What's In A Name?

Naming your internet radio station

So you have been following some of our other blogs on how to set up an internet radio station?

Choose carefully

Hopefully you have. One of the crucial things you need to consider is your station name. Make sure it fits your music genre you intend to play.

Your station name will be used on websites, social media, business cards, station promos etc so once you have done all the hard work and spent time and money, you don't want to find out that your new Internet radio station has the same name as another one, particularly if its in the same country too.

A true tale of woe!

All Affinity Radio blogs try to make sure you don't fall foul of a number of things, exploitation, paying too much and generally sharing our experiences with others. This blog is no different.

We did our homework checking out our chosen name  (Affinity Radio) using goggle, yahoo, MSN etc as a name check. Results were good so off we went. 

After six months  after starting 24/7 broadcasting we started getting a few emails for requests to presenters who were not on our station! Lucky for us these requests were by email so we were able to get back to the sender to find out what was happening. We found out that another FM and Internet station had stared up in Cambridge and had changed their name to ours! The requests were from a few confused listeners, listening to us on the Internet and the other "Affinity Radio" one on FM.

This also caused problems when registering the station with on line Internet radio directories and also iTunes, Microsoft, Tune In etc.

The other station decided to go for a DAB license and also decided to try and register our name as their trade mark legally! This meant we had to legally object and produce evidence of our counter claim.

We were successful and a year after the other radio station closed down.

Legacy issues

As with things Internet, there are still some issues still haunting us on the above issue, so think carefully and even if YOU do the legwork, keep vigilant as someone else won't.