Clickradio was an internet startup whose flagship product was a radio program that sought to deliver uninterrupted and high quality music. Clickradio downloaded songs to the computer's hard drive, because high-quality audio streaming was not available at the time. Since the songs were downloaded to disk, users could listen while not connected to the Internet.
Contents
Service Offerings
Clickradio allowed users to rate songs and essentially create their own personalized radio station. Users had the ability to vote on the songs they heard. Choosing a "thumbs-up" would indicate they would hear the song more, and choosing "thumbs-down" meant they heard it less. Users also had the option to "skip it" in case they didn't want to listen to a particular song. Since it was free, five minutes of advertisements were set to occur for every hour of play time.
Users also could get information about the songs and artists that were currently playing, and even had the ability to purchase the album.
The music was encoded with the ePAC encoder from Lucent Technologies. Since it was directly downloaded to the user's PC, the music was encrypted to help protect it against Internet piracy.
Known Issues
Clickradio experienced some problems, however. In the beginning, many people found that the program only downloaded a few songs and would refuse to download any more. This bug was fixed in subsequent versions.
Company history
In April 2000, the company received special attention from its deals made with Universal Music Group, as well as BMG Entertainment. In August 2000 they also signed with Warner Music Group. All of the (at the time) "big 5" music companies signed licensing deals with ClickRadio. The goal of Clickradio was to avoid any legal issues by signing with popular labels for their music.
The service launched in May 2000. The New York City company is said to have gone bankrupt around October 2001 as the dot-com bubble deflated.
Clickradio was planning to switch to a subscription format instead of their previous free offering, and was planning a large relaunch of their site. That never happened, and the domain clickradio.com no longer exists.