I don't know how good your May was but I've just roughly done the sums and May, 2005 will go down in aberdeen-music.com's history as a very important month indeed. Yep, for the very first time in the web site's history I am not using any of my own money to pay for the monthly web hosting fee! Thanks to all our sponsors and supporting members, aberdeen-music.com is at this moment in time completely self-sufficient!
This is a massive achievement for the web site and all of you who have donated money in the past or are a current sponsor/supporter should feel very proud of yourselves indeed. If things were to remain like this (and I sincerely hope they do!) then there will be no need for me to spend anymore of my own money on the web site. You don't realise how much less grieve I'll get from people about this fact!
Things might not stay this way of course. There are many other costs the web site has aside from the monthly web hosting bill. License renewals (for vBulletin, PhotoPost etc) are example of other running costs but thankfully they only usually come once a year. The web hosting bill is the all important one - if that doesn't get paid then the web site gets switched off and is always the most expensive bill to pay.
This now puts aberdeen-music.com in the unusual position of having a cash surplus beginning to build up. My intention was to never run this web site for profit and I'm not going to change my mind now. This means we now have the exciting prospect of using the money to make further improvements to web site or even donate or invest the money externally.
Being the geek I am I immediately think of how we might be able to add or improve to the web site using the extra money. One thing that immediately springs to mind is something we tried long ago with some success but something we had to switch off due to it's expense. Can anyone remember aberdeen-music.com radio? Feasibly, this would now be relatively affordable with this extra money - especially when the strength of pound is taken into effect (this is also why the web hosting is so cheap just now!). So what do people think? Would this be worth resurrecting for a trial period perhaps? Or should I spend the money on something else? If so, what do you think could be done with the cash?
For those of you that can't remember or were not a visitor to the web site back then, aberdeen-music.com radio was an Internet streaming radio station that people could listen to using most audio player software (e.g WinAmp etc). The station was programmed to play tracks submitted by local bands but also other commercial music. The highlight of the station though was when we did live DJ broadcasts. It was quite a laugh I seem to recall! If the station was to be relaunched then I would see it working in a similar way as before but because we would have more members this time round then I would hope more people would like to do their own live shows on the station. Shows can be done from the comfort of your home/venue or whatever but you do need to have an ADSL connection due to the bandwidth required and the usual DJ'ing equipment - CD player(s), mixer, microphone etc.
Anyway, let me know what you all think should be done with the extra cash! Be it setting up aberdeen-music.com radio or otherwise!