Radio Free Virgin was a digital radio

Digital radio

Digital radio has several meanings:1. Today the most common meaning is digital radio broadcasting technologies, such as the digital audio broadcasting system, also known as Eureka 147. In these systems, the analog audio signal is digitized into zeros and ones, compressed using formats such as...

 broadcaster started in early 1999 and a member company of the Virgin Group

Virgin Group

Virgin Group Limited is a British branded venture capital conglomerate organisation founded by business tycoon Richard Branson. The core business areas are travel, entertainment and lifestyle. Virgin Group's date of incorporation is listed as 1989 by Companies House, who class it as a holding...

. Their programming consisted of over 60 professionally programmed channels playing various genres of music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

. It quickly gained popularity and its downloadable radio player reached the 1 million downloads within a few months in early 2000. The company was privately held corporation funded by Richard Branson and was a unit of Virgin Audio Holdings, LLC. It was headed by Zack Zalon and Brendon Cassidy who were early pioneers in the internet music business. Dave Gordon was an early webmaster for the fledgling group.

While initially a completely free service, programming was ultimately broadcast over the Internet in a two-tier setup: a free tier that allowed access to a subset of channels and a monthly-subscription tier ("RFV Royal") for paying customers with higher-quality streaming audio and access to a greater number of channels. By March 2003, Radio Free Virgin servers accommodated 2.8 million unique listeners per month and Virgin was offering an integrated digital download and subscription service that was in direct competition with iTunes

ITunes

iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

, Napster

Napster

Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...

 and Rhapsody

Rhapsody (online music service)

Rhapsody is an online music store subscription service, launched in December 2001, and available in the United States only. On April 6, 2010, Rhapsody officially declared its independence from RealNetworks. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, Rhapsody's version...

 called Virgin Digital

Virgin Digital

Virgin Digital was an online music store operated in the United Kingdom and United States by the Virgin Group. It launched on 2 September 2005 in the UK, and was refreshed in November 2006 to run through an internet browser, rather than the former Virgin Digital Player...

. Radio Free Virgin (RFV) was also available at the time via the Philips Streamium

Streamium

Streamium is a line of IP-enabled entertainment products by Dutch electronics multi-national Philips Consumer Electronics. Streamium products allow users to consume digital entertainment and multimedia content—whether stored on their desktop computers or delivered through Internet-based services—on...

device, delivering its channels in MP3Pro.

As of February 2007, the service ceased to operate. It ended with the following cryptic message posted to its homepage:

"Letter from the road - January 3rd, 2007: Dear loyal listener... This marks the 44th blog posting from my trip. It's been particularly cold on this leg of the journey. I guess that's what you get for hitchhiking Alaska this time of year. I've been calling the office for almost two weeks straight, but no answer. I'm starting to think that they sent me up here on a ruse of some sort. Like maybe if they got me out of the office on my first vacation in 7 years they'd have a chance to actually have some fun or something. I'm pretty damn sure I heard Antoinette say something about St. John, but that could have just been the voices again. I spent about fifteen miles with a group of hippies last night. I mean real hippies, not the kind that don't shower and eat raw corn all the time. Bona-fide hippies. Got tuned-out and turned-on in '68 or something and never looked back. Main girl is called Ragina (nasty) and thinks it's 1970. Literally. Keeps bitching about Nixon and how the commies are going to save the world. Still, I may be in love with her. I have my reasons. My thoughts run to the office again - seventy-one of us, all crammed in that little space. Angeline (my driver) with that floppy mane of hair and sarcastic attitude that can only come from an upbringing in rural Wales, Sophie (chef) and her Sonoma foie-gras compote topped Roti A La Broche and constant humming out-of-tune, Vanity (really her name, types up my dictation when Delissa is at lunch) plucking her brows. I miss them all. But I know that being on the road is important for me, too. That the journey is the journey and not the destination, or however the saying goes. That time spent away from the office will make me healthier and the company right along with it. Still, I'm concerned that nobody's answering the phones..."

External links

• Company homepage (no longer active)
• (Archives - NY Post)
• (Dave Gordon)