Lantis Net Radio

» see lantis-net.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every show on Lantis Net Radio came with two small buttons, one marked 32K and the other 64K. Both opened a Windows Media stream, and that was the entire delivery mechanism from January 2004 to the last day of March 2018. There was no download and no podcast feed. Whatever you wanted to hear, you heard while the stream was running.

The station belonged to Lantis, the anime music label that four former Bandai Music staff started in an Ebisu apartment in November 1999 under the LAZY keyboardist Shunji Inoue. Radio was the label's own outlet for its own roster. A hundred and fifty-one named programs passed through over fourteen years, with thirty-two of them running at the same time at the October 2011 peak, and the schedule was built around anime the label had scored and singers it had signed. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya had a show. So did Girls und Panzer.

The closing notice went up sometime between 24 February and 15 March 2018, which is as tightly as the surviving captures will bracket it. It said the station would end 2018年3月末日をもって, as of the last day of March. It thanked listeners for their years of listening and it gave no reason. The March programs stayed online as an archive through the end of April, and by 8 May the page held the notice with nothing underneath it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ thirty-two kilobits and nothing to keep ~

In 2004 the site offered RealPlayer beside Windows Media and disabled right-click on every page, which tells you what the label was worried about. The bitrates never moved after that. A station that spent fourteen years making sure nobody could keep a copy ended up with no copies, so the episode counters are the only scale anyone can still measure: 586 for the Super Robot Wars show, 568 for Minori Chihara's.

Japanese anime radio is a closed room if you were not already inside it. These were in-jokes accumulated over hundreds of weeks, in a language I never learned, for people who already owned the label's CDs. What reaches anyone standing outside that room is the notice and the three links printed under it.

~ one day apart ~

Lantis published a notice of its own on 13 February 2018, signed by Inoue as president. From April the label would combine with Bandai Visual and trade as Bandai Namco Arts. That notice never mentions the radio station.

The station's own notice appeared after it, and the dates sit one day apart: web radio ended on 31 March 2018, and on 1 April the corporation that had run it since 2004 was dissolved into the company it had merged with. No source connects the two announcements and the label never said the merger was why. They are consecutive, and that is all anyone can honestly claim.

~ where the three survivors went ~

The notice named three programs that would continue somewhere else from April, and the three destinations are three different answers to the same problem. The Super Robot Wars show moved to the label's own YouTube channel, and Minori Chihara's radio minorhythm went across to HiBiKi Radio Station, which was a rival net radio portal. The third, Pl@net Sphere, ended up on the artists' own label site at Music Rayn.

A fourth show, the Aikatsu Stars one, stopped at episode 102 and went nowhere. The last original broadcast the station carried went out on 30 March 2018 under the title ひだまりラジオ×THE END. That follows the show's own naming habit, and in that particular week it also described the building the broadcast was coming from.

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