Cotonete

» see cotonete.iol.pt as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Cotonete opened on 23 July 2001, in the stretch when every radio group in Europe had decided the web was going to be a radio. It belonged to Media Capital Rádios, and the pilot went live with ten themed stations covering Portuguese music, fado, dance, jazz and a lounge channel called cotton club. Alongside those it carried the live streams of the group's own brands, Rádio Comercial and Rádio Cidade among them. The name was a joke about a cotton swab, written in lowercase with the last three letters doing a second job.

The part people actually came for was the station you assembled yourself. Cotonete held a catalog of more than 10,000 songs and let a listener build a personal channel out of it, with downloading firmly off the table. That feature lasted three years. It ended in 2004, because what had made it possible was a hole in European law that Portugal had never filled with legislation of its own, and once the hole closed the site could only offer a channel that guessed at the sort of music you liked.

What was left still worked. On its fifth birthday in September 2006 the site relaunched with a staff of twenty behind it and roughly 60 percent of all online radio listening in Portugal. A Marktest panel counted 366,000 people through the site between January and September 2007, which put it just behind the web presences of Cidade FM and RFM. By its tenth birthday, on 9 September 2011, it was carrying 30,000 visitors a day across more than 300 themed stations and claiming the largest Portuguese-language music database online.

In 2001 I was seventeen and on a modem in Turkey, where streaming audio was an argument with the phone line rather than a choice of station. Cotonete was never going to be mine in any case. It was a Portuguese product for a Portuguese audience, and the presenters and the catalog both sat behind a language I do not have. The only part I recognize from outside is the shape of the problem: a site that gave people a real feature and then had to take it back over a licensing question nobody in the audience ever saw.

~ the record ~

~ the law that took the feature ~

Personal radio in 2001 sat in a hole between two bodies of law. European rules on webcasting had been written for broadcasters, Portugal had no national legislation filling in the detail, and inside that gap a site could hand listeners a catalog and let them order it. Cotonete used the gap for three years. When it closed, the replacement was the compromise the whole industry eventually settled on, a channel that plays around your taste without letting you name the next song.

The company did try to buy the feature back the legitimate way. At the 2006 relaunch it was in talks with two record labels about bringing personal stations back under license. Nothing came of it in the old form. What arrived instead, everywhere, was the licensed algorithmic station, which is what most people now mean when they say internet radio.

~ the two moves ~

Cotonete lived on IOL, Media Capital's own portal, from launch until midday on 15 July 2005, when the whole radio group's web presence moved across to Clix. Clix wanted the traffic, and the stated target was 1.4 million listeners a month. In 2010 everything moved back to IOL, where it stayed until the end.

Five years of a music site living on somebody else's portal is a reminder of what a portal was for. Clix was an access provider with a front page to fill, and the front page needed reasons for people to open it. Music was one of the better ones, which is why every provider in Europe was renting or buying one.

~ the podcast detour ~

Cotonete opened a podcast service in May 2005, early enough that the word still needed explaining in Portuguese, and by that July it had built a station called Rádio Podcast that did nothing but stream the newest episodes back at you as a continuous channel. That is a strange and revealing product. Podcasting was supposed to be the thing that freed audio from the schedule, and the first instinct of a radio company was to put the schedule back on top of it.

The same instinct produced the rest of the catalog. Maisfutebol Rádio ran on the site in the early years, shared with the football portal of the same group. In April 2006 the Kulto magazine, then a Sunday supplement in Público, was handed a station of its own. Every property the company owned eventually got a channel, because a channel was the only shape the company knew how to make.

~ the last year ~

Nobody published a shutdown notice. Cotonete was wound down through 2015, and the way you can tell is by counting who was still doing the work: in December its coverage of the Vodafone Mexefest festival was a single reporter, and the radio servers had already gone silent. Fourteen years of streams ended on a date nobody bothered to write down.

The parent company had spent years rearranging itself around television by then, and a music site that lost its distinguishing feature in 2004 was running on a catalog and a habit. Habits are cheap to keep and easy to stop paying for.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »