db-FM

» see konami.co.jp/kme/db-FM/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 5 February 1997, Konami told the Japanese press that it would open a radio station on 17 March at six in the evening. The station was called db-FM and it would run on RealAudio. Almost everything on it was material the company already owned: stretches of radio shows it had sponsored, plus the drama CDs that had been cut out of those shows. One program in the lineup had until then gone out over the air only around Tokyo and Osaka. Updates would come every week to every four weeks. The Impress reporter who wrote it up added a line that dates the whole decade, which was that people who had never been able to hear these shows could now hear them whenever they liked.

The strange part is that db-FM already existed. It had been a location in Konami's games for three years before it became a website, with a published frequency and an audience that was itself made up. The 1997 site did not invent a station. It gave an existing one a transmitter.

In March 1997 I was still a year off my first dial-up account, which is the obvious thing to blame and the wrong one. Every program on db-FM was made for somebody who had already bought the drama CD and could follow a Japanese radio play, and that door stayed shut long after the modem stopped being the problem.

~ the case file ~

~ the island it was named after ~

The db comes from Donburi Island, the setting of TwinBee, which is a Konami shooting series about two small round spaceships. Somewhere in that fiction the island had an FM station, and the station had a frequency, 57.3 megahertz, chosen because 5-7-3 is how Konami writes its own name in Japanese number puns. It turned up first on a 1994 drama CD, where it was the broadcaster of two shows that did not exist either.

So the 1997 site inherited its name and its backstory from a shooting game, which is not how radio stations usually get founded. Japanese write-ups file it as the country's first internet station given over entirely to anime radio, which is a narrow crown, but somebody had to wear it.

~ thursdays ~

The station's own front page in 2005 is four sentences long. It says you can listen to personality shows from artists on the Konami label and to drama CDs, and then it says db-FM updates every Thursday, around five in the afternoon. That sentence is the whole operation. Ten and a half years of Thursdays is what the Japanese encyclopedia entry claims as a national record for a weekly internet radio station, and nothing I can find has ever tested the claim.

The show that held it together longest was a spin-off hosted by the voice actress Yukari Tamura, which started on 3 April 2003 and ran to its 205th edition on 2 May 2007. Around it sat a corner from the dating sim Mitsumete Night and a set of mini-programs trailing off a Bunka Hoso series Konami sponsored. In March 2006 Konami turned itself into a holding company and the station changed hands inside the group, moving to Konami Digital Entertainment on the last day of that month without anything on the page changing.

~ what the archive cannot show you ~

The files moved twice. They started under konami.co.jp, then shifted to a separate site the company ran for its music and media arm, and that is where the Internet Archive loses them. The last page anyone saved from the station is dated 29 October 2005. Across the whole of 2007 and 2008, the only thing the crawler ever came away with from that server was the robots file telling it to go away, fetched again and again against a site it was never allowed to read.

Which means the closing survives as a line on a couple of Japanese reference pages and almost nowhere else: 30 September 2007, closed. No notice anybody kept, and no account anywhere of a final broadcast. Tamura's show had been gone five months by then and came back later elsewhere under a different title. The station it left behind made it to the end of September and stopped.

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