Suono Dolce

» see suono.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 8 December 2017 Nippon Broadcasting put a letter on the front of suono.jp, addressed to everyone using Suono Dolce. The internet radio station would stop at 23:59 on Friday 26 January 2018. The letter went through what the station had been and thanked the audience twice. Then it gave its reason, and the reason was a round number: ten years had passed, there had been discussion that making anything more developed would mean rethinking the station's present shape, and the company had concluded that ten years was a good place to draw a line.

Nothing in the letter says what the more developed thing was going to be. No successor is named there or anywhere afterward. The letter claims no falling audience and puts no cost on the table, and the shutdown drew almost no Japanese press coverage at all, which is strange for a station whose launch and whose iPhone app had both been reported heavily.

What it had been for those ten years was a love song station and nothing else. The name is Italian for sweet sound. It went out from inside Nippon Broadcasting's Tokyo building under a catchphrase announced two months before it opened, printed in English under the logo: Love songs from Marunouchi, after the office district the building stands in.

~ the dossier ~

~ more music, less talk ~

The editorial line came from Hinohara Maki, then running the company's digital content department and later its president. Her rule for the station was More Music, Less Talk: it should sound like an FM station rather than the talk-led AM company that owned it. At launch it ran fifteen hours a day, nine in the morning to midnight. The audience it found was mostly women in their twenties and thirties.

The Marunouchi part was not decoration. The station cross-promoted the district's own website, and a show called TOKYO AFTER 6 sent a model out to report from the streets around the building. The shutdown letter still describes the station as rooted in its district, passing on Marunouchi news between the songs. That is a decision about who is being spoken to, and it holds however far the stream travels. The songs reach Turkey intact. Everything between them stays where it was made.

~ the listeners owned a piece of the app ~

The desktop player ran on Flash, so when the iPhone arrived the station needed a real app, and the money for it came from the audience. A fund run by Music Securities and ngi group raised 5.2 million yen in units of 10,000 yen, capped at 500,000 yen per investor, with repayment to come out of two years of revenue from the paid version. Investors were promised a tour of the recording studio and a seat in the sessions where the songs were chosen. Their names went inside the app as well.

It worked better than that arrangement usually does. The free app went up on 16 March 2010 and reached number one on the Japanese App Store's free chart two days later, and was still holding the top spot on the 22nd. By 22 March it had been downloaded 111,916 times. By August it was at 270,000, and by January 2012 the iPhone and Android versions together had passed 400,000. A paid version at 350 yen followed in August 2010, carrying lyrics for about 95,000 Japanese songs and a better bitrate. The buffer was set to three minutes, which was a decision about the Tokyo subway.

~ the platform it outlived ~

The station was assembled out of an older one. Nippon Broadcasting had produced a channel called LFX488 on Japan's satellite digital audio service from December 2000. That channel ended on 31 March 2006 and came back online days later, on 3 April, as an internet station called LFX mudigi, stretching from three hours a day to twelve. LFX mudigi stopped distributing on 1 April 2007, and Suono Dolce opened the next day with a format the old station had never carried.

The new station went out two ways at once, over Japan's terrestrial digital radio trial and as a stream a browser could play. The trial broadcasts ended on 31 March 2011, taking every channel riding on them down together. Suono Dolce carried on as a website the next morning and lasted another six years and ten months, which is close to two thirds of its life spent with the transmitter side of it already gone.

~ the last two hours ~

The December letter is specific about the order things stopped in. New downloads of the iPhone and Android apps were switched off during the first half of December 2017, about seven weeks before the station itself ended. Whichever version you already had became the final one. The browser stream was kept alive to the last minute, and the letter tells people to use it, with the address spelled out.

On the night itself there was a two hour live broadcast from eight to ten, with past presenters phoning in and two Marunouchi regulars brought on. Then the stream ran on by itself until 23:59. A digest of it went up on the station's YouTube channel a week later and has been watched about a thousand times. The channel is still there, thirteen videos, nothing added since. The domain went to somebody else; a Japanese celebrity gossip site answers on suono.jp today with no trace of the station in it, which is just what happens to a lapsed registration.

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