Goom Radio

» see goomradio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Goom Radio never reached Turkey in any form that mattered. It was a French product speaking French to French listeners, and its whole proposition rested on a habit I did not have. My music in those years lived in folders. It had been dragged off an internet cafe machine in the early 2000s and then off a home connection once that got fast enough, and the point of all of it was that the file stayed where I put it.

The company was founded in 2008 by Emmanuel Jayr and Roberto Ciurleo, both of whom had been senior at NRJ, the biggest Top 40 network in France. They left to build a radio network without any radio in it. About sixteen million dollars came in from European venture funds, Wellington Partners and Partech International among them, against a plan for a bouquet of themed webradios that listeners could also program themselves.

It was a reasonable bet in 2008 and it was made by exactly the people you would want making it. An American operation launched on 17 March 2009. The problem was arithmetic that nobody in streaming audio had solved yet, and mostly still has not: a broadcast tower costs the same whether four people or four million are listening, and a stream costs you again for every single one of them. Goom was paying per listener for an audience it was selling by the thousand.

~ the case file ~

~ the transmitter problem ~

The pitch was that spectrum was the old constraint and the web had removed it. That was true. What it missed is that spectrum had also been the old moat. NRJ could not be copied by two people with a server because NRJ held licenses that the French state issued sparingly. Once the barrier came down for Goom, it came down for everyone, and a themed webradio playing 90s hits had no defense against the next themed webradio playing 90s hits.

The US arm went first. On 3 February 2011 the American workforce was laid off, which for a company that had raised on international expansion was the expansion quietly being deleted. France carried on for another two years on a shrinking advertising line.

~ the Virgin Radio bid ~

In 2012 Goom tried to buy Virgin Radio from Lagardère. Read it in one direction and it is a natural move, a digital operator buying reach on the FM band. Read it the other way and it is the company that existed to prove transmitters were unnecessary spending its last real capital trying to acquire one.

It needed a financier and found Fimalac. French trade reporting has Fimalac pushing to take the whole of the station's capital, and Lagardère uneasy about where Virgin Radio would end up if it did. The backing was pulled late and the deal fell over. What it left behind was public evidence of how little Goom had, since a buyer that has to borrow its entire bid is a buyer whose own accounts are the story. Reporting from the period puts the company into a French safeguard procedure the following year to restructure what it owed.

~ what survived ~

It came out of that process in 2014 as something else. The themed webradios were closed and the digital terrestrial slot in Paris was suspended, which between them was the entire consumer product. The company kept trading, selling radio and audio services to business customers, and the name still turns up on aggregator listings that outlive the stations they point at.

The odd part is that the thesis was correct. Radio did move to the internet, and the network of themed streams is now how most people listen. Goom simply had to pay 2010 bandwidth prices to serve a 2010 advertising market, and nobody was going to survive that gap on sixteen million dollars.

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