a short history of internet radio: the 90's
inspired by seeing a used book detailing online radio from 2001
Online radio is something I’ve gotten back into fairly recently. I’ve been tuning in online more often to listen to my friends’ college radio shows, and I’ve learned more about stations that stream online, whether exclusively or along with FM broadcasting. In a used book store, I saw a book published in 2001 that explained navigating online radio (unfortunately I did not buy it), and it made me think about how interesting it would be to look into the history of it. It’s much newer than regular FM/AM radio, but it has the opportunity to reach wider and niche-r audiences. There are even fun websites like Radio Garden that allow you to tune in all over the world.
So, how did we get here?
For now, we’ll focus on the 90’s or else this article will be super long. Maybe I’ll come back later to discuss the 00’s, 10’s, and 20’s.
Carl Malamud is credited with creating the first internet station in the world back in 1993, and he interviewed notable people in science and tech (source). Not much later, music radio followed. Again in 1993 was the first live internet concert with the band Severe Tire Damage (source). Specifically, the livestream was on July 24, and then a year later Severe Tire Damage opened for the Rolling Stones’ first ever livestream, as boasted by their Spotify bio. I was kind of surprised to learn that they were livestreaming music so early, especially since I never heard of these online shows before.
A few early internet radio programs are archived on this website if you want to check them out. It doesn’t give time spans for some content, but it does say that they’re “early programs.” The programs are talk radio, so I don’t think any will have music. Still, it’s a cool little niche archive hidden in the internet.
This website gives a great overview of what Internet radio was like in the 90’s, coming from a book with copyrights from 1996 and 1998. I’ll reference some of the key points in this and the next paragraph. Just like today, internet radio was a great way to find underground bands, but it would take a long time to download songs. Despite the upside of finding new, cutting edge music, the sound quality was “low, scratchy, and low fidelity.” The author defined two categories of internet radio at the time: traditional broadcasters trying to reach more people, and newer Internet-only broadcasters that would’ve had a harder time gaining listeners but were “ultracool.” It seems like it was common to download files to listen to, whether it was music or talk radio, so this was the original way to listen to shows.
Carl Malamud is referenced again as the founder of internet talk radio, although the author says that just a few years later newer tech had mostly overshadowed ITR. 1995 paved way to new innovations that allowed users to finally audio stream instead of downloading files, since the files would play as they downloaded. This was driven by RealAudio Player, which was free. Audio quality was still a concern, leading to new launches of these streamers that promised better sound quality. National Public Radio (NPR) began experimenting with internet radio to make accessing their content more convenient. Innovation seemed to be coming pretty quick throughout the 90’s when it came to anything internet related, including internet radio. The book discussed more providers and stations, but I think these past two paragraphs gave a nice general overview of internet radio in the mid-90’s.
Before moving on from RealAudio, I found another specific point about internet radio in 1995: RealAudio’s release led to the launch of NetRadio.com, which this article says was “was the first true Internet radio backed by the simplicity of the web.” The site had '“tens of thousands of visitors a day” and included some information about the bands along with the downloadable streams. There were still some issues, like the aforementioned bad sound quality, but it was still a great innovation for the time. Also, a site back then with that many visitors merits mentioning.
Throughout the end of the 90’s, Canada and Europe and more joined into internet radio, creating 24/7 streams and putting their full program online; there were also stations that included advocacy in their programming, such as environmentalism (source). Streaming still improved and more stations could use it for their sites. By 1999, this Berkeley source says there were “more than 4,500 streaming radio stations on the Internet,” with the majority (2,786) in North America.
I found a Washington Post article from 1999 that explained how tuning into radio stations all over the world or making your own station was free. They saw that the future of radio would be reinvented, calling it a “radio revolution.” The article mentions that an “estimated 6 percent of Americans [have] listened to a radio station online,” which was a smaller number than I expected but makes sense given that a lot of people weren’t computer literate yet. There were all sorts of stories of people finally finding music they like on internet radio, descriptions of the variety of music on internet radio compared to FM, and more. It’s a great time capsule for what internet radio was like at the tail end of the 90’s.
Well, that’s a wrap on that, at least for the 90’s. I hope it was as interesting for you as it was for me to see the way that internet radio really boomed in the 90’s. I didn’t expect it to not only evolve so quickly, but also to have been so influential in underground music communities! It definitely changes my perspective of what the early stages of the internet were like, which is fascinating in and of itself. I feel like as technology gets better and better, it’s nice to look back at its primitive days. It must’ve been so exciting to watch this all unfold, and I’ll be on the lookout for more interesting information about this topic in the future! At the least, I’ll have some fun facts to spit out when I help new members joining my college’s radio station.
Let me know if there’s anything I missed or anything you found cool/surprising/etc.
How fascinating!! So interesting to see how internet radio really paved the way towards modern day streaming and came so many years before the first paid digital download. True internet pioneers!!