I’m looking into setting up a sort of local community online radio station. Has anyone here done this? Or have a good idea of the costs involved. In my head it seems quite straight forward but lm sure it’s not!
Any help or resources in this would be fab.
Thx.
I too am interested in this topic. Outside of the usual overheads (premises, power, insurance, kit) the biggest unknown for me is the licensing costs (I know you can go pirate, but I’ve doing my research anyhow). I’ve had a pretty unhelpful response from PRS - they sent me this link: www.prsformusic.com/LOML - which is quite opaque. And I’ve had zero response from PPL. Maybe they don’t want our money?
Thanks for the link - that’s a start! Maybe I’ll claim that the station is education based. Teaching people the Way of Andrew Weatherall 
Seems like if the streaming numbers are not huge then the licensing costs are not too crazy. I wonder if that changes if you were to have any kind of advertising?
The station I’m on had a private investment of 10k to get started. This included everything to get going. No idea why but that was the Station Manager who did this, we are situated in a completely off grid building in Birmingham due to it being in the local Friends of The Earth community space. Gear can be got off Ebay, favours come in many different ways and licensing/automated systems can cost a bit too. It depends how you want to go about it I guess. It’s nice to do radio when there isn’t a virus kicking around in a proper studio.
Mixcloud Ad just popped up in my feed seems they do live streaming now, might be a good place to try before you get too deep?
I joined a community radio station about 11 weeks ago… here’s the cost as far I know based on our fun-raiser that we are currently doing:
2021 ASCAP/BMI/SESAC licensing: $2,540
The radio station hosting service: $990
Our app development budget: $1,470
We use Radio.co for streaming.
We are open platform, we have 80 Dj’s, its a real mix of programing. It’s been keeping me sane having something to produce for every week.
Thanks Tom. Love the idea of an off the grid hosting service or something similar.
Thanks Paul. That’s really helpful. Listening to the station now 
My friend Leo from Amateurism set one up. In fact @leggattism is from there. Rob do you know anything about this stuff? Or is Leo on here and if so can he shed some light on the license etc…
I know they’ve used this for amateurism > https://radio.co/ which while I talk about them are broadcasting all weekend so check in on that if you haven’t. Good people with good hearts.
Awesome - thanks. It’s on.
Perfect- this seems like the way to go. I’ll have a noodle but may come backs with some questions. Thanks v much 