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Determining Streaming Audience

R

radiosurfer

Is there any programs available that can give you an acurate reading of your total listerners currently online?
Also, is Loud City & Live 365 the only options available for handling your stream and royalties together?

I use Loud City. Does this place actually have an address other than a basic website and an email ?
I wonder sometimes if I get actual readings from them. A total of 2 listeners the whole month and 1
is me. Is their information accurate?

Any thoughts.....anyone !
 
I use Loudcity too and find it fustrating that we can't get better geographical
information.

I saw a add somehere for 1000 Mic's but did not look into it. I do not know if
they are royalty inclusive. I have also discovered radio stations using Ustream
as a streaming option. It's free but I don't think it's legal.

Live 365 has great "Geo Stats" but their LIVE streaming options leave very little
to be desired. It is way overpriced for the amount of live slots you get.

My suggestion: Get your station a page on Facebook, figure out who you want
to reach and then run a cheap ad schedule and start to build your audience.
It's a slow go, but you will add listeners. Target you ad's with impressions,
not clicks and start to get the word out.

Loud City and live 365 are your streamers, not your marketing plan. Your content
and marketing are going to bring the numbers up on your stream. I started June
1st with my station. I have had some luck. I was able to get the "presents" on a
concert that my core audience enbraced (The English Beat) and was able to grow
my audience. My fans on Facebook has grown quite a bit. If you use that
properly word of mouth with listeners friends will get you going if your content
is good.

Good luck!!!


Chris
www.radiookc.com
 
radiookc said:
I use Loudcity too and find it fustrating that we can't get better geographical
information.
...........
My suggestion: Get your station a page on Facebook, figure out who you want
to reach and then run a cheap ad schedule and start to build your audience.
It's a slow go, but you will add listeners. Target you ad's with impressions,
not clicks and start to get the word out.

Loud City and live 365 are your streamers, not your marketing plan. Your content
and marketing are going to bring the numbers up on your stream. I started June
1st with my station. I have had some luck.
Click to expand...

I see some people quoting "number of listeners" for their streaming... but the ones I have noticed are terrestrial radio stations that also stream. So, their vendors are providing them with what they believe to be credible info.

One of the " gotchas " seems to be that the royalty folks want a list of the music played, and exactly how many listeners for each and every song. The record keeping expense could be equal to or greater than the royalty itself!!!

Radio OKC... I just went to your site a few minutes ago to see what... no, make that HEAR what you are doing. You have something going on I haven't run into before: MANDATORY REGISTRATION. I didn't have the patience at the moment to jump trough the hoops so I will have to come back later.

Does that enable you to gather "number of people listening" any better than what other people are doing?
 
Besides LIVE365 (which is a one stop shop for broadcasters, but pricey) and LoudCity there is also SWCast. I've been on LIVE365 since 2001, but they did a package readjustment due to the every increasing royalties, and have become very pricey in addition to the restrictions they apply to the broadcasters. I've been with SWCast since early 2008, although they only cover you for royalty licensing like LoudCity, they have different levels of pricing that are up front and clear.

As for checking your stats, you could check the shoutcast server, or you could get a fancy program like CasterStats.Desktop which gives you geo info (with map).
 
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
Radio OKC... I just went to your site a few minutes ago to see what... no, make that HEAR what you are doing. You have something going on I haven't run into before: MANDATORY REGISTRATION. I didn't have the patience at the moment to jump trough the hoops so I will have to come back later.

Does that enable you to gather "number of people listening" any better than what other people are doing?
Click to expand...


Cowboy, I didn't "register", I just clicked the "SAVE" button on broadband... I got the stream eventually, but here's a direct link to the MP3 stream which is playing in my WinAmp player.

http://lax1.loudcity.fast-serv.com:80/4889.96.live.mp3
 
I've got some errands to run, and some audio to upload to a website that I do the sound administration. I will go back and check okcradio site again this evening.

One of the "quality control" things we have to do is look over the shoulder of someone who is a newbie or is not a geek and see if the site works for them.

I'm not claiming to be anyone special, but I am responsible for editing some church services and getting them on the website for on-line listening and for distribution via the iTunes methodology.

I maintain a personal site where I put audio in hidden pages (no external links to get there) for personnel type committees etc. (non geeks). I run a studio and network at home.

So do thousands of others. But if I go to a site three times trying to claw my way in and listen and I don't get there, throw up my hands and quit and walk away, then that site has a problem. What chance do the non-technical have of clawing their way in?
 
