The first commercial broadcasts in the traditional radio format have been occurring since the 1920s. The first exclusive live Internet radio broadcast was by the Seattle-based rock group Sky Cries Mary and took place on November 10, 1994 It was broadcast by Starwave, a digital media company owned by Paul Allen.
During the same month, just a week later, the Rolling Stones had a concert that was “cyberspace’s first big multicast concert”.
Also during the same month, WXYC was the first traditional radio station to announce Internet broadcasts. WXYC had begun bandwidth and broadcast testing in August 1994. On the same day, WREK, using CyberRadio1 software, began broadcasting its beta release, and advertising for its broadcast did not take place until later.
In 1995, Progressive Networks released a free download called RealAudio. Time magazine reported that it took advantage of “the latest advances in digital compression” and delivered “AM radio-quality sound in so-called real time.” Shortly after, Nullsoft and Microsoft released free downloads of audio players with streaming capabilities. More and more online radio stations started springing up as audio player software became more widely available.
One of the first American 24/7 Internet radio stations licensed by BMI and ASCAP was Sonicwave.com, created by Edward Lyman.
In the same year, the first radio station in Europe to broadcast its traditional program on the Internet in its entirety was Virgin Radio in London. It was available 24 hours a day and was a live version of their FM signal.
In the late 1990s, Internet radio began to attract significant attention from investors and the media. In the United States, in 1998, Broadcast.com set an IPO record for the largest jump in price of stock offerings. The offer price was $18, while the opening price of the shares was $68 when trading opened on the first day. This was all the more surprising considering that the company was losing money at the time and they themselves had stated in one of their prospectuses that they did not expect that to change any time soon. On July 20, 1999, Yahoo bought the company for $5.7 billion.
In 1998, in Sydney, Australia, NetFM’s The Vinyl Lounge (the longest-running Internet radio show) began broadcasting over the Internet.
After 2000, broadcast quality improved as bandwidth became cheaper, and today most stations broadcast between 64 kilobits per second and 128 kilobits per second, which is close to being CD quality radio.
