NetRadio.com

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

~ the obituary ~

netradio.com sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. october 1995 i was 11 years old in turkey, three years away from my first 14.4k modem. the first internet-only radio network in the world launched out of an office park in eden prairie minnesota and started pushing realaudio streams across an internet that nobody had a sound card for yet.

scott bourne and scot combs founded the company in 1994. realaudio 1.0 went live in november 1995 as the streaming backbone. navarre corporation, a minnesota music and software distributor, bought the whole thing in 1997 and folded it into one of its subsidiaries. by the late 1990s netradio offered more than 125 themed stations across rock, classical, jazz, alt-country, electronic, and a long tail. arbitron's first round of internet radio measurement put eight of the top ten ranks on netradio properties.

the shutdown came on wednesday 24 october 2001. a previously announced strategic investment from a new york media company called the advisory board fell through when the advisory board failed to secure its own financing. netradio tried other funding paths and could not close one in time. the company stopped operating that night.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the netradio pitch was that the broadcast tower was now optional. one hosting bill and a streaming server let you run dozens of stations targeted to genres a terrestrial station could not afford. in 1995 that was a real thing to say. by 2001 every am and fm station that wanted to be online had an icecast stream and a webpage, and the targeting advantage compressed. shoutcast and winamp's streaming directory carried the audience by then for the kind of listener netradio was built around.

the broadband dependency was a problem. realaudio 14.4k streams sounded like a sealed bathroom from another floor. 28.8k was acceptable for talk. anything music required at least a 56k or a t1, and in 1995 most home connections were neither. netradio was a product designed for the broadband future on a dial-up present. when the dotcom advertising spend pulled back in 2001 the projected broadband audience that justified the ad rates had not arrived yet.

~ the day it died ~

the strategic investment fell through some time before 24 october 2001. the company gave itself a short window to find a replacement. nothing landed. the wednesday announcement said netradio.com was discontinuing operations, the staff was let go, and the streams went dark within hours.

parent company navarre kept the netradio.com domain warm for a stretch afterward. the actual stations and the production team did not come back. live365 picked up most of the long-tail-genre audience that netradio had been carrying.

~ the long tail ~

the first internet-only radio network proved the model worked and the model could go broke. terrestrial stations took the playbook and ran simulcasts. the dmca royalty regime came in 2002 and rewrote the economics for every internet broadcaster left. netradio caught the death of the experimental era a year before the new compliance era began.

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