MSN Radio

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

~ the last words ~

MSN.com was the homepage on most of the machines I used between 2002 and 2005, in the cafes first and then at home on TTNet. There was no radio tab on the Turkish version. Streaming music rights in those years were sold territory by territory, and Turkey was not a territory anybody was buying, so what MSN gave me was mail and a messenger client that everybody I knew was already on.

In the United States it gave you free internet radio. Microsoft bought MongoMusic on 13 September 2000, a small California outfit whose whole value was a recommendation engine and a personalized-radio product, and folded the technology into MSN and WindowsMedia.com. By September 2004, which is when the Internet Archive first has a working capture of radio.msn.com, the radio sat inside MSN Music as its free tier. You picked a genre and it played, at no charge, on a page you were already looking at.

The problem with running your own stations is that you have to keep buying music rights and keep tuning the engine, and Microsoft by 2006 had a different music plan with a brown device attached to it. So in November 2006 MSN Radio stopped being Microsoft's product in any meaningful sense. Pandora took over the back end under a distribution deal, and the page you landed on was Pandora's station builder with MSN furniture around it. Archived captures from March 2008 are almost entirely Pandora links.

That arrangement ran eighteen months. On 18 June 2008 Microsoft ended it, and the page carried a single sentence: "MSN Music has discontinued its radio service." Pandora's Tim Westergren described the separation as mutual and said the company would put its limited resources into its own website, which turned out to be the correct call by an enormous margin. The last working capture of radio.msn.com is 13 May 2008. By November it was a 301 redirect.

~ the record ~

~ the pandora years ~

The deal made sense on paper for both sides. Pandora in 2006 was two years old and had no money for marketing. MSN had listeners and no appetite for licensing negotiations. What MSN got was a functioning product it did not have to build. What Pandora got was distribution on one of the largest portals on the web, and a lot of Americans heard the words "powered by Pandora" for the first time on a Microsoft page.

The catch is the one every white-label deal has. Nobody using MSN Radio was learning the name of the thing they liked. When the deal ended, the listeners who wanted to keep going had to be told where to go, and Westergren said afterward that Pandora was better off spending its people on pandora.com than on somebody else's furniture.

~ the day the stream stopped ~

June 2008 was a bad month to be a Microsoft music customer generally. The same year Microsoft announced it would switch off the license servers for the old MSN Music download store, the ones that had to be online for purchased tracks to keep playing on a new computer, only two years into a five-year promise. The company reversed that particular decision after the complaints, but the radio never came back.

~ what microsoft did next ~

Zune, then Zune Marketplace, then Xbox Music, then Groove Music, then a deal to hand Groove's users over to Spotify in 2017. Microsoft spent seventeen years trying to be in the music business and ended by paying somebody else to take the customers. MSN Radio is the earliest piece of that to disappear completely, and the only one whose obituary is a single sentence on a page nobody archived after May.

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