Lis­ten­ers may have not­ed inter­rup­tions in our broad­cast­ing and a move away from our 24/7 sched­ule, begin­ning in late Octo­ber.  We val­ue our loy­al lis­ten­ers and want to let you know what occurred, and what can be expect­ed mov­ing forward.

In Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber, a sharp and unex­pect­ed rise in lis­ten­ers sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased our lis­ten­er­ship hours, which would nor­mal­ly be a Good Thing. How­ev­er, as more lis­ten­ing hours means more music licens­ing costs, it increased to a lev­el that was finan­cial­ly unsus­tain­able with our lim­it­ed income, espe­cial­ly as it occurred out of the blue. We took tem­po­rary mea­sures in order to avoid incur­ring addi­tion­al costs, and ulti­mate­ly decid­ed that to remain with­in our bud­get, we would no longer broad­cast on Mon­days and Tues­days for the time being, and focus on air­ing our orig­i­nal series, whose sched­ules remain unchanged.

What are the costs you incur as an inter­net radio sta­tion?, you may won­der.  We pay stream­ing audio serv­er fees, of course, among oth­er tech­ni­cal costs. And because we believe that musi­cians should be paid when their work is broad­cast, Vir­tu­al Com­mu­ni­ty Radio — unlike many oth­er inter­net sta­tions — also pays music licens­ing fees. These fees are cal­cu­lat­ed based on our total lis­ten­ing hours (TLH) — the more and the longer peo­ple lis­ten, the high­er the fees — and this is where the chal­lenge lies.

We are com­mit­ted to con­tin­ue oper­at­ing com­mer­cial-free, rely­ing on spon­sor­ships and dona­tions to meet our costs. We hope that you will con­tin­ue to lis­ten to the sta­tion, enjoy our orig­i­nal pro­gram­ming and our eclec­tic mix of music, and if you do, we would wel­come your sup­port. We are con­tin­u­ing to mon­i­tor and ana­lyze sta­tion sta­tis­tics to plan for the future, and we hope to be back to 24/7 oper­a­tion in the New Year.

If you would like to sup­port the sta­tion it will help us return to the 24/7 sched­ule that has been our norm since we began broad­cast­ing in 2021. Please vis­it the web site at vcradio.org and sim­ply click on the “Donate” but­ton, top right of any page. Or vis­it our office on the Not­thund region and become a Spon­sor, Friend or Patron (see those pages on the web site for details).

Thank you for listening!