PRESS PLAY. LISTEN LIVE!
A 24/7 streaming music platform built before streaming had a name. Music licensing, broadcast operations, on-air talent.
It's 2007.
YouTube is two years old. The iPhone just launched.
Spotify hasn't reached anywhere yet. It'll debut in Sweden a year later and won't hit the U.S. for four more years.
Twitch doesn't exist — it's still four years away. Facebook Live is nearly a decade off.
MySpace is the dominant social platform for bands. Pitchfork is the dominant tastemaker.
There's no centralized place to listen to indie music, read about indie music, and watch indie bands play — live, on a screen, in real time.
The agency I worked at decided to build one.
Building a 24/7 streaming platform in 2007 required solving five problems simultaneously, none of which had off-the-shelf solutions.
Streaming royalties were a regulatory mess. SoundExchange. ASCAP. BMI. SESAC. Every track we played required a licensing path. Indie labels were generally willing. Working out the per-stream economics on a startup budget was the trick.
Twenty-four hours of programming every day, seven days a week. Scheduled blocks. DJ slots. Live shows. Someone had to build the schedule and someone had to fill it.
We didn't need DJs in the morning-zoo sense. We didn't need college-radio kids either.
We needed people who weren't afraid to take a chance on the new thing.
People who could bring a perspective to what was getting played. People you'd hand an aux cord to at a party. People who'd introduce you to a band you hadn't heard.
Sometimes that was an intern. Sometimes that was me.
We were learning as we went.
The platform also needed written content. Articles. Album reviews. Interviews. Live show coverage. I wrote a lot of it.
Streaming servers. Live broadcast feeds. Live chat alongside the stream. All of it had to work, simultaneously, 24/7. None of it ran on platforms that existed for this purpose.
Built by a team of five. With no template to copy.
I came in as a Project Manager and was promoted to Assistant Manager. The work spanned every layer of the platform.
Long-form features on bands the platform was championing. Live show coverage from inside the room — including the alleyway acoustic set Envy on the Coast played after the venue cut them off for curfew at Metro Chicago. Album reviews. Festival recaps. The full music journalism toolkit.
Scheduling the 24-hour programming day. Live-show coordination. The PLAY/STOP transport ran a real audio stream with the currently-playing track displayed in the interface.
Hired and managed the on-air roster. Coordinated guest appearances. Coordinated intern programs. Made sure the right people were on the microphone at the right times.
The platform ran a live in-studio camera with simultaneous chat. You could watch the DJ talk and chat with other listeners while listening to the stream.
This is exactly what Twitch would be, four years before Twitch launched.
AirRaid didn't survive the 2008 financial crisis.
Neither did most of the businesses built around independent music that year.
Spotify's eventual U.S. launch in 2011 took the wind out of every smaller streaming play that wasn't backed by major-label money.
The platform is gone. The lessons aren't.
Running a 24/7 anything teaches you there's no time when nobody is responsible.
The schedule has to be filled. The systems have to be monitored. The work has to happen whether or not it's convenient.
Small operations don't get off-hours.
I was hiring, scheduling, writing, editing, coordinating live broadcasts, managing licensing conversations, and answering customer questions.
Not because I was good at all of those things. Because someone had to do them, and we were five people.
The job taught me to recognize what someone with deep expertise looks like, because I was usually the person who needed their help.
Most case studies are about work that landed. This one's about work that came too early.
What AirRaid taught me has been usable in every operational role I've taken since. How to build a thing that runs all the time. How to make sure the part the audience sees looks easy.