RP Frequently Asked Questions

No. That's why contributions to RP are not tax-deductible. RP is a for-profit business, and as such doesn't qualify for the 501(c)(3) status that a volunteer-run public FM station would.

RP is a full-time job (and then some!) for us, so we run it just like any other business - paying state and local income taxes on all of our income, investing in equipment and services to keep the business going, paying salaries, and providing benefits such as health insurance and a 401(k) plan.

Yes. Like we said, RP is our full-time job. We don't expect to get rich doing this, but we do need to pay our bills. If we needed to have outside jobs to cover our day to day expenses, then the quality of our programming would definitely suffer.

While it's possible to start an Internet radio station as a hobby, using just a home computer, a few MP3 files, and a cheap DSL connection, that's not how we do things here. We use professional-grade audio equipment and computer automation software and have redundant systems and Internet connections to reduce downtime and outages.

We maintain clusters of servers in four locations: our audio stream sources and control systems are here in Paradise, CA; our stream distribution center, main database server, offsite backups, and some stream servers are located at a data center in San Jose, CA; our web servers are located in Portland, OR; and we have a new stream distribution center in New York City.

We currently use a total of 18 active servers and desktop systems to keep the music streams and website running smoothly. We own, maintain, and continuously upgrade all of our own servers.

In addition, we pay a significant amount of money in royalty fees to music copyright holders (click here for more info), pay income & business taxes, cover a hefty utility bill, utilize professional accounting & technical services, and all of the other expenses that go along with running a business.

Through an arrangement with Shoutcast, a number of our streams - including the 128k MP3 stream, our most popular by far - are relayed by them through AOL's backbone network (Shoutcast is owned by AOL) at no cost to us. This greatly reduces our monthly bandwidth costs, but hardly eliminates them.

It's hard to see how a business based on asking you to pay what you think the service you receive is worth could be considered a scam. If at any point you feel like we're asking you to give us more than what our service is worth, then please feel free to adjust your contribution downward.

Our business model is unusual, which is probably what prompts these kinds of questions. Traditionally it's been the business - not the customer - who assigns a value to a product or service. Or a non-profit foundation provides a service to you or to others and then tries to convince you that they're worthy of your support.

We don't fit neatly into either category, so a certain amount of confusion is understandable. But it's really pretty simple: we're asking you to evaluate what you think our service is worth to you, and - if you can afford to do so - pay us that much.