Internet radio was pioneered by Carl Malamud. In 1993, Malamud launched "Internet Talk Radio", which was the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert". The first Internet concert was broadcast on June 24, 1993, by the band Severe Tire Damage. In March 1994, an unofficial automated rebroadcast of Irish radio news was setup as the RTE To Everywhere Project, allowing Irish people across the World daily access to radio news from home until it was rendered obsolete in 1998. In November 1994, a Rolling Stones concert was the "first major cyberspace multicast concert." Mick Jagger opened the concert by saying, "I want to say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the M-bone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse." [twenty]
On November 7, 1994, WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA) became the first traditional radio station to announce broadcasting on the Internet. WXYC used an FM radio connected to a system at SunSite, later known as Ibiblio, running Cornell's CU-SeeMe software. WXYC had begun test broadcasts and bandwidth testing as early as August 1994. WREK (91.1 FM, Atlanta, GA USA) started streaming on the same day using their own custom software called CyberRadio1. However, unlike WXYC, this was WREK's beta launch and the stream was not advertised until a later date. On December 3, 1994, KJHK 90.7 FM, a campus radio station located in Lawrence, Kansas, at the University of Kansas, became one of the first radio stations in the world to broadcast a live and continuous stream over Internet radio. Time magazine said that RealAudio took "advantage of the latest advances in digital compression" and delivered "AM radio-quality sound in so-called real time." Eventually, companies such as Nullsoft and Microsoft released streaming audio players as free downloads . As the software audio players became available, "many Web-based radio stations began springing up." In 1995, Scott Bourne founded NetRadio.com as the world's first Internet-only radio network. NetRadio.com was a pioneer in Internet radio. It was the first Internet-only network to be licensed by ASCAP. NetRadio eventually went on to an IPO in October 1999. Most of the current Internet radio providers followed the path that NetRadio.com carved out in digital media. In March 1996, Virgin Radio - London became the first European radio station to broadcast its full program live on the Internet. It broadcast its FM signal, live from the source, simultaneously on the Internet 24 hours a day. On May 1, 1997, Radio306.com (now Pure Rock Radio) launched in Saskatoon, Canada. The internet-only station purerockradio.net celebrated 20 years on air in 2017 as the longest-running Canadian internet station.
Internet radio also provided new opportunities to mix music with advocacy. In February 1999, Zero24-7 Web Radio was launched. t was the first internet radio station to be crowdsourced and programmed by professional broadcasters and crowdfunded by a unique partnership of people, charities and businesses. Out of Washington DC, the station mixed progressive music and green messages. It was created by BBC and WHFS veteran Mark Daley.
Internet radio attracted significant media and investor attention in the late 1990s. In 1998, the initial public stock offering for Broadcast.com set a record at the time for the largest jump in price in stock offerings in the United States. The offering price was US $18 and the company's shares opened at US $68 on the first day of trading. The company was losing money at the time and indicated in a prospectus filed with the Securities Exchange Commission that they expected the losses to continue indefinitely. Yahoo! purchased Broadcast.com on July 20, 1999, for US $5.7 billion. With the advent of streaming RealAudio over HTTP, streaming became more accessible to a number of radio shows. One such show, TechEdge Radio in 1997, was broadcast in three formats - live on the radio, live from a RealAudio server and streamed from the web over HTTP. In 1998, the longest running internet radio show, The Vinyl Lounge, began netcasting from Sydney, Australia, from Australia's first Internet radio station, NetFM (www.netfm.net). In 1999, Australian telco "Telstra" launched The Basement Internet Radio Station but it was later shut down in 2003 as it was not a viable business for the company.
From 2000 onwards, most Internet radio stations increased their stream quality as bandwidth became more economical. Today, Most stations stream between 64 kbit /s and 128 kbit /s providing near CD quality audio. As of 2017 the mobile app Radio Garden, a research project of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, was streaming approximately 8,000 radio stations to a global audience.
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