All Night Nippon Mobile (オールナイトニッポンモバイル)

» see allnightnippon.com/annm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nippon Broadcasting went on air on 15 July 1954. Fifty-five years later to the day, it started selling All Night Nippon by the file.

All Night Nippon had been running since 1967 and was in its forty-third year when the mobile version was announced, on 13 July 2009, jointly by the station and RecoChoku. The reasoning the station gave was unusually plain for a press release. Listeners in their twenties and older had work and housework to deal with, so being awake at one in the morning for a radio show was not something most of them could still manage. The fix was to cut the show into pieces and sell the pieces.

A piece was seven minutes of talk, priced at one hundred and five yen a file. The first file of any program was free and a new one went up every Wednesday. The catalog mixed second runs of material that had already gone out over the transmitter with fresh recordings made for the handset, where a personality who had been off the air for years could turn up and explain what he had been doing. The opening lineup ran to three programs. Demon Kogure had one and Matsumura Kuniihiro another, with Tsuchiya Reo of RAG FAIR on the third.

It was not an idea anyone planned from scratch. The station had been putting odds and ends on its mobile site Mobile 1242 for a while, and when a director's cut of Beat Takeshi's All Night Nippon went up in 2009 the download counts jumped hard enough to suggest there was a business under it. By April 2010 more than sixty personalities had recorded for the thing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ one hundred and five yen a file ~

Two shops carried it: Mobile 1242, which the station ran itself, and RecoChoku, the ringtone and music download service that was the biggest paid audio counter in Japan at the time. Both billed through the carrier, and that is what made the whole thing work. You did not enter a card. You pressed buy and the hundred and five yen turned up on your phone bill next to the voice minutes.

That rail is most of why this is a Japanese story and not a general one. Elsewhere a radio station could not simply become a merchant on your mobile account, and by 2009 the markets beyond Japan had largely settled into treating talk audio as free, with an RSS feed attached. Japan spent the same years building a market where seven minutes of a comedian had a price on it, and the two companies said so directly, writing that they wanted to establish talk content as a category in mobile download sales.

~ forty-eight programs at once ~

On 9 April 2010 a terrestrial show called AKB48's All Night Nippon started, and the mobile service was used to introduce all forty-eight members at once. Forty-nine files went on sale: one per member, plus a free opening file recorded by the three team captains. Every member had her own program with her own title.

Then came the rule the service is actually remembered for. A member got a second episode only if her first one passed a thousand downloads, and every episode after that carried the same condition against the one before it. Nobody softened the language. A radio station had turned its own idol roster into a public meter, and the number was one thousand. Several members never got past the file they started with, and the lists of how many episodes each one managed are still sitting in the record.

~ the afternoon of 11 march ~

By the mid-2010s the service lived on Radital, Nippon Broadcasting's audio platform, which had been taking member registrations since 3 September 2012. Radital ran on an outside server. That detail is the whole ending.

At around two in the afternoon on Saturday 11 March 2017, pages on Radital started showing up altered. The company's investigation found a break-in through an Apache Struts2 vulnerability, with possible exposure of 11,330 name and address records from the shipping form and 45,984 member records covering everyone who had registered since the platform opened. At four o'clock that same afternoon they cut Radital off the network. Their own program sites, run on their own machines, were untouched.

Radital served a 503 for the next five months. A successor called All Night Nippon i started distributing on 31 July 2017, and on 2 August the station published the notice that ended Radital for good, saying it had looked into restarting and decided against it on security grounds. Nine episodes of a Morning Musume program were carried across to the new site. Everything else stayed where it was. The All Night Nippon Mobile page is still up at the station's own domain today, six thousand nine hundred bytes of it, with an unrendered Movable Type template tag sitting in the markup where a variable should have been filled in years ago.

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