefore more listening hours per month (up to 74,400).

Please note that VIP members have unlimited access to all streams and are not counted in either the number of simultaneous listeners or the listening hours per month.

You can actually earn cash by being a broadcaster with Live365. There are two ways to earn money: with One-time Bounties and with the Subscription Share Program. The One-time Bounty program gives you a cut of 25% of the initial sale when “a listener subscribes to VIP in order to gain access to — or show support for –” your station. The Subscription Share  pays rewards based on the amount of time VIP members spend listening to your station in a given month. Live365 states that broadcasters can compensate their monthly fee by selling only a couple of VIP memberships.

If you’ve read this article and have recent and hopefully more profound experience with Live365, please let me know (just send in a comment). I’d love to hear from you, also from a personal interest in radio broadcasting.