Why RBL needs your support

It’s likely that if you have been close to our community you understood how there’s no easy income for an online radio, especially since with RBL we strongly intend to avoid sponsorships and advertising on our channels. On the other hand, it’s often difficult to grasp the high expenses we need to keep up with every year just to maintain our service and organization. Sustaining an independent and non profit-focused radio station is not always an easy task. With this brief article we want to take a moment to let you know about some of our fixed expenses for which your support on Patreon will be used, in order to grow RBL into a more and more sustainable project.

For instance, just paying the royalties to SIAE (the Italian copyright institution) goes for an inevitable expense of more than 1000€ per year (€1,049.20 to be precise). This is an essential expense for us to provide you with a 24/7 live broadcast. Other than that, the radio counts a lot of maintenance expenses: for example, the audio and video streaming expenses add up to an outstanding amount of around 550€ yearly. These streaming expenses were particularly relevant in the last year – thanks to the possibility of streaming we could throw live events despite the challenging circumstances, such as on our birthday this 25th of April, or with the Magnifici Vespri live concerts of the past spring.

And smaller expenses also add up: every year we need to spend 231€ to subscribe to streaming services (132€ for Mixcloud pro and 99€ for Soundcloud pro), in order to have an extensive selection of rbl.media podcasts uploaded online for you to enjoy at any time. Plus, the yearly expenses for the website dominion of rbl.media, allowing us to stream to about 10.000 users monthly, and the registering of our radio servers online add up to about 225€.

In addition to everything, there is one thing that helps RBL to grow and succeed the most: the people. We are lucky enough to have an extensive number of fantastic members of the community participating in the radio’s activity and contributing every week with their ideas and know-how, as well as with the promotion of the radio’s activity. However, at times the help of a paid professional is inevitable, for example with website renovations, for which we usually have to spend at least 1000€ a year to keep everything running smoothly. And besides, it is our objective to have a working team for RBL Cosmos, that will take care of the growth of the Patreon page and support the RBL hubs around Europe with their online presence.

This is by no means a complete list of all our expenses, but it should give you an idea of why we decided to aim for a subscription service in order to receive fixed support from our members and listeners. For all these reasons, if you intend to support RBL you can head over to our Patreon page, where you can select the preferred subscription plan according to your possibilities.
You can read why Patreon is the best tool to sustain our radio more in-depth in this article.