sadly by the time I found this it seems the lad has already closed down the station, which was a pity as I was actually looking for shows/DJ's playing those genres of dance music as I am less familiar with them being older!
it is hard work even if it can be fun, I'm a former broadcast engineer who saw the paid career evaporate due to Internet radio and "free for all" stuff but luckily got a day job in ICT and (until I had to move to a zero tolerance town) had many fun years raving so rather than be bitter about it decided to work with a station associated with a popular dance music forum.
this has now become one of Europe's most popular EDM stations and we still have difficulty filling the live shows as a lot of our DJ's/presenters got older and became parents or moved area (the upheaval associated with this shouldn't be overlooked as in England it can result in a broadband circuit being off for weeks or months as they are
not commercially backed music studio lines)
(apologies to those elsewhere for being UK centric and biased towards EDM at this point but I've got the most experience with the scene in my country)
I've discussed this on the forum associated with the station I am most involved with (and TBH I only recently got involved more with it myself) but paradoxically I think that its much harder to fill slots if you are in a city like London or Manchester where there are still many pirate FM broadcasters and legal community stations offering safer slots on "real radio" to DJ's (provided they can speak more than two syllables in either English or a language recognised by the community).
Added to that its also easy enough to get a set at a EDM event playing to a real live crowd (or at least a semi concious one, depending how much of the horse-powder has been doing the rounds).
Outside the cities though there should be more interest but I'm sorry to say it appears that peopel give up easily or don't think of radio as a way of keeping the scene going when their town goes zero tolerance for EDM events like mine did a few years ago.
perhaps its because "online radio" seems like "too normal and geeky" than pirate stations though it doesn't make sense to me, as many of the same listeners play complex computer games I don't understand - and now it is possible to tune into it on various mobile devices which wasn't as easy before...
but as an older chap one thing I do think is important is ease of tuning in.
I like "normal" radios too (whether it is my hi fi receiver, my bearcat scanner or my HF receiver) all I need to do is tune in the frequency and seconds later I hear either music, or the harbourmaster and local shipping, or the squalling noise that I can convert into a useful weathermap (I live very near the North Sea so these things are of interest to me, I can understand if they are less so in Coventry
)
Sometimes (especially on HF) there is bad interference but what I do not get is 40 pages of some random unrelated item or folk trying to sell me stuff. Even on band II (though I tend to only listen to the community station ICR-FM the ads are limited due to Ofcom).
Using places like Facebook,"free" forums etc to get a cheap platform means a great deal of this crap is inserted into over and above your "signal" (the image of your station you are trying to put across) as these advertisers are the paying customers, not yourself/ I know younger people with less cash tend to use these but they can dilute your "brand" somewhat, you don't get anything for free..
important difference : you will not get the folk "stumbling across your frequency" like on a normal radio station. because of all the different players etc. You really
do need to go out there and keep promoting your station, and also making sure it is "on air" as much as possible using recorded shows if there are no live ones but making sure genre tags are correct - after all its not as if you have to stop other stations robbing your TX kit or dodge Ofcom/Agentschap Telecom or any other "feds" like the old pirate days..
I think its possible to turn the corner but it can be and should be done (incidentally our station has become popular in spite of the relative lack of live UK shows as the recorded ones remain popular with listeners in a variety of far away foreign countries, don't forget that your stream is usually not limited by national borders, even some nations I thought would defo block us because of the forum don't!)
Alex
