Some churches operate LPFM stations and finance the operation through normal church funds. Unfortunately, most of these stations end up being little more than a translator for some national programming feed, minus that church's Sunday and Wednesday services which becomes the "local content". A few government entities have LPFM stations. Most of them self-promote the city or area and offer emergency information during bad weather or some large event. These stations are supported by local taxes. And there are some college or school-based LPFM licensees that use the station as a broadcast lab. No commercial content on any of them, because air time doesn't need to be "sold" to pay the bills.
The other LPFMers are selling "underwriting", similar to what you'd hear on an NCE station.
"This hour's music brought to you by Lester's World of Websites" so something like that. You have to be careful with ad copy, because there are a number of land mines out there about what you can't say in noncommercial underwriting. After the NAB wasn't able to kill LPFM outright, their next two steps of lobbyist actions were to mandate third adjacent protections (even though translators didn't require this level of protection, and many translators were higher powered than the 100 watt ERP limitation for LPFM), and to demand noncommercial status, hoping this would cause significant cash flow problems and LPFM stations would wither on the vine after they went on the air.
Being noncommercial turned out to be somewhat of a benefit to LPFM, because it avoids the price-gouging Federal auction process to get a license. To sell underwriting, you just need to refine your sales skills and your message so you explain how underwriting can bring about the same Top Of Mind Awareness an advertiser wants and thinks he is getting from more traditional radio advertising. Of course, program content and a usable signal are also issues for some LPFM stations, and those real world problems will need to be dealt with on an individual station level.
As far as the current legal environment goes, I would like to see it made easier to sell an LPFM station. Some licensees didn't realize what they were getting in to when they first went on the air. Let these guys sell the thing and hopefully the new owners will be older and wiser and you won't have to surrender one license, then wait for a window to open, then hope the new group can get the old frequency. That's how it works now.
This is also one area where the NAB totally missed the boat. A national organization with their prominence should have embraced LPFM instead of fighting it. LPFM is not and was not the death star for conventional full powered over-the-air broadcasting. In fact, LPFM could have created a farm system of sorts for radio and created additional employment opportunities for sales, engineering, and programming folks. The NAB should have helped LPFM get established and created a separate division for them within the NAB organization. But the Eddie Fritts generation of broadcast lobbyists wanted a war. They got their war and won almost every battle. And conventional radio is still dying.
Oh, yeah. F*ck the NAB.
