Just for kicks the other day I decided to go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback browser and check out Shoutcast as it was getting hot. This screenshot is from April 27, 1999 and displays the “top ten Shoutcasts,” which seem to have been overwhelmingly Techno music oriented channels (with pop and rock thrown in).
The other two Shoutcasts streamed Metal and some kind of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” talk format. The rock channel links to a “stinkfly.com” domain which doesn’t seem to exist any longer (I wonder what happened to it).
Shoutcast channel audiences were pretty small back in those days. Notice that the number one stream had a whopping 75 listeners, its maximum allotment. The bottom five had less than 25. But Shoutcast was just getting started. Here’s another screen shot from 2004.
Now we’re talking listeners; thousands of them. There’s even a classical radio station and . . . look, Soma.FM’s Groove Salad at number seven!
Ah, it all just feels like yesterday (sort of was, actually) . . .
