$10 a month is too much for me, I don't listen often enough (and it's about the same as satellite radio with hundreds of stations). I wish they had more support scenarios -- I'd happily throw some money their way to keep the music streaming. Should be an interesting test for internet radio generally....
Listener Supported WOXY.com â?? The Future of The Future of Rock and Roll
Grab a cup of coffee, friends. This isnâ??t gonna be your average update. This past Monday, WOXY.com became a listener-supported operation. While it means change for us, we hope it means a change for the better, and that we can all keep listening to the best music for a long time to come.
Why are we doing this?
Internet radio is a tricky business. It's in its infancy and people are still figuring out the business model. Technology hasnâ??t quite bridged the gap to allow easy access to internet radio in your car and other remote locations. Satellite radio is portable and nifty except that we're not on it. While it's technically possible to receive Internet radio on certain mobile phones today, the process is far from being user friendly or widely available. But we have no doubts that easy Internet radio in your car, iPod or phone is just around the corner. We just need to figure out how to stick around until that time comes.
Mom always taught us to do right and keep it honest, so that means paying music royalties to all kinds of folks (royalties that are probably going even higher this year), handling the costs of reliable streaming, providing health insurance for our employees and filing our taxes. We like to run a clean business. But at the end of the day, this is a business, and that means finding a way to pay the bills.
Unfortunately, at the moment, advertisers just donâ??t know what to think about us. Are we a website or a radio station? Is our audience local or (inter)national? How do we track whoâ??s listening? Everyone is intrigued by what we're doing, but advertisers are not quite ready to throw enough ad dollars our way to make it work.
We have always prided ourselves on being a free radio station. No matter who you are, whether youâ??re a starving student or multi-millionaire, each day we bring you the best music we can find on the planet, and serve it up with live DJs to boot. We think weâ??re doing something pretty special, and donâ??t want anyone to miss out on the party. Unfortunately, until technology catches up and advertisers know how to quantify us, we have to find a way to sustain ourselves. For that reason weâ??ve decided to make the move to being a listener-supported operation.
So what does it mean?
This past Monday, we began offering our premium service. For the bargain price of $9.95/month we will be offering 24-hour, true broadband, CD-quality streams to subscribers. We also have some other super-cool perks for members planned for the near future. And for those of you who just canâ??t afford to pay one more bill each month, weâ??re keeping a low bandwidth stream. It may not be the best quality, but you can still tune in for free. But just because you canâ??t pay a monthly fee, we hope youâ??ll find a way to make a smaller financial contribution to keep us up and running. To ease the transition weâ??ll leave our 64 kbps streams running until February 13th.
When we made the announcement that the FM radio station, 97X, was closing up shop, we received an outpouring of support. People asked how they could help and what they could do to keep things running. Well, folks, itâ??s time, and weâ??re asking for your help. Trust us when we say that we need you to support what we do or weâ??re going to be history.
What's next [the long term outlook]?
Our goal is to keep this ship afloat until we can find a business model which allows us to go back to being free, but in the meantime, we need you to come on board. On March 6th weâ??re going to evaluate how things are going, running the numbers to see if we have enough supporters to keep us afloat. If youâ??re going to sign up, please do so by this date â?? the sooner the better so we can see if this thing is a go. We hope weâ??re a valuable enough part of your life that you choose to stick around and take the ride with us, because we hope itâ??s going to be a long, long trip.
The future of The Future of Rock and Roll is in your hands. Just sign up(at BitPass), donate, or learn more so we can take off our financial hats and get back to doing what we do best.
