Creating an Internet Radio Station - The REAL Story

Forget 99% of the articles out there that are telling you what you need for starting your very own internet based radio station. I'm here to let you know that you can cut your budget by almost 99% by not listening to most of the articles that exist on the web today.

I just has an article about my streaming radio station in the local paper and when the reporter ask how to start an internet radio station I was torn between a couple of answers. Do I lengthen the story and add a few thousand dollars to the budget just to scare away potential competition? Or do I tell the reporter just how easy is actually is, and deal with a few more station on the internet that could potentially steal listeners from me? I chose to tell the reporter exactly what I though was right. I chose to tell him exactly how easy setting up your very own radio station is.

When I started to research what it took to set up a streaming radio station, It was staggering how many articles are out there that told me that I needed thousands of dollars and a web hosting account that would cost an extra 400 to 500 hundred dollars a month to handle the bandwidth and copyrighting issues of running an internet radio station. I actually became quite angry after I had gone through most of the set up of my own station. I realised that a lot of the articles out there were written by people who just wanted to sound smart, simply copied and pasted another articles and had no clue what it took, and the creme de la creme were the people who wrote articles just to scare people out of creating a station because they couldn't handle the competition. So, the number one item on the list of important things to do before you start you own streaming radio station? Research, and lots of it.

I quite literally have another window open on my screen as I write this because I want to list out what the author of the other article wants you to buy in order to start your own streaming station. Ready? Here goes...

2 CD players
Nero 9
Adobe Audition for Editing
2 EV RE27N Mics (yeah, right)
Audio mixing board
Outboard audio gear (compressor, equalizer)
Digital Audio Card
Dedicated computer
Encoding software
Streaming media server

This list is why I get so frustrated. What you see in the list is about $3000.00 of wasted money. This guy obviously wrote an article to either brag about what he knows about electronics, or to scare away people that want to get into running their own station. I know that if I didn't know better, I would have added up the grocery list and immediately started thinking about getting into another line of work.

Do you want to know what you actually need to start your own streaming radio station? Here we go...the truth of what you need:

Your computer
Some music
WinAmp
Broadcast scheduling software with encoders
Mic
VPS Hosting account
Patience and lots of it

Since you already own you computer we can say that you can now start your own station for about $200.00. Yes, it is a far cry from the estimated $3000.00 the other list was telling that you needed. Doesn't it make you want to punch a wall?

We'll start at the beginning of the list and explain what it means or how you can get it for cheap or free.

Let's start with your computer. As I already stated, you got one and shouldn't be counted in the list. If you need one, get a good one. I run one computer for my station and had an AMD Dual Core for about 2 years. I never had a problem and it ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until the day I thought I would trade out the heat sink and cooling fan and destroyed the processor. Now I run an Intel Quad Core and it works just fine, although I am still partial to AMD, but it just gets down to familiarity and brand loyalty. You can buy a great computer these days for a small price. You can get a fast computer with a mouse and keyboard and a 20" monitor for about $600.00 these days. This will honestly be the biggest purchase you will make, unless you start to get fancy that is.

Now let's talk about the music. Your best friend will be either Indie music, Open Source, or Public Domain. You can have a rotation list of 1000's of songs without ever having to touch today's mainstream music. Why pay money every month and/or year when you can have all the best music in the world for free? You just have to do a bit of digging and emailing to get people to send you their music, but they are always glad to get exposure. When I first started, I used 'free to post' websites to let bands know I was looking for music submissions. I would get at least 20 emails from bands within the first 12 hours of the posting. This is great, especially with niche radio stations like opera, indie or dance music. THERE'S ALWAYS FREE MUSIC OUT THERE! Never steal music to put on your site, bands don't respect it and you get boycotted PDQ.

WinAmp is free and it's super easy to use as a media player and a broadcast unit. When you get to the site, just download the WinAmp broadcasting package and you'll be set up and ready to go. WinAmp also transitions into using Shoutcast on your server, but we'll talk about that later. Either way, they are both FREE.

Broadcast scheduling software was the biggest pain in the butt to research. There's so much competition out there and a lot of crap to sift through before you hit the golden nuggets of scheduling software. The important thing to remember about this particular software is that you can get it for FREE! Do you see a theme starting here? To get you started, here is a list of FREE software you can use for broadcasting. It may not be the ultimate in broadcasting software, but it works and you might even like it...

BP2X - Broadcast Power
Zulu Radio
WinAmp
Shoutcast
NCH Software

Try each of them out and figure out what you like the best. Eventually you may end up going with a paid copy of another piece of software, but FREE is good always, and it's the best way to start.

If you plan on talking you need a mic. Mics do make a difference and people can tell that you are using a crappy microphone. But for the cost, stay with a low budget mic that you can upgrade easilty at a later date. Most start-up streaming stations don't even have a DJ, so the mic might be just an afterthought. Buy what your budget can afford, any more than that and you've wasted your money.

The hosting account is very important. You need enough bandwidth to be able to broadcast to your listeners, but not too much that will break the bank. VPS hosting seems to be the way to go. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and is pretty close to running your own private server. The thing that I like is that you get tech support and you get to add programs to your hosting account like FFmpeg and Shoutcast/IceCast. The speed of the server is pretty good, and depending on the server, you are 1 of 4 (maybe 6) other clients on the same server. What you really need though is the ability to use telnet or communicate with your account via SSH to start your Shoutcast server, assuming you are using Shoutcast or Icecast. The hosting company I chose to go with after a bit of trial and error was WestHost. They've had their share of difficulties in the past, but the past is the past. They offer support that is second to none and the prices are really good. But, shop around and see what's best for you. And there's a reason I didn't mention your Internet Service Provider. They can be a bit grouchy when you decide to use them as your means of stream a radio station. Upload bandwidth is usually topped out at 200 to 500 megs, which means you can only have a finite number of listeners. ISP's also have rules and regulations about broadcasting or streaming, so double check. If they let you and you don't need a lot of listeners, then you just dropped you price by another $150.00 or so.

So, we've learned that creating an internet station is not easy, but it's not as hard as people would have you beleive. The expense is minimal, if you do it right. The random article I googled gave a price of abouit $3000.00. I was able to give you the price of about $200.00 assuming you have a computer. That's a big difference. Your best friends are going to be:

Open Source
Public Domain
Independent Music

Just remember those phrases when you are looking up information on your search engine. If you play your cards right, you may eventually find that you can get things done for no price at all.