Listenership has dropped off since the early days of the station, so I've been wondering why, and how we could improve.
So today as an experiment, I found the highest rated anime-themed station in the Shoutcast directory and checked them out.
"AnimeNfo Radio" is their name, and they have 694 listeners as I write this. How are they different, and what can we learn from them?
Well, quite a lot, of course. The first thing I notice is that they're streaming 192Kbps MP3, which sounds a lot nicer than my 56kbps AAC+ stream, and is compatible with more players. I'd love to have a better bitrate and more listener slots, but I just can't afford it.
That being said, I am exploring what it would take to move to a higher bitrate. ($20/month would get me 125Gb/month traffic, but 192Kbps mp3 would eat 60G/month per listener. so more than 3 listeners and i'm over? am i missing something here?)
They actively ask for donations, and give people who donate special privileges, at various levels such as VIP and UVIP.
I've always been very low key about asking for donations, and egalitarian about it... people who donate don't get anything special over anyone else; you don't even have to register to request. That also means I don't have much money, of course.

But asking for money embarrasses me.
I noticed that every song that played while I was listening was a request, and I listened in for around ten songs or so. We used to be inundated with requests, but that seems to have died down. I could probably loosen up my request policy a bit.
I didn't hear any drops or promos during this time, so they either don't do them at all, or very infrequently. I wonder if I schedule drops/promos too often?
Their webpage shows the album art for songs that play.
Their song tags weren't as clean and consistent as mine, but that's about the only area where I'd say we're better than they are. They really do have quite a nice station, and I enjoyed listening to it.
What are your thoughts? What are the station's strong points, and what are its weak points? How could we take this station to the next level?