Live365Reviews of live365.com

I have been a broadcaster on LIVE 365 since 2020 and I like that everything is in one place including the royalties being paid by LIVE 365. What I don't like? I don't like being nickeled and dimed and it has been feeling that way the past year with the U.K drama and having to pay for extras that used to be included. Now our fees are going up in September 2026 again and I am seeing broadcasters planning to shut down operations. I hope to continue but with 2 radio stations this is double troubling. Plus I am in Canada and this is a huge increase when you are paying in Canadian dollars and not American dollars. I understand that the price of everything is going up but LIVE 365 needs to stop treating broadcasters like customers and start treating us like partners. They should want our input and not just our money.

Live365 is fine for beginners, starting their own online radio station. Firstly, it lack FTP pload - something crucial for fast uploads. Secondly, rotations and playlists are not easy to customise. Support is good, as you can actually talk to real people and not bots, as in many other cases.

In January of 2016 the original Live365.com - a streaming radio site focusing on niche stations run by real living, breathing people and with 100% of content uploaded from their own personal CD collections - closed its doors. This catastrophic loss was due to the expiration in late 2015 of the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2009, which had allowed lower music performance royalty payments for small 'net broadcasters, of which Live365 is host. The year 2016 was a sad one for people who prized real radio - as opposed to robostreams like Apple Music, Pandora and Spotify. Just a gaping void where a great variety of music in every imaginable genre had been available. But that all changed when news came out in early 2017 that someone had bought and re-started Live365. Sadly, it became quickly apparent that this new ownership was allowing - nay, exacerbating significantly - one of the prime elements which had utterly obliterated any chance that Live365 would make so much as a blip on the publicity radar for "Top Streaming Music." That destructive element is: Advertising volume set to blast out at several times louder than the station content. So the new Live365 is just as invisible as the old, and the new management not only refuse to correct the problem, there's a definite indication they're in total denial that the problem even exists. Like presumably thousands of other streaming music fans I try to listen at work, when I'm on tasks where having music going is not a problem. And like most workplaces, there are people there other than me. So assuming everybody in your work group is cool with the music you want to play, all of that agreement and goodwill goes straight down the toilet when an ad screams out from the speakers at 4,000 dB louder than the music that had just been playing. Every. Single. Time. This is not an anomaly limited to any particular station - I have listened to dozens of stations at Live365 and it's the same for every single one of them: When the song ends and an ad cuts in, you had better have your fingers on the volume or you are going to get your ears blasted to smithereens. I've long since learned that Live365 simply *cannot be used* in a work situation or any other public or semi-public listening scenario. I'm assuming every single other potential listener, wherever they may be, has learned that exact same lesson, the hard way, in every listening situation in which others are present - work, school, home, wherever. It quickly becomes intolerable even for me when listening solo at home - so it's off to some YouTube channel or other, usually. So not surprisingly, Live365, nearly six years after its relaunch, is all but invisible to the world - particularly to cyberspace and all discussions of music streaming therein. If you do a simple search for "Top Streaming Music Sources," you will see: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Qobuz, Tidal, LiveXLive, Deezer, Pandora, SiriusXM, Idagio. What you will not find, anywhere, is Live365. Go ahead, open a new tab and give it a try. See? Granted, some of these competitors (like Apple and YouTube,) have boatloads of cash for promotion. But they at least make the effort, and above all: They do not blast ads at listeners at ten times the volume of the music, thereby negating the entire prospect of that whole "having listeners" thing in the first place. So the new Live365, like the old Live365, is like a rare treasure with absolutely enormous potential - but is circling the drain to inevitable bankruptcy and oblivion. Why? Because its management cannot - or will not - correct a massive flaw that short-circuits the entire entity at the ground level. People will not listen to Live365 for the simple reason that Live365's ad volume makes listening impossible. It's sad to see the slow suicide of Live365 happen, but for fans and DJs alike there is nothing that can be done except hope that at some point in the future a wiser group of people will buy out the site and run it responsibly. This is a problem that is bonehead-easy to fix, but the people at the controls refuse to do it. I feel like I'm watching an old friend destroy himself with a crack addiction or something. Again, it's just inexpressibly sad.

When listeners hear a song they like on a broadcaster's stream and "click or tap" the shopping cart to buy that song, it should hyper-link that listener to the broadcaster's Amazon or Apple affiliate account so they can receive the credit for that purchase, not Live365. It appears Live365.com currently has the buy now button linked to someone's Apple affiliate account, making extra money off hardworking radio programmers as if the subscriptions paid by broadcasters are not enough. It's not fair, and this needs to change. It is already harmful the cap placed on a broadcaster's stream account, which makes it difficult for radio programmers on the Live365 network to earn money or credits towards their monthly subscription fee with Live365's monetization program, which this broadcaster has elected to be a part of since 2009 and this my station has not made a penny from Live365's monetization program. Next, there is the subject of promotion, and I am not talking about Live365.com's spotlight featured stations that you have to request through Live365.com's marketing department. As a broadcaster, I am concerned about the first thing a website visitor will see when they visit live365.com. When you visit the Live365.com website, the landing page shows various broadcaster logos that should randomly display different station logos each time their landing page reloads, but this rarely is the case which appears that Live365.com has its favorites. It's those stations that you continuously see receiving the most hits to their streams and those stations that enjoy the most listeners. I have brought this issue to Live365 management a few times by creating a support ticket over the last twelve years since I have been a customer. The emailed response that I get back is always the same without addressing the real issue on the Live365.com landing page. Look, here's the thing, there needs to be equal opportunity for all broadcasters on the Live365.com network, not just a select few.