It all started by mistake. No joke.
I got into the 'internet' early on. It was the early 80's and I saw my first 'home' computer called the TRS-80 sold at Radio Shack. If you're anywhere near my age you remember them well. I had messed with electronics since an early age and the natural progression to computers was easy. The sales guys let me sit back there and write computer programs because it was helping them sell the thing like hotcakes. Through time along came the Commodore 64, the Mac and the IBM XT.
Well into all that neat techy stuff and having run a very popular BBS and near the end one of the first dial up internet providers that wasn't AOL or Compuserve. Needless to say I was well in touch with emerging technologies. By the late 90's a new high speed form of internet came out called DSL. Then along came Napster. An all you can eat music buffet. And I consumed. Then - RealAudio 1.0 was introduced. It allowed you to record audio, post it on a website and others could come and listen in. Wow, I could actually do my own 'radio show' - like anyone woul dlisten to that. I was one of the few people I knew then with an internet connection capable of doing it. Hell, no one had ever heard of Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.
So I played around with some downloaded music and a mc and made some whacked out radio show (you'd call them a podcast now) and shoved it up on a website. A few people came along and listened and afterwards I forgot about it.
Then, all hell broke loose.
Almost a year down the road I receive a check in the mail. It was a whole $10 and some odd change. But what the hell was it for? It was my name so before I cashed it I checked to make sure it was real. Found out it was for advertising revenue from my website? Apparently in the infancy of streaming audio on the internet people had found it and liked it. Alot.
Seriously? So I started making one or two a month. Two months later a check showed up for $20. That's when I thought - there could be something to this.
During that year a new site opened up called Live365. It allowed you to download a piece of software and it would 'relay' the music you were playing to their server which would then distribute it to many more. So we setup a feed there and within a few months we had several hundred listeners that would come for the daily broadcasts.
Then on December 31, 1998 we began a 24/7 radio show. And it never stopped. While at Live365 we became the #1 rock station and #20 overall out of thousands of stations. After several years we outgrew their services and set out on our own. Between leased servers and bandwidth donated by AOL (yep, the same AOL) we hit the Shoutcast radio directory which featuers tens of thousands of other stations. And rose to the top 10 with millions of monthly listeners. We becamse part of the radio directory in Windows Media Player, iTunes, cell phones, tablet computers and even car stereos and TV's.
There was some downtime however. In late 2006 the battle over internet radio royalties became so bad that thousands of stations were disappering over the year. Insane royalty amounts and uncertainty almost ruined the entire thing. Even Megarock Radio shut down.
After almost two years gone things finally settled down. We began streaming again on (not ironically) December 31, 2008. Since the old website addresses and connections to all those listeners severed we put up a new website at a new address and essentially started over.
Since then it's been a slow build. But as people find out about us and what a fun radio experience it is they keep coming back and bringing friends. We still broadcast 24/7 (except when something blows up), still feature tons of songs and still take your requests anytime day or night. The audio is pure digital and we're compatible with almost any device.
And we've become well known to be one of the very first places you'll hear new music. We have constant 24/7 contact with some of the best sources of the industry so we get the news first and the music too.
Where we go in the future no one knows. Technologies continue to change and we'll do our best to keep up with them. But remember - all you see here and all that makes it happen is the work of me. Not a big crew, not a corporation - me. There's of course a few friends in the background that help out from time to time. This is my labor of love because I enjoy great rock music of all kinds and grew tired of radio stations that play tight formats - just classic rock, just alternative, just metal. Very few stations play it all and that's the reason Megarock Radio came to be.
It was all a mistake.
