Imagine Radio

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

~ the eulogy ~

streaming audio in 1998 needed a connection i did not have. the home modem topped out at 33.6k, the line was the household telephone, and every minute of it was billed. an hour of realaudio was not a decision anybody in my house was going to sign off on. imagine radio was built for americans sitting on a cable line or a university network, and from ankara it was a category of thing rather than a site i could open.

it came out of imagine media, the san francisco publisher behind next generation and pc gamer, and went live in march 1998 before being spun out as its own company that july. rotem perelmuter and p. michael briseno ran it. the pitch was simple enough that it survived intact into everything that came after: you should not have to accept somebody else's playlist.

what you got was around two dozen staff stations with names like retrograde for eighties new wave, the pit for hard rock, soul food for classic soul and vinyl for club. beside them sat the thing people actually came for, a station you assembled yourself by naming artists and giving each one a score from zero to five. higher scores came round more often. the archived front page carried a line about building your station and broadcasting within minutes, which was the whole promise.

~ the dossier ~

~ what you could not do ~

you could not ask for a song. the licensing rules that governed webcasting at the time drew a hard line between a radio station and an on-demand service, and anything that let a listener summon a specific recording fell on the expensive side of it. so imagine radio took your ratings as a shape and filled that shape from a catalog you never saw, and the interface spent real effort explaining that this was a constraint rather than an oversight.

it streamed over realaudio and windows media, and the player opened in a browser window 562 pixels wide with a javascript function that tried to focus itself on netscape. the tuner window is preserved in the archive along with the playlist calls it made. everything about it is recognizably the ancestor of what pandora shipped seven years later, minus the money and minus the bandwidth.

~ closed for repairs ~

viacom bought imagine radio in february 1999, with cnn covering the deal on the eighth, and used it as the foundation of mtv interactive. what viacom actually wanted was the personalization engine, which it moved into mtv.com and vh1.com, and then into radio sonicnet, another property it picked up that year. the address itself had no role in that plan.

the archive dates the end to within three weeks. on 13 september 1999 imagineradio.com is still serving the full station list with a login box and a working tuner. by 1 october the server is answering with plain iis 404 pages. by 9 november every url on the site returns a small page that says "closed for repairs" above a single link reading "go to sonicnet," and by february 2000 the domain is one sentence pointing at radio.sonicnet.com. nobody wrote a farewell. the site was just repurposed into a signpost.

~ the court case ~

the founders did not stay. mtv networks filed suit in the united states district court in manhattan on 14 september 1999, the day after the last working capture of the site, accusing perelmuter and briseno of breaching their employment agreements and their non-disclosure terms by building a competing internet radio project called third millennium radio while still inside the company. the complaint said they had been using mtv's information and hoped to use mtv's people.

so the last thing imagine radio produced was litigation between the two men who built it and the company that had paid for it seven months earlier. the product they were fighting over had already stopped serving pages. what survived the fight was the idea itself, which by then was loose and which nobody could have kept anyway.

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