Radio Free Virgin

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

~ the obituary ~

Sixty channels of continuous audio assumed a connection I did not have. In 1999 I was on a 33.6k modem in Turkey and a stream was something you clicked, watched buffer, and abandoned. Internet radio only became usable for me years later on TTNet broadband, around 2006, by which point Radio Free Virgin had roughly a year left to live.

That gap is worth stating plainly because the whole first wave of internet radio was built on an American assumption about bandwidth. Radio Free Virgin launched in early 1999 with more than sixty programmed channels, each one put together by a human rather than an algorithm, and its downloadable player passed a million installs within a few months of early 2000. Those are the numbers of a product landing in homes with cable modems.

The money was Richard Branson's, held through a private company called Virgin Audio Holdings and run out of Los Angeles. Zack Zalon and Brendon Cassidy ran the thing, both of them early enough in internet music that there was no established way to do any of it yet. Dave Gordon was the early webmaster, which is the kind of credit the Wikipedia article keeps and the trade press did not.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

It started completely free and then split in two. The free tier gave you a subset of the channels, and a monthly subscription called RFV Royal gave you the rest plus better audio quality. By March 2003 the servers were carrying about 2.8 million unique listeners a month, which put it in the same conversation as anybody else streaming music that year.

It also escaped the browser earlier than most. Philips shipped a network audio device called the Streamium, and Radio Free Virgin's channels came down to it in MP3Pro. A box on a shelf playing an internet station in 2003, with no computer visible in the room, was several years ahead of when that stopped being remarkable.

~ the day it died ~

The homepage did not say the service was closing. It posted a letter dated 3 January 2007, written in character as somebody hitchhiking through Alaska in winter on their first vacation in seven years, filing a 44th blog entry, unable to reach the office by phone for almost two weeks and starting to suspect the trip had been a trick to get them out of the building. Seventy-one people crammed in a small space, it said. I miss them all. Still, I'm concerned that nobody's answering the phones.

Then the service ceased operating. That letter is the entire death notice, and it is one of the strangest things any dead website left behind: a shutdown announced in the voice of a fictional employee who has not yet worked out that everyone else is gone.

~ what it became ~

Virgin's real bet by then was Virgin Digital, a Windows Media download and subscription store aimed straight at iTunes and Rhapsody. Radio Free Virgin went first, in February 2007, and Virgin Digital followed in September, shutting its US service and then closing the UK store in October. Eight months cleared out the whole of Virgin's digital music operation.

What survived was the format rather than the brand. Human-programmed channels under a free tier funded by a paid one, reaching a hardware client with no PC attached to it: that stack is what everybody selling music streaming runs now. A company had it working in 2003 and could not hold on to it long enough for the holding to matter.

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