Attempts to create Internet radio in the history of the web have been made so many times, all of them are difficult to remember. Each time there was another innovation and, in most cases, another failure occurred.
I began to study the history of Internet radio since the days when this area was a "blank slate", so I usually always imagine how individual projects developed, but I know almost nothing about Web radio. So it always amazed me that every story I discovered consisted of a project reaching its peak, then fizzling out trying to grab as much market share as possible, and then failing. In this post, I will not list all the examples I found, but I will look at four websites. All but one of them ended up in disappointment and failure, and the state of affairs of the only one left does not look very good.
The reasons for this did not immediately become clear to me. Radio in the age of the web seems a little old-fashioned, especially when you think about the petabytes of data streaming through Netflix servers. However, arguing this way, you absolutely cannot grasp the essence. We study history, and before radio, the media on the web was extremely limited and restrictive. Radio was the first step towards a multimedia web, the first step towards web-based streaming and syndication (sale of broadcasting rights), the first step into the era of algorithms that we now live in. Capture this market, take possession of it, and your project may become another serious success.
It seems that implementing radio on the web is simple: you just need to take one, two or a hundred radio stations and put them on the network. But with the passage of time and the maturation of the web, the concept of radio changed, because the web provided new opportunities, a way to listen to radio as something personal, which was not available to its analog ancestor. And each of the projects tried to take advantage of this opportunity and "sell" it to the world.
With all this in mind, let's go back to the very beginning.
At a time when the government funded the nascent Internet, audio files did not have much priority in it. Thanks to FTP, it became possible to transfer files by downloading. Broadcasting such files was challenging, especially given the channel limitations and latency. However, there have been several attempts to broadcast audio files on the Internet. One of Xerox's experiments led to an incredible, albeit controversial, success: the Rolling Stones concert live on the Internet.
The web was different. Its rise in popularity coincided with the release of RealAudio in 1995. RealAudio used compression to let you listen to the audio file while it was being downloaded - today we call it streaming, or streaming. It was still impossible to stream directly from the web; there were still several years before the advent of such technologies. To listen to streams, the user had to download the RealPlayer application to his computer. The web was then a place to explore what could be streamed at all.
The first person to grasp the meaning of this idea was Scott Bourne, who launched NetRadio.com shortly after the release of RealAudio. It was the first true Internet radio based on the simplicity of the web.
At its peak, the site boasted tens of thousands of daily visitors. It provided information about concerts and bands, as well as downloadable RealAudio streams. The problems still existed: RealPlayer was weighed down by an inconvenient installation process, and the Internet had yet to reach a critical mass of users. Plus, the sound quality was definitely poor. The songs were streamed to the web via homemade microphones mounted next to analogue radios and digitized in real time. Ultimately, it turned out that Bourne's idea came too early. The site was sold, and by the early 2000s it ceased to exist.
After NetRadio, Mark Cuban took over. In 1994, he met Chris Jaeb through their mutual friend Tod Wagner. Jaeb had started his own company a few years earlier. His business consisted of renting headphones: fans who came to another city for the games could listen to the radio broadcast from their city at the stadium. This interested Cuban for two reasons: First, Jaeb was using the Internet to broadcast. This technology itself had value; second, and more importantly, Jaeb had access to licenses. For several years, Jaeb contacted professional and university sports radio stations, acquiring broadcasting rights from them. It was a veritable gold mine.
Cuban was not an engineer, but he knew a lot about the broadcasting industry. Good enough to know that you can buy an office in a suitable part of the city, install satellite dishes on the roof and receive signals from hundreds of AM stations . Good enough to know that if you can digitize these stations, then all you have to do is acquire the broadcasting rights. Jaeb had such rights. So Cuban rented an office and installed satellite dishes on the roof. He founded his own company, designed Jaeb and Wagner as co-founders, and offered Jaeb a ten percent stake. This is how Audionet was born - a radio site dedicated to sports.
This happened in the dot-com era, when, unfortunately, aggressive, greedy projects often appeared. Audionet had the right history, founders and market potential. Its owners wanted to take over the Internet broadcast radio industry. In just a few months, Audionet has transformed from a single stream into a huge set of university and professional sports radio stations. A few years later, he was already broadcasting political events, concerts and original content.
Website after rebranding
Investors were racing to get their share of the new stars of the web after Cuban gave them the opportunity. In July 1998, the company held an IPO. On the same day, she rebranded herself as Broadcast.com and revealed her not-so-hidden ambition to be so much more than just web audio. It was one of the largest IPOs in the dot-com bubble, making Wagner and Cuban millionaires in a day. Less than a year later, Yahoo followed through with the IPO, acquiring the company for $ 5.7 billion. But the enthusiasm gradually subsided, and the end, as we can see, turned out to be quite predictable. It soon became apparent that other players were coming, and that Broadcast.com's plans to focus on short-term bursts of popularity instead of a long-term perspective were too ambitious.Yahoo rebranded the site a few years later and then shut it down. By then, Cuban and Wagner had liquidated their assets, set up their own companies, and moved on.
