Clayton Douglas said:
how costly is it to set up an internet "radio" station website? cost of streaming, equipment, fees , etc? fees for music played?
Streaming is relatively inexpensive from a cost standpoint. I'm confident you'd be able to do it from the computer you're using to post on these message boards.
There's essentially two ways to do it - you can take the audio from a separate source (like if you have a mixing board and/or a home studio) and just put it out there on the web, or you can play the songs directly off of your computer and do your voice breaks with a mic plugged into your sound input port.
If you're already an established station, then of course it's probably the simplest solution to just take Program Out and just start streaming it on Live365 or something. However, for you - you'll probably want to get a radio automation program that will take the mp3s on your computer, set some rules, create a program clock, and interrupt for some voice breaks in a "Live Assist" mode.
At WCUR, I helped the station convert to
MegaSeg as an automation solution to do this, but that's for Mac users.
TuneTracker is an automation/streaming all-in-one package that, while it may take a little getting used to, was awesome back when I was using it in college. It involves installing BeOS on your computer, but the boot-up time is fantastic and the little thing never stopped working for us. At $200, it's a bargain compared to other automation software.
Basically, you're going to pay more for the ability to create infinite playlists required for 24-hour radio than you are for the actual streaming. Most streaming software is free. You can probably even make your own playlists in Winamp or iTunes and do it that way, if you so chose. That's a little difficult to do for 24 hours a day, every day - so at that point, you may want to consider just recording a podcast like was said earlier.
For streaming, we used
Shoutcast to turn around and make that audio available at our IP address. (Usually, it will be something like xxx.xxx.xxx:8000). There are a good set of instructions for setting it up on your computer. It takes some getting used to, but eventually you'll hack your way through it and find that getting your stream up is pretty easy. Live 365 is another way to stream, but it costs $9.95 a month. It seems to include a support system and help getting set up - but you're listed in the site directory, so that's a plus. Check out
this link to see how to get going there.
This is a pretty good article with a couple other links to software to get started. I'm around on AIM: carnyfeet if you have any questions about the links above - all software that I've used or researched at some point.