How to grow your internet radio station listeners

big balls of mud killer, in 16 February 2015

In the spirit of being open about stuff I’d like to share my listener statistics for my radio station datafruits.fm.

clockhazard guest mix - maximum 23 listeners
subbe.at all day streaming party - maximum 50 listeners!
pure aesthete guest mix - maximum 10 listeners

How many listeners can a radio station really get?

I know rinse.fm is pretty popular. Maybe their icecast stats page is public?

rinsefmicecaststats

Aha oh, ok I guess they aren’t interested in sharing their data. Looks like they modified their stats.xml to output this.

Demographics

Most of my listeners are from the US or Japan. Given I’m an American living in Japan and I play alot of Japanese artists, that’s not too surprising.

What went well

guestmixes:

When I have a guestmix from another (more popular than me) artist to play on my show I get an incredible boost in traffic. Hopefully I can keep that consistent and get a queue of guestmixes to play on my weekly show. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to secure a guest mix for the last show of the month so there weren’t too many listeners.

tweeting alot with buffer:

Tweeting and sharing to facebook often with buffer seemed to attract lots of listeners. I think I will attempt to automate this more when there is a live DJ playing.

What to work on

There is basically almost no one tuning in during normal hours, or when there is no live show. I’m not sure how I could increase traffic during these times. We basically just put on rotation a playlist of recordings of all the previous shows. Perhaps there is some way we could make the playlist more interesting, or we could have the twitter account announce the current archive that is playing (although that might get annoying). Or maybe we should just have more live DJs.

What have you tried to grow your radio station listeners? Leave a comment if you want to share your strategies. I plan on making a blog post like this once a month to share my progress.

I’m currently working on a internet radio hosting platform that can help you grow your radio listeners, automate your station and more. If you are interested check out streampusher.

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