Overview

The examples in the previous chapter clearly have the advantages that (a) they have already established substantial audiences through their broadcast licences and (b) they have plenty of accumulated experience of how to make radio programmes that communicate well with those audiences. Their disadvantage is that, as broadcasters, they have to play to the middle of a broad range of listeners to hold on to the audience numbers that justify the station s existence. Now we move on to take a look at stations which are using the Web to start from scratch. (Although many of the personnel involved do bring their own experience of terrestrial radio with them to their web projects.) These are the freestyle climbers of web radio who have no ropes to support them. They are exploring a different face of web radio than are the established broadcasters. They are finding out about the spaces that lie in between the vertices of the existing broadcasting world, where restrictions on the access to the electromagnetic spectrum and licences to transmit no longer limit the number of stations that can be on air at one time.

Their challenge is to find those niche audiences and build upwards from zero and so by definition they represent an alternative to mainstream broadcasting. That said, in their very different ways these experimental stations are also exploring the very different financial conditions on the Web as well for clues as to how they can cover their costs in the long term.