Supporting Members

The listeners who keep the stream up

Polish New Castle Radio has always run on its listeners. Not on advertising, not on a parent organisation, and not on any kind of grant — on individual people who decided the station was worth paying for and did something about it.

What supporting membership meant

Members contributed toward the running costs: the streaming licences that are charged per listener-hour, the bandwidth, the hosting and the archive storage. In return they were acknowledged on air and on this page, and they had the modest but genuine satisfaction of knowing exactly what their money was doing.

The membership spanned a remarkable geography for a station named after a small Pennsylvania city — Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida, the Carolinas, Ohio and Ontario among others. That is the shape of the Polish-American diaspora, and it is why an internet station works for this music where a local transmitter never could.

Why the names are no longer listed

Earlier versions of this page carried the full membership list with each member's home town. That was normal practice at the time and was done with everyone's consent, but publishing the names and locations of private individuals is not something this site does any longer. The support was real and it is still gratefully acknowledged; it simply does not need to be a public directory.

Other ways people helped

• Hosting a show. The largest contribution anyone made was an hour a week, every week, for years.
• Sending in recordings. Bands, labels and collectors supplied a great deal of what got played.
• Reporting events. Listeners frequently knew about a dance before the station did.
• Photographs. Most of what survives of the scene visually was taken by someone in the room.

What listener funding buys, concretely

It is worth being specific, because “supporting the station” is vague enough to sound like a formality. Contributions go to three things: the performance licences that make it legal to broadcast commercial recordings, the bandwidth that carries the stream to listeners, and the storage that keeps the archive available after a broadcast has aired. There is no fourth category and nobody takes a wage.

The licensing is the part most listeners never think about and the part that most often closes a station. Broadcasting recorded music legally means paying the collecting societies, the fee scales with the audience, and there is no small-station exemption that makes it free. A station that stops paying stops broadcasting.

The practical consequence is that a station of this size lives about a month ahead of itself. That is not a complaint — it is simply the shape of the thing, and it explains why appeals appear on air periodically and why the archive window is measured in weeks rather than years.