How Would You Start a Radio Station?

MurderINC asks: "For the past few months, I have been looking into starting up a radio station here. I am a student in a college town. The university here has around 10,000 students, but in my opinion, not a single decent radio station. There are a couple of country stations, a couple of 'today's hit music' stations geared towards the junior high audience and a few talk stations, but that's about it. I would LOVE to start a classic rock / alternative / hard rock station. I'm thinking this could probably be run right off of my Mandrake box (just load up a playlist and go with it). The problem consists of: I know very little about the FCC's regulations, the costs of the equipment, and what equipment I would need, and was hoping someone out there knew a lil' somethin somethin, or has done the same thing."

Comments

getting on the radio

[schussat]

You might want to consider a couple of things before you go full-on on the air: Do you want to become a full-time station manager? Who is going to run the show 24/7? The Saturday morning 5-7 AM shift is real drag, I can guarantee you that. If you just want to hear the music you like, play some CDs for yourself -- why start a radio station?

Alternatively, if you just want to have a good time talking on the radio, why not try to get a show on the local college station? Many colleges have free-format stations; you just have to sign up (but be forewarned; you'll probably get the last slot, the Saturday 5-7 AM). It's a good time, but a lot of work to do a regular show. You ought to give it a try before actually trying to run a real broadcast station.

-schussat

Good idea, but here's the reality...

[greysoul]

Never you mind the stiffling laws of the FCC and the millions of dollars it takes these days to set up a commercial broadcast station....yes it DOES take at LEAST a million bux, which isn't much in a business world, but a lot in a "college student" world.

Getting a lawyer, and a group of investors is step one. Most people with money wont want to talk to you, mainly because you don't have money (unless you do, but then you wouldn't be asking, you'd already know to hire a professional consultant and a legal team)

So how do you get these people to talk to you? You could try to kidnap one of them, but you'd most likely go to jail for a very long time. A better solution is to socially engineer your ass into an elite private party and make your pitch on the covert op level.

Of course, the _RIGHT_ way to go about it is to get a degree in broadcasting, and perhaps elctrical engineering, get a job at a radio station for 10-20 years, build up a network of contacts and then pitch your idea to them, and offer to put the money up yourself.

Either way you decide to go, you're still going to have to suck ClearChannels cock for minimum wage and be forced to sell your station to them or risk lawsuits on behalf of the RIAA, who I suspect works for CC.

Anyways, it's a valiant idea, but it's not likely to happen. Being a student takes too much time. You'dprobably be best off calling the local radio stations and start up a popular movement to get the music you wanna hear played. The radio stations DO NOT care about music, they care about advertising revenue. If they think there is an audiance, they'll play 24 hour polka classics on 50 stations.

BTW, do you look to see if your school has a radio station? if they do you could probably volunteer to DJ a show once a week and play WHATEVER YA WANT! EVEN POLKA!

Anyways, that's it for my playing devils advocate, I swear I'm not jaded, the world really is going to hell!

CLEAR CHANNEL WILL OWN US ALL

-GuS