you need to look up all the engineering needs of a radio station. you need a transmitter tower. you need a sound engineering board. you need studio mike equipment. you need computers; you need a phone system for callers to call in. lots of stuff you need in the actual studio. investors will be difficult to get if you cant answer the important questions. what is your program format going to be? music? talk radio? if music, you need a music library. if talk is the format, you need to sign talk show hosts to contracts. a talk show format is going to be a mix between national hosts and local hosts. national programs will pay you a fee to carry their show. you re limited to the fee, because majority of the advertisement time will be time that they are selling around their program. which leaves reduced commercial time for the local station, which is you. now if you run the national shows, you can fill up your schedule during the week, by running repeats of the national talk shows, and the repeats will be mostly advertising time that you can sell. and you will probably owe a small fee to that national show to run their repeats. we ve touched on engineering and equipment; on-air talent; on-air content. so far we re up to a fairly large budget already. bottomline, you need a good saleman who can sell local ad time. in the beginning, you re going to have to try to sell ad-time without making promises to your customers of any ratings numbers. you basically have no ratings. its a new station. Ratings of course, means number of people listening, in case you re not familiar with the term. bottomline, what is the unique format of your radio station? why will people tune in? your investors are the real owners of the station, you re just along for the ride, and your investors can kick you out at any time. You are a hired hand. you better sign a good contract with your investors. a contract that offers you a salary plus a share of profits. a contract that makes you general manager for a specified contractual term that you are obligated to workl there, maybe a five year contract. you better get a job at a radio station, and work your way up. you might be smart enough to do it, but without experience, the investors might not want to invest with you.
i can t tell you where exactly to find such investors/venture capitalists. from what i know it mostly about having connections and networking if you want to go places.if you are planning on getting investments your plan needs to be spot-on, for starters you may want to switch AM for DAB especially if you are talking 4 years later.as for banks it is probably a matter of making an appointment with the bank manager or business consultant or whatever they call themselves.
to obtain a frequency CAN under some conditions, be impossible.they are finite. What I have advised others to do in your situation is to finda good programmer and obtain the needed software andstart an internet radio station which requires no freq, nohardware aside from what you have --just software.and write a biz plan!!!
