The Downtempo Blog

When looking at what makes a great web application, I like to look at offline models that are successful and haven’t yet been replicated online. Simply creating the online equivalent lets you leverage a proven model and increases your chance of success at the start.

For example, when I was at Burning Man in 1997 and 1998, I spent some time DJing on the radio station near Center Camp created by Moebius, Frequency Publica (“Radio by the people, for the people”). Despite the fact that I hadn’t DJ’ed since college, I had a bunch of CDs I’d borrowed from a friend and hadn’t listened to before, and the mixer didn’t have a headphone cue feature, I became a microcelebrity for an hour.

Thanks to the powerful antenna reaching across the playa at 91.5 FM, and the loudspeakers pointing into Center Camp, what started as random passers-by became a crowd dancing around the loudspeakers and multiple radio listeners across the playa. Once the first people started coming over to thank me for the music, I was hooked.

When I came home from the playa, I missed the experience and thought about how I’d love to bring that back into the Real World. I thought about college radio, but it didn’t have the interactivity and broad reach that I missed from Frequency Publica. I also wanted to pull in my friends in Seattle who were electronic musicians (Rock on, Glitchpop), so it had to be able to reach at least between San Francisco and Seattle.

At the same time in 1999, Justin Frankel had just released Shoutcast, which let anyone create their own radio station. Perfect timing. So I setup a Shoutcast server on my home DSL line (back when DSL was brand-new, and having 384k of bandwidth at home was cutting-edge), gathered together my friends, and made an agreement to rotate the server each evening to a different broadcaster, creating a rotating community around a single server.

The next step was to scale up the idea to something much larger — Frequency Publica could only have one broadcaster at a time, but the Internet didn’t have those kinds of limitations. I just needed a lot of bandwidth… the kind that my employer, Nanocosm Technologies, had at their server colocation facilities.

So I brought the idea to our CTO at the time, Peter Rothman, and we put together a new plan for the company that combined free streaming radio server hosting with 365mb of web hosting, and 3D homepages, which we called “Live365″. (The radio server popularity soon outstripped the web hosting and 3D homepages, and those features were dropped from the product offering.)

Once we launched, the numbers on the radio project exploded beyond anyone’s expectations (even my lofty ones!), and Live365 rapidly became the world’s second largest broadcaster soon after beginning operations. All we really did was take “Radio by the people, for the people”, put it online, scale it up, and paid attention to building a strong grassroots community one broadcaster at a time. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones you come up with at a great party in the desert.