A brief history of internet radio

The history of internet radio is older than most people remember. The first internet radio station was broadcasting before there was a web browser worth using. Three decades later it is still around, in a form its founders would mostly recognise. The streaming revolution did not kill radio. It changed the building it lives in.

This is a brief history of internet radio, from the first 1993 transmission to the present, with the stations and decisions that mattered.

Quick history:

• 1993: Internet Talk Radio launches, the first regular online broadcast
• 1995: RealAudio releases, streaming becomes possible for normal listeners
• 1998: Shoutcast launches, anyone can run a station
• 2000s: Pandora and Last.fm bring algorithmic radio
• 2010s: Spotify and Apple Music push streaming over radio
• 2020s: Curated internet radio comes back as a refuge from algorithms

When did internet radio start: the early experiments

The standard date is November 1993, when Carl Malamud launched Internet Talk Radio, an interview show distributed as downloadable audio files. It was not live streaming. You downloaded the file and played it locally. But it was scheduled, regular and broadcast-like, and that counts.

The first true live internet radio station is usually credited as Radio HK in 1995, broadcasting from California. The same year, Seattle radio station KJR did a one-off live internet stream of a baseball game and proved the model could work for traditional broadcasters.

The technical missing piece was streaming. Until 1995 audio on the internet was downloads. RealAudio, released that year, was the first widely adopted streaming format. It sounded terrible by any modern standard. It worked.

The first internet radio station boom: Shoutcast and amateur stations

In 1998 Nullsoft released Shoutcast, a free server that let anyone with a modem and a PC run a radio station. This was the moment internet radio became a movement rather than a curiosity. Within two years there were thousands of stations.

Most were terrible. A few were excellent. The crucial thing was that the bar to start a station dropped from broadcasting licences and FCC paperwork to a download and an evening. Community radio went global.

Many of the curated stations still on WRC today have roots in this era. Frisky Radio started in 2002. SomaFM launched in 2000. Dublab goes back to 1999. The DNA of late 1990s open internet is still audible in how these stations sound.

The 2000s: Pandora, Last.fm and the rise of algorithmic radio

In 2005 Pandora launched. It was the first widely used algorithmic radio service, built on the Music Genome Project, an attempt to classify songs by hundreds of musical attributes. You picked a seed track and Pandora generated a station.

Last.fm took a different approach with collaborative filtering: people who listened to X also listened to Y. The combination of these two ideas defined the next 20 years of how the music industry thinks about recommendation.

The strange thing in retrospect is that algorithmic radio was a real innovation, but it was not what the next generation wanted. By the early 2010s users were moving toward on-demand catalogues, not radio. Spotify, launched in Europe in 2008 and the US in 2011, took the streaming model and aimed it at owned listening, not radio listening.

The Spotify era: when streaming nearly killed internet radio

Through the 2010s on-demand streaming ate everything. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music. The promise was access to every song you wanted, whenever you wanted, for a flat fee.

Internet radio survived but quietly. The community stations from the 1990s and early 2000s kept going. Public broadcasters like the BBC, France's FIP, Australia's ABC Jazz and Germany's ByteFM ran live streams of their broadcasts. A small group of new curated stations launched, mostly in cities with strong music scenes: Berlin, Los Angeles, Paris, Sydney.

The big shift was in the cultural posture. Radio went from being the default way to find new music to being a specialist choice. The mainstream moved to playlists.

The 2020s: curated radio comes back

Something changed around 2020. The streaming experience started to feel narrower, not broader. Discovery felt repetitive. The algorithmic playlists kept recommending adjacent versions of what you already played. (There is a longer piece on curated radio vs algorithms on this point.)

In parallel a new generation of community stations launched. Refuge Worldwide in Berlin started broadcasting in 2020. Kiosk Radio in Brussels grew its audience. NTS Radio in London became a global brand. The model of a small, opinionated curated station with a strong identity proved to have an audience again.

Spotify itself bought several curated brands and launched countless radio features, an implicit admission that human curation was something they could not replicate algorithmically.

What internet radio looks like now

In 2026 the landscape has three layers.

The public broadcasters: BBC, FIP, ABC, DR P2, FM4, France Musique, Concertzender. Big budgets, deep catalogues, no ads. Still the gold standard for breadth.

The community stations: Refuge Worldwide, Dublab, Kiosk Radio, Cashmere Radio, Bruzz, KEXP. Smaller, sharper, more identity per square inch.

The genre-led independents: Frisky Radio, Deepershades Radio, Jazz24, Cafe del Mar, Buddha Bar Radio. These do one thing very well for a long time.

Where to start

If you want to hear the present-day evolution of internet radio, FIP is the broadest single starting point. For the community-led end, try Refuge Worldwide or Kiosk Radio. For genre depth, browse the Electronic and Jazz categories.

Frequently asked questions

When did internet radio start? The first regular internet broadcast was Internet Talk Radio in November 1993. The first live streaming station was Radio HK in 1995. Mass adoption began in 1998 with Shoutcast.

What was the first internet radio station? Internet Talk Radio in 1993 is the usually accepted answer for the first regular online broadcast. Radio HK in 1995 is generally credited as the first 24/7 live internet-only station.

Is internet radio still popular in 2026? Yes. The total audience is smaller than streaming but engaged, and curated internet radio has had a clear revival since 2020. Public broadcasters and community stations have grown global audiences.

Open FIP and listen to where the medium ended up.