If you’re on the lookout for an alternative to Radio King, then you’re in the right place! Radio King and Radio Cult are both great providers. They each streamline the technical aspects of running an online radio station, leaving you with one less thing to worry about. Meaning you, as stations, can focus on what’s really important: broadcasting and music and other audio content you and your community of listeners want to hear.
What’s the difference between Radio King and Radio Cult?
Short answer: Radio Cult is specifically built for independent and community radio, with a key focus on stations who mainly broadcast mixes.
Radio Cult and Radio King are similar in some regards, but each has clearly been designed for different use cases. Radio King was first released over 10 years ago, when online radio stations primarily broadcast playlists. Radio Cult is a modern platform, with ongoing development, that is built specifically for the current state of online radio.
Many radio stations play a range of content - from pre-records, to playlists, to live sets and everything in between. You need a tool that is fit for purpose.
So if you’re a modern station looking for a tool that is a delight to use, has dedicated mix support and is more affordable then you’re in the right place.
Seven reasons why stations use Radio Cult over Radio King
We’ve assembled seven points of difference between Radio Cult and Radio King, which we are convinced (and hopefully you will be to) that make Radio Cult a better alternative to Radio King for your station.
Reasons to choose Radio Cult over Radio King
1. A mix-focussed platform
As listeners' habits change, so must stations. It’s becoming more and more common for online stations to broadcast live sets and pre-recorded mixes, rather than just streaming playlists.
Radio Cult has been designed with this in mind. We offer a modern UI to easily upload, schedule and ultimately archive mixes. With us there’s no need to create a playlist when it will only store a single audio file for the mix you want to play. Radio King has clearly been designed to primarily broadcast playlists and you do need to create a playlist to play any sort of mix. So scheduling a mix is more cumbersome than it ought to be. However, by having a different focus than us, Radio King does offer greater playlist functionality, such as being able to see what exactly will be played prior to your broadcast beginning.
2. Cloud storage
Nowadays, we fully understand stations need a large amount of cloud storage to broadcast what they want. A pre-recorded mix can be hundreds of megabytes and this is further compounded when a high quality bitrate (such as 320kbps) is used for the audio file. That's why Radio Cult provides so much cloud storage to it’s stations.
Radio King’s Pro plan is priced at $54 USD and offers 10GB of storage. While our most similar plan (Hobby) is $55 USD and we offer 50GB of storage. So for an extra dollar a month, we provide 5x more cloud storage than Radio King.
3. Affordability
Running an online station can be expensive - you know it and we know it as well. That's why we’ve strived to keep our costs low while still providing you with the best tools available. We believe our pricing when compared to Radio King reflects this.
Though Radio King’s two cheapest plans are less expensive than anything we offer, one would struggle to operate an online station using them in our humble opinion. The maximum amount of storage is only 5GB, the highest stream quality is 128kbps and on the cheapest plan only 150 monthly listening hours are allocated (meaning once your listeners have consumed this allowance, your stream will be cut off).
Their remaining plans are more generous, but we believe ours provide greater value for stations with little difference in cost. Unlike Radio King we offer up to 320kbps stream quality on all of our plans. Further, we provide significantly more cloud storage - up to fives times as much. Lastly, we offer either a greater or similar bandwidth allowance, depending on the comparable plans.
4. Integrations
Web radio is a live experience. As a listener, once a mix has been played it’s not the easiest thing to hear it again whenever you want. Uploading past mixes to Soundcloud and Mixcloud - the most popular archival tools in the industry - solves this problem entirely.
Radio Cult integrates with both Soundcloud and Mixcloud. Radio King neither integrates with Soundcloud nor Mixcloud. So no matter your listeners' archival platform of choice, Radio Cult has got you covered.
Our integrations can save you a lot of time. You should be able to focus on the important things - not uploading media to different tools.
5. Mobile
Gone are the days where web radio could only listened on computers. Most listeners now have the means to enjoy web radio using the device in their back pockets. We know it's important to you as stations to allow your listeners to lock in through as many mediums as possible, especially through their mobile phones.
Radio Cult offers our aggregator mobile app (which is available on both iOS and Android) on all of our plans at no additional cost. Radio King does offer stations a dedicated app, but only as a paid add-on (except on their Business plan, where only the android app is bundled in as part of the plan’s cost). In fact to get your own iOS app through Radio King could mean your monthly bill is more than double than what it would be without it.
6. Chat rooms
Community radio as the name suggests is all about engagement with your community of listeners. Not only do you want to know that your audio content is resonating with your listeners, you also want to provide a place where you listeners can engage with each other and a chat room provides just that.
Radio Cult provides a chat room for you on all of our plans, which is accessible on our aforementioned app as well as an embeddable component on your own website. Radio King provides no chat functionality of any kind.
7. Station management
Running an online station is time consuming and resource intensive. We know that managing all your artists and residents can be a lot. So you need processes in place to ensure that when a show goes live, everything is in place so it goes off without a hitch.
Radio Cult offers dedicated station management functionality, allowing you to store all of your artists and presenters data in one place. A central repository to track everything about your artists and make sure you have everything from them to make certain your station runs seamlessly.
You can even use this data to power your own site, so your listeners know everything they need to about your artists. And when you need to update an artist’s information, you only need to update it in one location. Radio King provides no comparable station management functionality.
Please note: If Radio King gets an update and this article becomes outdated, please email us and we will update it.