An online radio station may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you consider your business or organization's Web needs. But offering audio on your site may not be as far-fetched of an idea as you think. And it's pretty easy to do with Live365.com's category busting "Pro"-level services.

If you have some original songs or other entertainment-industry audio that you need to make available for your customers or clients, you've probably already looked into a streaming audio solution for your Web presence. But that's not to say other business types and non-profits can benefit from streaming audio as well.

The most obvious reason to put some audio on your Web site is to rebroadcast speeches, product announcements or financial conference calls. While you might be able to store those on a standard http server and allow visitors to download them, a streaming solution is probably best if you know that more than a few people will be accessing them.

Using the Live365 service can also take a load off your Web server and Live365 offers you’re the ability to archive those feeds for quick access--soon after the surfer clicks the link she's listening to your audio feed.

In fact, the feed can be live, if you like, enabling you to rebroadcast events as they happen at your company or organization. That can be handy for product launches or special announcements, press conferences or anything else that you'd like to make available on the Internet. (And, as this writer can tell you, the more PR resources you have, the better, so archiving those product launch feeds can be a good thing.)

You may find that audio can be a significant benefit for your technical or customer support as well. Training audio can be reassuring to a visitor who doesn't want to cull through your knowledge database. In an educational setting, the benefits to stored audio are obvious—you can post recorded lectures for distance learning or just to have handy for your students studying. Non-profits can post speeches or audio segments produced by the people who are being helped, to give a human touch to a site. A non-profit, company or municipality might make its meetings available online for public consumption or on an intranet to help bring employees or clients up to speed on new developments.

Live365's service isn't cheap--starting at $75 a month for the Intro level and going up from there--but that gives you the live feed capability, a set number of megabytes for storing archived audio along with a logo-customized version of the Live365 player application and a message board associated with that branded player. You can make MP3s available or you can use special encoding software to offer a live feed. And Live365 reports listener stats and information back to you to let you know what audio content your visitors are listening to and whether it seems to be holding their attention.

Best of all, Live365 covers music licensing from BMI and ASCAP, so you can use commercial music in your broadcasts or presentations without specifically arranging to pay for the rights. So, just in case your goal really is a full-fledged Internet radio station--spinning the hits--then you're covered for that, too.