Choosing your radio genres wisely

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
One of the most overlooked areas of promoting your internet radio station is choosing your genres wisely. In addition to your choice of genre the formatting is also important.

You should choose genres that accurately reflect what your radio station plays. We recommend you choose 3 or 4 genres that best fit your station. Simply using the genre 'Various' or 'All' is a bad idea.

Your genres should be separated by spaces. Using commas or any other delimiter is just a waste of the space.

Most internet radio directories give extra impressions in their results to certain popular pre-defined genres. You should be taking full advantage of this by selecting 3 or 4 of those genres (that match your station) for your radio stations encoder settings.

Our tag cloud on our internet radio directory shows popular radio genres based on listeners. You could use this as a rough guide.

Its also worth mentioning that you shouldn't underestimate niche genres people may search for. These tend to have less competition than say Rock, Pop or Dance.
 
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Its also worth mentioning that you shouldn't underestimate niche genres people may search for. These tend to have less competition than say rock, pop or dance.

this is really important. I've been a EDM enthusiast for over 25 years (!) now and there seems to be a new genre every week which is a sub genre of a existing one. So put in both its "hip" name and what the "parent" genre is, and get the DJ's who are playing it to promote it via whatever social networks they might use. For instance just this week a mate of mine said some tracks were "fidget" when I would have thought of them more as the wider genre of eurodance. (which also opened my ears up to what fidget house is supposed to be as I was never quite sure myself :D)

Also the kind of folk attracted to internet radio are more likely to be music specialists themselves. you can hear a bunch of the generic commercial tunes on your local or national radio stations as it is, if listeners are going to the trouble of activating extra gadgets to hear music they are wanting something better ;)
 
One of the most overlooked areas of promoting your internet radio station is choosing your genres wisely. In addition to your choice of genre the formatting is also important.

You should choose genres that accurately reflect what your radio station plays. We recommend you choose 3 or 4 genres that best fit your station. Simply using the genre 'Various' or 'All' is a bad idea.

Your genres should be separated by spaces. Using commas or any other delimiter is just a waste of the space.

I've been looking everywhere for WHERE we do this, since I can't find anything genre-related in the control panel. Could you just briefly explain where we set the genres?

Thanks
 
I've been looking everywhere for WHERE we do this, since I can't find anything genre-related in the control panel. Could you just briefly explain where we set the genres?

Thanks

Hi Phil,

In the control panel you can add your genre descriptions in the 'AutoDJ' tab under 'Configure Server' if you use this feature. If not, then most live stream encoder software has settings where you can add your genre information instead.

We hope this helps.
 
Hi Phil,

In the control panel you can add your genre descriptions in the 'AutoDJ' tab under 'Configure Server' if you use this feature. If not, then most live stream encoder software has settings where you can add your genre information instead.

We hope this helps.

Perfect, it certainly did help, many thanks!
 
You should organize the moderation of genres. At the request of the owners of radio stations, you should consider the cases when the radio stations are located in more than 6-10 genres, they do it in order to raise their positions, but their radios are irrelevant to the genre in which they are located, thereby the radio stations, which are located in their true genres, are in lower positions, and thus your catalog turns into garbage, and in such cases you should take action to eliminate such stations of the genres to which they do not have any relationship.
For example, the following radio of "Classic Rock Florida SHE Radio WSHEHD Hi Def Miami" uses 10 genres, meanwhile they use ‘ambient’ genre, to which they have no relevance. Thus, the radios, which play ‘ambient’, are in a low position, while the ‘ambient’ section is clogged by other genres, thereby all the sections of ‘Internet-radio.com’ portal do not reflect the reality, and you spoil your reputation. Also, in addition, you can create a thread on the forum, where the owners of the stations will be able to express their claims to the stations located in 6 or more genres and to which they have no relevance.
 
Thanks for taking the time to give us some feedback. This is something we have been mulling over for a while behind closed doors.. As we become more popular we are seeing the issue increase. We have some ideas that we would like to discuss with the community so I've created a thread here so we can see what we can come up with :

Genres and the quality of the directory listings

Please do join us (along with anyone else) to voice your opinions.

You should organize the moderation of genres. At the request of the owners of radio stations, you should consider the cases when the radio stations are located in more than 6-10 genres, they do it in order to raise their positions, but their radios are irrelevant to the genre in which they are located, thereby the radio stations, which are located in their true genres, are in lower positions, and thus your catalog turns into garbage, and in such cases you should take action to eliminate such stations of the genres to which they do not have any relationship.
For example, the following radio of "Classic Rock Florida SHE Radio WSHEHD Hi Def Miami" uses 10 genres, meanwhile they use ‘ambient’ genre, to which they have no relevance. Thus, the radios, which play ‘ambient’, are in a low position, while the ‘ambient’ section is clogged by other genres, thereby all the sections of ‘Internet-radio.com’ portal do not reflect the reality, and you spoil your reputation. Also, in addition, you can create a thread on the forum, where the owners of the stations will be able to express their claims to the stations located in 6 or more genres and to which they have no relevance.
 
Hi rocklouisiana,

We listed your station for you yesterday. We pull your stations genre information directly from your Shoutcast servers status pages metadata.
 
Can I add one music genre only in this moment if station not registered in Shoutcast?

The shoutcast authhash actually limits the amount of genres that you can have, so without it you can set multiple genres (or even just the one) in either your server control panel or live streaming softwares settings.
 
The shoutcast authhash actually limits the amount of genres that you can have, so without it you can set multiple genres (or even just the one) in either your server control panel or live streaming softwares settings.
Can you direct me where exactly in control panel can I put multiple genres , please? I put on DSP plugin genre - misc - but this genre doesn't reflect in your stations genres directory,so people can't find my station by genre.
 
Can you direct me where exactly in control panel can I put multiple genres , please? I put on DSP plugin genre - misc - but this genre doesn't reflect in your stations genres directory,so people can't find my station by genre.

The control panels genre settings are only for when using the AutoDJ feature. For live streams the settings have to be configured in encoder softwares settings.

I can see that your station is displaying the genre as "Misc". https://www.internet-radio.com/station/rocket/
 
This is because we do not have a "Misc" genre page. But any stations listed as misc can still be found by searching that term in the search bar.
 
Hi - It seems as though there may have been updates to the control panel since i last used it; I am a returning user, different account; Previously, i could update the Genre in the Mount Points tab, but this is no longer available. Support also gave me access to the raw config file because i had trouble with the genres not appearing correctly when i used AutoDJ. Can someone help me get this functionality back?

My username is KieranCloudRadio.
 
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Hi KieranCloud,

Welcome back! Yes, unfortunately there is a bit of a bug with the genres in the latest version of Centovacast at the moment, this will be fixed in the next update though. So for now I have given you the permission to edit your server's raw config file.

To edit the genres open up the 'liquidsoap' config file and on line 20 you'll see the genre settings. Edit this accordingly and then save the file. You'll then need to fully stop and start your server again for the new config settings to take full effect. If you have any issues with doing this then please drop us an email.
 
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