Internet Radio will be back, big time

This might get a little ranty. Grab a drink and come back when you’re ready.

Okay? Let’s do it!

I think I have seen at least one whole ‘cycle’ of things now, in terms of fashion, tech and other categories (you know, centralised vs dispersed teams, cough cough). But today I want to focus on the audio side of things.

Remember a few years ago how suddenly vinyl was popular again, and people started to develop the players again?

I am a CD era person, and I long for the day that people remember that it is the most compact, accurate and cool way to show long term appreciation for an artist.

Separately, I used to run an internet radio station with over 180k downloads a year, in 2011! Wow, it’s been ten years already…

In an era where we are surrounded by [legally] cheap and free video options, where do we stand on the audio front? We have started to see some late 90s audio-style services come back to life. Clubhouse appeared and took the world by storm (at least for now), but if you look closely, surely it’s just a rehashed, 2021 version of Paltalk from circa 1998. Open-door chatrooms where anyone can come and go, and anyone can create their own topics for discussion.

So, surely one of the next things in the queue after 1998 is Internet Radio.

Let’s go back to the early/mid 2000s.

My experience of mid 2000s Internet?Radio

Back in the day, as a teenager finding a home on this crazy thing called broadband internet (at the then-super-crazy speed of 512kbps. But also old enough to remember using 56k on the aforementioned open chatrooms), the world was slowly adapting to the faster internet lifestyle. Up to this point, the most common ‘media’ online were images. Because up to this point, it was too crazy to load anything else.

This is where I found myself and many others exploring the other mediums that could be shared online instead. Namely audio and video. At this time, YouTube and other such video services did not exist yet, the internet did not figure out the best way for this yet. Children, there was such a time!

Back then I ran a ‘website network’, which was my cool way of giving all 10-ish of my internet projects an umbrella name. Me and my ‘gang’ tinkered away at different services that could be born. One day, my ‘lead’ at the time found a small network of internet radio all themed around video games, and they were looking for new operators of each ‘station’. This was my foray into what became my Internet Radio ‘career’.

It was weird to think that ‘anyone could run a radio’, since I thought that belonged to a bygone era when pirate radios were physically done on boats outside of national borders. But there we were.

As it turns out, much like pirate radios before, video game music operated in a very legally grey area for a very long time. Although game music was very well established, published and printed in Japan, this market absolutely did not exist anywhere else (trust me, I did some very long research on this). The only answer to operate with video game music in a broadcast medium was to ‘just do it’.

Picking up the really sh*tty headset I had at the time, plugging into a 3.5mm analogue-in port on my loud fanned laptop, and attempting to connect to my radio server, I somehow ended up doing my first ever internet radio show.

Despite the quality of my voice, and some listeners being confused by the disruption (we had an IRC channel to talk to listeners), they were all very excited with what’s going on. And so was I.

After a number of ‘test’ weeks, I eventually established a weekly show, having some guests and people requesting music from their favourite video game. I enjoyed every part of what I did, and the listener numbers grew over the years. There was just one big problem with it.

Mid-2000s Internet Radio was completely not profitable

We sat in the legal grey area for a very long time, and reached out to the original publishers of the games we played, who all had a similar answer for this newfangled format: “You can keep doing what you do, but do not profit”.

I took the words as literally as possible, calculated the costs to operate the whole thing, and put up a donation box to the exact amount required to cover it. So now, I have a self-sustaining service, but it was still not allowed to profit. Damn, this is becoming a lot of work for a ‘hobby’.

Even those who were running fully legal internet radio stations at the time faced similar hurdles. You keep a log of what songs you played, how many times, how many listeners, and allocated some money for the rights holders and their representatives to pay.

Sadly, a lot of the time this still ends up costing the station more than it’s making, and is why it became hard for internet radio to scale up.

The technical challenges of running internet?radio

Technically speaking, the whole thing was quite a ball-ache.

You had to pick a [virtual] dedicated server which prioritises bandwidth. This is where I learned that bandwidth was big business.

Once you have the box, you need to set up one of the many options available for broadcasting audio. The main two freeware at the time were ShoutCast and IceCast. Both had their pros and cons, but generally do the same thing, and cost you the same amount of bandwidth to run.

Next up, you need to source all the media being played. Ensure you are playing the correct version, and nudge the server to update its playlist when ready.

Cool! But it’s 2012, and all your listeners have just moved to smartphones. That flash player of yours isn’t going to work for them. Oh and that m3u8 streamer file has a 40% chance of working.

How about the 3G speeds? Is your server configured to do multiple bitrates? What about the client side? Does your radio app that you painstakingly wrote in Objective-C/Java properly support the stream? What are you going to do about that IRC channel written in Java for your phone users? Ignore them?

This was a transitioning phase when a lot of internet services were realising mobile-first was a real thing and had to be addressed. And it felt like internet radio was left behind.

Let’s just thank TuneIn for coming in on time to provide support for all these stations in the new world order, me included.

Podcasts becoming the winning audio?format

For a long long time, before and after my own internet radio era, podcasts were a thing. Originally available to download for iPods and other popular portable MP3 players, this format gave listeners fresh content anywhere at any time. Remember, mobile internet was still quite terrible, and expensive.

As people were becoming more portable, the content they consume need to fit the new general lifestyle. The service has to be able to come with you. For this reason alone, podcasts took the crown through the 00s.

Taking iOS as an example, the difference between listening to a radio station and a podcast was quite simply: Podcast services comes with the device by default and can be used offline, internet radio does not. Because this provided a hurdle to users, people opt for the easier option.

Why internet radio has a chance to return this?time

Let’s start with the running costs from the station’s side. Since my time, cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud and Azure have appeared, and even my previous service providers have slashed their prices as the landscape changes and bandwidth becomes cheaper.

Your bill is easily at least half of what it was ten years ago to run the same thing if you know where to look and how to set up.

And from the user’s side, mobile internet has become both cheaper and/or faster. It is also more widely available in both developed and emerging markets. This means your audience is experiencing the internet as if they were at home.

From the experience side, better solutions for efficient app development approaches have appeared. In fact, both Apple and Google have created Swift and Kotlin in that time.

But we cannot just offer a similar service to before, we have to improve on it. I believe personalisation techniques have improved over time, giving users the potential to experience a ‘radio’ best suited to them. Spotify’s auto playlisting algorithm is along these lines, but they are not suited for ‘Radio’ radio, yet.

Anyway, this is my own view of how I believe it could turn out, and as someone who came from this area, I admittedly have a small bias in wanting this format to win. But let’s see where the market goes over the next few years. Heck, I might even have another go myself soon enough.

Please share your thoughts and follow me if you’re interested in hearing more of my random experiences!