FAQ

Two of the biggest problems return to the fact that Fear.FM is an organization run by volunteers. Fear.FM has grown this big that we now have to make binding agreements with external organizations to keep things running. This agreements became more important every day and the interests involved only grew bigger. Furthermore we have problems finding the right, reliable people to fill in some of
the key positions. We can find plenty of people who are willing to help out but turn out to be uninvolved after just a few weeks. Filling in crucial positions like the board and management, take up to 10 hours a week and at some times even way more. Also we've had issues with employees in the past who seemed trustworthy but turned out to have changed, got demotivated or even turned out to have
entirely different faces. Next to the reputation damage that caused this, a few times we had to find this out about the employee in a less fortunate way. In a business you can walk up to your employee to see what they're doing, you can't do that in an online organization run by volunteers. The only thing we can do is ask the employee to perform his tasks and relieve him from his position if he
doesn't.

This brings us to the third problem. Finance. Fear.FM never used its commercial potential. Partly because of restrictions by our sponsors, but also because it's a lot to ask from a volunteer to visit clients across the country (and abroad) during work hours. We haven't got the money to pay these sales people. Also, the hard dance market is far from an easy market. Advertorial mediators don't
see hail in a company like Fear.FM or don't even want to be associated with the hard dance scene. Finally, the fact that the number of Dutch listeners is decreasing, doesn't give much hope either.

The fourth reason is that the last couple of months, a lot of people on key positions had to quit Fear.FM or will quit Fear.FM soon. We couldn't find the replacement for all these people.

The fifth problem is that the scene is rapidly growing. However, this growth takes place outside the traditional radio field. It takes place on social media and youtube. The new generation of listeners prefers to download a podcast via iTunes with the latest hits, instead of listening to a varied radio show that tries to please all listeners and wants to introduce listeners to new sounds as
well. Internet radio hasn't got the same potential it had five years ago.

The sixth problem is that the company that actually arranges our streaming (Radionomy), had to drop 90+% of the Dutch radio stations because of a conflict with the Dutch organization that enforces the Neighbouring
Rights Act. Fear.FM could stay but could be forced to quit any moment as well. Even though Radionomy has hosted thousands of radio stations, they never got any big advertorial campaigns
from the ground in The Netherlands. They turned out not to be the trustworthy company we hoped for. Because of this we can't agree on any long-term deals because we can't be sure we will still exist by that time. Would we choose to pay for all music rights ourselves, that would introduce a cost from about 10.000 euros. If we would do this, the members of the board would be personally held liable
if things would fail.

The seventh problems is that because of the changing law (concerning cookies), it's a certainty that our income will decrease. At this moment it's profitable to keep things running but it won't be anymore. We expect that if would confirm to these new laws, it's impossible for us to remain profitable. For now no one complies to this law so we are willing to take the risk.
The board has reached a point where it's okay for us to quit. We're tired of swimming against the tide, all this problem fixing and arranging all these issues. In the end we decided to either professionalize the entire organization or either quit. The lives of lots of us change: we moved on our own, got kids or got a girlfriend. Some of us changed their primary taste in music as well. Our last
try to professionalize the organization unfortunately failed. We haven't found enough people to replace the board and other people on key positions. An other option would have been to minimize Fear.FM (for example by keeping just one stream with just mainstream hardstyle). However, this is not what we want because it's not wat Fear.FM stands for. We also explored the option of handing Fear.FM
over to another organization but this turn out on nothing. We therefore think it's better to pull the plug and look back at seven beautiful years.

Some of the smaller issues remain unnamed here. These smaller problems were of course fixable but they did make our decision a bit easier.