If you are streaming using ShoutCast your admin page has a ton of info.

It shows how many people are listening at that moment and who they are listed by their address. If you are any kind of sleuth at all you can often figure out where they are listening, for instance "qwest.phx" would tell you you have a listener using qwest as their ip and that listener is in Phoenix, AZ, or another "sd.sd.cox" would tell you have a listener in San Diego on Cox cable net.

I recognize there are occasions when listeners don't show up and I have verified that to be the case. We have many local area listeners who are beyond our pitiful part 15 AM signal. I have spoken to a number on the phone when they are listening and asked them to turn their stream on and off. On the shoutcast admin page if you refresh you can see them come and go and comeback again. There have been instances where there was no change in listener count. You know they are their because they are either telling you they are there, or they have written with some program detail which they would have had to have heard.

I like to use the list as a way of knowing who is listening to and give them a personal shout out, or at least a community/state shout out when we do live shows. We've gotten many letters from listeners who identify themselves and they love the recognition and it makes being a live dj much more fun. Sometimes I look up the weather in their town and include it in our local weather cast, also I figure out the time and announce that as well. We have a regular listener in Toowoomba, NQ, Australia and giving the time and weather, it's nite time there when it's morning here, is lots of fun. We've become friends over the years and he has added us in music blog, which is excellent, this is what he has written, and we get a number of hits from his site: http://poparchivesblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/gulch-radio-ghost-town-radio.html

If you want statistics on whose hitting your website, we use: statcounter.com - it's free and you can mine a lot of info from it.

Here's another excellent statistic source that shows you graphically your audience movement in 10 minute intervals: amptracker.com

LoudCity's stats seem pretty accurate to me. If you want to test it, I'd be running a stream monitor 24/7 and that will show up in their stats. You would have at least one listener every refresh.

By the way, if you use Shoutcast, and more than 11,000 stations do - there is a monthly statistic available on their "old style" (black) page. You can find your stations rank - in Firefox you can use a key word to search the page and come up with your station. We usually rank around 4,400 - hot dog - and you can see the total hits to your station and those that listened more than 5 minutes.

The bummer about statistics is you get your fantasy bubble busted real quick and that will cause some soul searching, which of course isn't a bad thing when it comes to getting your priorities set straight. Or you can lie to yourself - that works too.

If you're up for a real oldies fix, I do a live Oldies show Sundays at 4 to 6 MST - take requests as well. The Dj is kind-o-lame but the tunes are great.

Well - nuff for now, thanking myself in advance for all the great info! smiley face, wink face, etc.

rickity
gulchradio.com
 
Thanks for the heads up on the issue of logging in. You are correct. Most will not
bother logging in if it is a hassle. I have tried to make the process as simple as
possible.


Chris
www.radiookc.com
 
You can purchase the SAM Statistic Relays from Spacial, and get your listener numbers, though it wont give you your TLH. I am running Station Playlist with my station, and the stats program within it gives me my TLH, so that is nice. I also have a little program running on a web page called Stats International. I'm sorry I don't remember where I got it from, but it will tell me where in the world any listener is tuned in from, along with the player being used and whether there have been any underruns on the stream with that player. It also records the IP the listener is tuned in from. This program only works with Shoutcast streams, and won't log WMA streams or Icecast.
 
I also run Station Playlist. I have tried both the SAM Statistic Relays and the relays that comes within Station Playlist. Everytime I try to connect to LoudCity, it errors out. I have set it up according to the stats from LoudCity. Same stats that run my encoder for Icecast. It works fine with the encoder.

I am also a little confused about a LoudCity issue to anyone. When a listener grabs your station from LoudCity, does
that pull down one's bandwidth coming from the station. I'll be listening and then I will here "drop-outs" from the signal.
What does that mean ? I need two get a streaming provider ?

Regards to everyone..
 
If you are saying that you operate your own shoutcast server and that the listeners ultimately connect to your location, then you most likely (which is the majority of us) will have to find a streaming provider as the bandwidth needed to handle listeners of popular Internet Radio station is massive. For instance a home cable system, may only be able to handle 5 listeners at 128Kbps. Keep in mind, cable companies typically give you large download bandwidth but small upload (i.e. streaming to listeners) bandwidth. So if this is your case, it would be better for you to send 1 stream to a streaming provider, and then the listeners connect to it at that point.
 
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