MFNRocks.com – October 1999
I am a little late writing this post, but I’ve been busy trying to keep up with a few things.
October 1, 1999 was an exciting day in my life. It was the day that my brother and I launched MFNRocks.com (Music For the Net) an Internet radio station like no other at the time. It was months of hard work, research, building a website, and launching something new and exciting.
At the time there were very few Internet radio stations. There was of course KNAC.com and a few others that were a jukebox style stream, but when we launched MFNRocks.com no one was streaming 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We were the first. We had our problems, but that happens when you are first. Others were doing video, but it was a still frame of a webcam that updated every few seconds. We had true streaming video 24/7.
We had a successful launch and by successful I mean we probably had about 3 of my friends listening on the first day, but as the days and weeks went by that number grew exponentially. You must remember this was happening in 1999 / 2000 and the start of royalty rates and streaming concerns for music and by 2001 things had changed dramatically. When we shut down the site the first time in 2001 we were reaching over 250,000 unique visits a month. Pretty incredible considering we started with none. All grass roots. I was making phone calls, partnering with bands, doing 12, 13, 14, 15, hour days, whatever was needed to make this business a success I was doing.
I was able to interview some of the greats during this time, made partnerships and friends that I never thought possible and most importantly I learned a lot about running a business.
In a nutshell if you know what Joe Rogan does with his podcast, with guests in the studio and drinking and smoking and such we were doing that 20 years ago. No one even could imagine that we were so far ahead of the game.
We were down for a month or so and I revamped the website and turned into a music news online style magazine and it stayed that way for years. The site was on the first page of Google for years. By todays standards we were killing it. By 1999 /2000 standard no one knew what to make of what we were doing.
I finally decided to relaunch the website in 2010 as a streaming music site. I used newer technology for streaming and had an even more kick ass website. I had a business plan ready to go and even though I didn’t ever reach out to potential investors I had another successful run from 2010 until 2013 when I finally decided to shut it down.
I always wondered what could have been if the royalty rates issue hadn’t come into play, but I do know how exciting it was to be a part of something new and different. It amazed me how supportive and unsupportive some of friends and colleagues at the time were as well. Even though I never sold the company or became some Internet mogul, that website was a success and I did some incredible things in that first 2 years let alone the 13 years that I had it.
As I approach the middle of October and I am excited to launch another new business in the coming days! More information soon.. Stay tuned…
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