Radio@Netscape in 2002
Posted on May 23, 2025
Back in the late '90s, when dial-up tones were the soundtrack of getting online, Netscape Radio dropped as part of the Netscape Communicator 4.5 update in 1998. It was one of the first web-based radio services baked right into your browser—basically a plug-and-play streaming option powered by Spinner.com (which AOL later bought). You’d fire up your Netscape browser, click over to the Radio button, and boom—you had access to over 100 music stations without downloading anything extra. It was wild at the time. No Spotify. No YouTube. Just your clunky beige PC and Netscape Radio giving you real-time music streams before most people even knew what “streaming” meant. It was ahead of its time, but like most early tech, it didn’t last. Still, if you ever clicked that little radio icon and let the music run while you surfed GeoCities sites, you remember exactly how good it felt.
