Have you ever thought of running your own Radio Station? It is not as hard as one might think. This weekends project is to setup a streaming radio station. Here are the steps involved in getting started.

1. Come up with a station idea. I suggest you find a niche and a target market. Also choose music you love listen to and an audience you enjoy being around. Streaming Radio stations are not big money makers so this will become a labour of love.
2. Purchase and own your content. You will need to buy music to play on your Radio Station. Not only will you need to buy the music you will need to pay for the royalties. You can do that by becoming a SOCAN member and paying 43.3 cents per user to your station. This buys you a blanket license to the music.
3. Setup a streaming server. You could do this at your house and have people connect to your home machine. We will not go in to how to set that up as most ISP’s in Canada do not allow it. I also believe that it is smarter to have a hosted streaming server.
4. Setup your radio DJ’s. There are various software’s both free and paid to do this. Each DJ can stream live from there own computers to the server.
5. Purchase Radio Sweepers. Make your station feel more professional with a few Sweepers. For less then $50 you can get 3 done professionally.

From here your goals would be to setup a site and start pushing traffic to your station. To earn money you can sell radio station ads or embed your player into a page and display ads.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.