Radio.Blog.Club

» see radio.blog.club as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Radio.Blog.Club was a french audio-sharing service from 2003 to 2008. The product was specific and useful. You uploaded an mp3 file. The site gave you a small flash audio player. You pasted the embed code into your blog post or your skyblog or your forum signature. People reading your post could click play and hear the song without leaving the page.

This sounds normal now. In 2003 it was clever. Most audio at the time required clicking through to a separate page or downloading a file and opening it in winamp. Radio.Blog.Club let you embed sound the way you embed a youtube video now. It just played, in place, in the blog post.

This is yet another french thing i did not use myself. In turkey we mostly listened to mp3s through winamp or limewire downloads, and the embed-into-blog use case was not a big deal here. But in the french blogosphere of the mid-2000s, radio.blog.club embeds were everywhere. A skyblog post about your favorite song almost always had a radio.blog.club player on it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually worked ~

The flash player was small and simple. It had a play button, a pause button, and a small progress bar. You could put multiple tracks on a single player to make a playlist. The whole thing fit in maybe 200 by 30 pixels of horizontal space, which made it easy to drop into any blog post or forum thread.

The site itself was a database of mp3 files that users had uploaded. You could search the database. You could pick songs from it. You could upload your own. The combination of upload and embed was the thing that made the site work for blogs.

There was no real attempt to license any of the music. Most of what was on radio.blog.club was uploaded by users who had ripped it from cds they owned or downloaded from p2p. Copyright was not part of the design. The french record industry noticed.

~ the lawsuits ~

SACEM is the french collecting society for music rights. It is one of the older and more aggressive equivalents to ASCAP or BMI. They sued radio.blog.club in 2007. The argument was the same one used against napster and mp3.com years earlier. The site was facilitating mass copyright infringement, the operators were profiting from advertising, and they had not paid royalties.

The french court agreed. The shutdown order came in early 2008. Radio.blog.club was given a small window to comply, which they did, and the service stopped operating on 4 april 2008. The founder, David Guez, has talked about the case in interviews since. He has said the legal pressure was not really survivable for a service of that size.

~ what we lost ~

The audio embed as a feature of personal blogging. After radio.blog.club went down, blog posts went back to either linking to mp3 files (which most users would not click) or embedding youtube videos of the song (which only worked if there was a youtube version, and which felt different from the original radio.blog.club idea).

Soundcloud showed up in 2008 and partly replaced the use case, but soundcloud was its own platform, not really a tool for embedding existing songs into someone else's blog post. The specific thing radio.blog.club did, which was let you put a small audio player in a blog about a song, has not really come back.

The french music blogosphere of the mid-2000s was a real cultural moment. Skyblogs full of radio.blog.club embeds about local rap, indie pop, and electronic music. Most of those blogs are gone now too, partly because skyblog itself wound down in 2023. The combination of skyblog and radio.blog.club was a particular french-internet ecosystem that does not exist anymore.