Even before the launch of County Radio, people asked us how we plan to financially support the operation of an Internet radio station in Prince Edward County. The most common question was, “Are you going to be running commercials?”

Here’s the answer: there will be no 30 or 60-second commercials on County Radio—the sort you’re all too familiar with when you listen to traditional radio broadcast stations.

What you will hear are short informational messages—about 15 or 20 seconds long—from businesses and organizations. These messages will provide helpful information, but won’t include calls to action, references to price, or superlatives (“best”, “greatest” etc.).

If you sometimes listen to NPR radio or watch PBS television programs, you will likely be familiar with this approach. It’s called underwriting. And the messages often begin with a preamble introducing the underwriter (e.g. This program is made possible through the support of…).

Yes, Internet Radio is cheaper to run than conventional broadcast radio stations. We don’t need items like transmitters, towers, or the salaries of a sales staff out pitching commercial time.

But we still have bills to pay. We have professional recording and editing equipment, computer hardware and software, website maintenance, Internet connections, our audio stream provider, and bandwidth requirements that increase as our audience numbers and listening hours grow.

And since County Radio is licenced by SOCAN, the Canadian copyright collective, we will be paying royalty fees to music copyright holders.

After you have had an opportunity to listen to our creative music playlist and other special feature programs, please let us know if you would like to discuss becoming a County Radio underwriter. We’ll arrange a meeting with you and present a proposal.

You can contact County Radio’s content director, Don Edwards, at countyradio@gmail.com any time.

We’ll sincerely appreciate hearing from you.