ladrite Radio is at risk of shutting down and we wanted to explain why and tell you how you can help. As a fully listener-supported station, anytime we have to turn to our listeners, social media followers and visitors to our website for financial support, we feel it’s important that we be fully transparent about why we’re asking. Here’s the low-down…
There are three primary expenses involved in operating a streaming radio station:
- The costs of operating a website. Hosting, security certificate, back-ups, that sort of thing. We cover these costs out of our own pockets and don’t factor them in when considering when to turn to our listeners for support.
- The cost of streaming the music. We use Live365, a very fine provider, to stream the music to you. This costs approximately $60 a month.
- Here’s the big bite: Licensing. There are rights agencies that in the streaming radio world are called “The Pros”: BMI, ASCAP, SoundExchange and others. The Pros make sure that online stations like Cladrite Radio pay licensing fees and then they disseminate that money to the artists (or their estates), the record labels, the composers (or their estates), etc.
We have to pay the Pros. Otherwise we could easily find ourselves in serious legal trouble (plus, it’s just the right thing to do).
For the past few years, an organization called RadioCoalition handled licensing for us, and because RC was a non-profit, they were able to negotiate significantly lower fees.
But RadioCoalition is no longer operating, so to remain licensed, we will have to turn to Live365, our streaming provider, to also handle our licensing. The problem is, Live365 is not a non-profit and cannot get those lower rates. Live365 must charge according to the number of hours its clients’ streams are accessed each month, and with our growing listenership, that adds up.
With RadioCoalition, our monthly costs, streaming and licensing combined, came to around $280 a month. Luckily we have enough Patreon supporters to come close to covering that cost, so while RadioCoalition was in operation, all was well.
But our combined licensing and streaming costs through Live365 come to approximately $680 a month—that’s an extra $400 a month. We simply can’t cover that without your help. If you like this website, if you enjoy our offerings on social media, and most of all, if you appreciate the toe-tapping tunes of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s that we play on Cladrite Radio, now is the time to show Cladrite Radio some love. If not enough people step up, Cladrite Radio will be no more. That’s the plain and simple truth. The good news is that, while $400 a month is a lot for one person to cover, when like-minded folks chip in, it’s a cost that’s easily covered.
How can you help?
You can join us as a supporter at patreon.com/cladriteradio. With a monthly donation there, you can help Cladrite Radio remain “on the air” for years to come for as little as $5 a month. As we’ve explained above, the need for more funding is immediate and ongoing.
You can also make one-time donation via Paypal, and while we gratefully accept all contributions, it’s really ongoing support that we’re seeking (so we don’t have to keep sounding the alarm bell every few months). If you do wish to chip in on a one-time basis, you can do so here, with our thanks.
We have thousands of listeners all over the world and just as many followers on social media—on Facebook alone we have more than 28K followers. If 80 people (that’s just .3 percent–not 3 percent, but three-tenths of one percent–of our FB followers) would join us as patrons, we’d be good to go. If 80 of our thousands of listeners all over the world would support us on Patreon, we’d be set.
As we said above, four hundred dollars a month is a lot of money for the average person, but it’s a tiny sum when tackled by a community of like-minded folks. If you like what we do, please consider joining us on Patreon. Otherwise, our station and the content we share online could soon be just a memory.
We thank you for listening and we’re grateful for your support.