Radionomy

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

~ the goodbye ~

The feature that mattered was one nobody could see. You signed up, picked music out of a catalog, and you were running a legal radio station, and if you had asked most Radionomy users why it was legal they could not have told you. Radionomy held the licenses. Radionomy paid the collecting societies. The whole product sat underneath the part of the screen anybody ever looked at.

Four Belgians started it in Brussels in late 2007 and held the launch press conference in the Eiffel Tower that January, which tells you what the ambition was. The site opened to the Belgian and French public on 17 April 2008. The deal was that you built and programmed a station through a web tool called the Radio Manager, and Radionomy sold the advertising and covered the SABAM licensing. The ceiling was four minutes of ads an hour.

It became the default place to put an internet radio station if you were not a broadcaster. Thousands of them, mostly one person with a genre and a strong opinion about it, running around the clock with no equipment beyond a browser. Radionomy took a stake in Hotmixradio in 2011 and opened a San Francisco office the year after. At the end of 2013 it bought the American advertising platform Targetspot outright.

i did not run a station on it, and the honest distance here is legal rather than regional. What Radionomy was handing out for free was coverage under European collecting-society agreements, and coverage has a border drawn around it. That is why the American stations were the first thing thrown overboard when the numbers turned, and why anybody broadcasting from outside those agreements was leaning on cover that was never quite theirs to lean on. A product whose real asset is a license is a product whose map gets drawn by lawyers instead of by cables.

~ the chronicle ~

~ four minutes an hour ~

The economics were straightforward and thin. Radionomy paid royalties on everything its stations played and got the money back by inserting advertising into the streams, capped low enough that listeners did not leave. Station owners got hosting and a licensing shield, and they paid nothing. What they gave up was any control over the ad breaks and any claim on the audience they had built.

That model works while the per-stream rate stays under what an ad slot brings in. It stops working the moment somebody else is setting the rate. In February 2016 a group of Sony labels sued Radionomy for copyright infringement in a California federal court, and although it was settled out of court fairly quickly, it was an early sign that the arrangement looked very different from the label side than it did from Brussels.

~ the years it owned winamp ~

In January 2014 Radionomy bought Winamp and SHOUTcast from AOL. The reported price was somewhere between five and ten million dollars, and AOL took a twelve percent stake in the Belgian company as part of the deal. AOL had announced two months earlier that it was simply switching Winamp off, so this was a rescue, and it is the reason the player still exists at all.

Ownership then moved several times without much of it reaching the product. Vivendi took a 64.4 percent stake in December 2015 and AudioValley bought it back in August 2017. The group has been renamed twice since, ending up as a listed company that took the Winamp name for itself in 2025. Radionomy the platform was somewhere inside all of that, generating streams and generating costs.

~ what the eight thousand lost ~

The first cut came on 31 May 2019, when every station based in the United States was removed. The reason was the Copyright Royalty Board's rate schedule, which climbed every year and had let the small-webcaster carve-out lapse, so streaming to American listeners had stopped covering itself. Radionomy offered the affected stations a move to Shoutcast for Business, and Shoutcast does not pay anybody's royalties.

The rest followed on 1 January 2020, when Radionomy shut its streaming service and folded into Shoutcast. Around eight thousand stations were told to migrate and given a free year of the business product as compensation. The licensing became their own problem. That is the moment the invisible feature became visible. Most of those stations were somebody's hobby, and a hobby that suddenly requires you to account to a collecting society is not a hobby any longer.

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