In August I switched off AI Country Music. Not paused — switched off, with a goodbye note on the front page saying it wouldn't be coming back. Four weeks earlier I'd been delighted that people in eight countries were listening. Then I did the maths on what the next twelve months would cost, and the maths won.
What's back now isn't the radio station. It's the same songs with a play button in front of them. This is the explanation I owe anyone who read that goodbye note, and it might be useful to anyone else thinking about starting a small internet station in the Netherlands.
What I actually built
A continuous stream. One playlist, running around the clock, everybody tuned into the same second of the same song. If you arrived halfway through a track you heard the second half. That's what makes radio feel like radio — the thing you're hearing is happening now, and other people are hearing it too.
Technically it was an AzuraCast server: Liquidsoap assembling the playlist, Icecast pushing it out to whoever connected. It worked well. That was never the problem.
The problem was the category
The moment you run a continuous broadcast, you're not a person with a website any more. You're a broadcaster, and broadcasting is a regulated activity with its own institutions, registrations and annual fees. That's entirely reasonable — those rules exist to protect audiences and to make sure the people who write and perform music actually get paid.
The rules just aren't scaled for something my size. They're the same rules whether you're a national station or one bloke in Naarden writing songs after dinner.
Who's involved, and what they do
For anyone who's never looked into this, here's the landscape as I encountered it. These are broad descriptions of each organisation's remit — not an assessment of what applies to any particular project, including my own.
- Commissariaat voor de Media (Dutch Media Authority) The regulator that supervises compliance with the Mediawet. Commercial media services register with them and pay annual supervision costs. Their remit covers broadcasters, and also extends to on-demand media services meeting certain criteria — which is worth knowing if you assume that going on-demand automatically puts you outside their scope.
- Buma/Stemra The collecting society for composers, lyricists and music publishers. Buma covers the public performance side, Stemra the reproduction side. If music is being made publicly available, this is where the rights of the people who wrote it are administered.
- Sena The collecting society for neighbouring rights — the rights of performing artists and of the producers of recordings, as distinct from the rights of the person who wrote the song.
Each has its own registration, its own annual costs, and its own reporting. Individually none of them is outrageous. Together, for something with no advertising, no sponsors, no subscriptions and no income whatsoever, they added up to a yearly bill I'd be paying purely for the privilege of giving away my own music.
"But it's all your own songs"
It is. Every original track is mine — words, story, direction, and usually the melody and chords too, worked out on a piano or a guitar. The handful of covers are songs old enough that their copyright expired long ago: Barbara Allen, Shady Grove, The Old Chisholm Trail.
What I learned is that owning everything doesn't make the paperwork go away. The obligations attach to what you're doing — operating a station — not only to whose music is playing. Demonstrating that your catalogue is entirely your own is itself work, and it's recurring work.
That's the part I'd underestimated. I'd assumed writing everything myself would keep things simple. It kept things honest, which matters more, but simple is a different thing.
So I changed the shape, not the music
The continuous stream is gone. Icecast is switched off, the AutoDJ is off, the stream address returns an error. There is no longer anything playing in the background waiting for listeners to arrive.
What's there instead: a library of 168 songs and a play button. When you press it, your browser fetches the catalogue, shuffles it into an order that belongs only to you, and plays the songs one after another. Two people listening at the same time hear different things. Nothing starts until somebody starts it.
And here's the part I didn't expect — it's better. Not a lesser version of the radio station. Better.
You can skip a song you don't like. You can go back and hear one again. You can scrub through a track, or jump straight to something further down the queue. Every one of those was impossible on a stream, where the whole point is that you get what everyone else is getting. I spent months building something that took control away from listeners, and then discovered that giving it back was the upgrade.
What I'd tell someone about to start one
Ask yourself what you actually want. If you want the feeling of radio — the shared moment, the sense of a station somewhere pushing sound out into the world — then it's a broadcast you want, and you should go in knowing what that costs in a country that regulates broadcasting properly.
But if what you actually want is for people to be able to hear your music, then you don't need a station at all. You need a catalogue and a play button. That's a website, and websites are something one person can carry.
I'm glad I built the radio station. I'd have always wondered otherwise, and for four weeks it was genuinely thrilling to watch someone in another country stay for an hour. But I'm not sorry it's gone, and that surprised me most of all.
The music is still mine and it's still here. You just start it yourself now.