After that, the dot-com bubble burst and for a while everything was quiet.
Rising from the ashes of dot-coms, the next web audio experiment started as two separate projects. The first was the personalized radio Last.fm, which contained mostly indie music. The radio responded to likes and dislikes by curating the music playlist according to user votes. The second turned out to be a plug-in for playing music Audioscrobbler, which tracked the history of listened songs and allows you to share them with friends. Officially, both projects emerged in 2005.
Last.fm depended on connections between music lovers. Every track you listened to connected you with a possible "neighbor" - someone who was also interested in the same music. The site even tracked offline music preferences in an effort to match users with similar tastes. The research process never ended. By studying your neighbors, you've always found new music.
Your Last.fm profile became an extension of your musical taste. He could be wild and varied or calm and pedantic. But this window into the online world allowed you to show just what kind of music fan you are. And at the center of it all was a personalized streaming radio station. In it, you opened new groups, embarking on a musical odyssey driven by the preferences of people completely unknown to you.
The site did not have a success story like Broadcast.com, licensing proved to be difficult, and radio stations were limited to non-commercial music only. But this only made users more connected to the project, turning the site into a place to discover. It has become the digital equivalent of going to a record store, talking to locals and discovering new songs. The site took away the monopoly on taste creation from the record companies and the music press by making music a process of sharing finds between friends.
Last.fm screenshot in 2003 version
Last.fm proved to be significant as a small community of indie music lovers. He has grown a loyal following and has been the reason for the success of many artists. But we're talking about Internet radio, and in this industry, lax ambition will get you nowhere. In 2007, CBS came on the scene, recognizing the potential of the site to promote something more mainstream. The company acquired it and adapted it to its new vision. Ultimately, she only succeeded in destroying everything that made this website unique. The redesign trimmed many of the social features that users are accustomed to. Shortly thereafter, TechCrunch published information that the serviceallegedly, there was a leak of personal data of users who were engaged in streaming pirated music (the site stubbornly denied this). Later, the owners started charging overseas users. Last.fm still exists, but has little publicity.
And that brings us logically to the Pandora project, founded by Tim Westergren around the same time that Last.fm was born. While working as a film composer, he created his own hierarchy of organizing music into categories that reflect its themes, melodies and tonality. It evolved into the Music Genome Project, using the Westergren classification to create algorithmic connections between compositions based on computer magic. The project has undergone many changes throughout its life: from its origins as a licensed recommendation engine, it eventually evolved into a personal web radio. At this point, it was renamed Pandora.
Pandora stands out from the rest of the sites for its discovery process. It doesn't rely on advice from online friends and doesn't force you to explore new music on your own. The music played is determined by your musical preferences. In the process of learning your preferences, the Pandora algorithm uses the Westergren system to create these connections. It was and continues to be a completely new approach to radio implementation. The Pandora state still has dozens of music researchers who rank compositions in a hierarchy and pass information to the site.
It took several years for the site to develop; dozens of investors abandoned it. The company ran out of money several times in order to firmly stand on its feet, it had to change strategy and tactics for almost a decade. But when she succeeded, the site gained immense popularity, attracting a new generation of music lovers. The site has evolved into a proof of the concept of a new type of radio that takes full advantage of the web (a centralized network running on top of users' computers) to create a personal, intimate and evolving musical experience. By 2013, two years after its successful IPO, the site had over 200 million users.
According to the owners, Pandora won where others failed and realized the ambition of creating Internet radio solely thanks to the will of its founder. But this is not entirely true, a decent amount of luck also helped: Pandora managed to get funding on time, despite hundreds of refusals, and to close the right deal at the right time. But the most important factor in Pandora's success was that it transcended the ambition that the company claims to have always held. For two years, Pandora simply stopped paying its employees - this behavior is exploitative, manipulative and undoubtedly illegal ( several employees have filed a lawsuit against Pandora for deferred payment of salaries ). For this and a hundred other small reasons, Pandora was able to survive.
In 2017, the Pandora service was acquired by Sirius XM. He may have entered the inevitable, albeit overdue, final phase of the web radio project that everyone else had. It will probably be stopped and taken apart. He may simply fade away, after which he will be replaced by a more active competitor. But maybe this will not happen. We may have passed this stage. One thing is clear - streaming still relies on the web, but its priorities have shifted. We listen to streaming music and podcasts on phones and smart devices. The web remains glue, but it is no longer the ultimate medium. Perhaps it should be so. In the end, we will always have podcasts.
Advertising
Need a server for internet radio ? Epic Servers are reliable Linux or Windows servers with powerful AMD EPYC processors for absolutely any purpose. Try it as soon as possible!
