History Lesson

2026 | Links:

What Monkey Radio was, when it ran, and why it mattered!

As a reminder: this is a fan-site, and features history as best I can reconstruct it from primary sources! Your mileage may vary.

Spinning Up The Disks

Per the website’s own commentary, Monkey Radio spun up in 1999. The project of developer Brennan Underwood, it featured an eclectic array of triphop, downtempo, and acid jazz…and tracks that were rare, unofficial, or from unknown artists. The site was bright purple; Wolfe Gleitsman was credited with the iconic logo.

Early on it offered 128k streams as well as official 24k streams, allowing the determined user to stream music over dialup.

Underwood directly purchased (or otherwise acquired directly from the artists, in some cases) the tracks he played on the station (and had some critical things to say about Napster). While his employer initially provided the bandwidth, Underwood otherwise directly funded the station from his own pocket.

RIAA Drama

Unfortunately, the Recording Industry Association of America was waging a campaign at the time against internet radio stations (among other things); the station went offline for a time for related reasons (Monkey Radio was specifically named in a Slashdot article in 2002 as being impacted, in fact).

You can see the tension in Underwood’s post in 2002 on the homepage:

21-Jun-2002 — "Silence. I'm sorry." (click to expand the full post)

21-Jun-2002

Silence. I’m sorry. The new rates for Internet broadcasters were finalized yesterday, and most streams will not be able to afford to pay them. The upshot is, if you stream music, you pay. Period. And the money you pay goes to the artists on the Billboard charts.

Basically they are insisting I pay a ransom to Britney so I can bring you a.p.e. I will not do that. At the very least it offends my sense of style.

Even worse, they want to backdate this payment to the beginning of time, even though the rates are only being set now.

If you’re not pissed, you should be. The RIAA is taking away your right to hear music, by TRAINING YOU TO THINK YOU’RE NOT ENTITLED TO IT. Music is vital to life. Music is the oldest known art form. Nobody doesn’t listen to music. It fills up your entire sense of hearing and stimulates your mind. It is food for your brain. You need music, and THEY are holding from you, for ransom. Music is your birthright. It is not mere entertainment, or a pure luxury. It is the foundation of communication and we NEED IT, thank you very much.

I kept my stream up anyway overnight while I thought about this and how to keep the stream up while adhering to my values. Maybe I could sneak by. Maybe I could find the money somewhere. But the whole thing stinks. I haven’t made a dime from the stream. Not one damned penny. And I never wanted to.

So here are my thoughts:

1. I will not be bullied. This is an obvious bully tactic. They want all that wonderful free commercial-less music on the Net SHUT DOWN. Otherwise you might think, hey, that might be how it’s supposed to be.
2. I will not be motivated soley by money. Money is power. I want to own my own life.
3. Since money is power, I will not give my power to people I deem assholes. This includes the RIAA.

Not only that, I haven’t made a dime from this stream. Not one penny. I’ve paid for everything out of pocket, except the bandwidth, which my work paid for. And what adds insult to injury, is that I bought almost every CD I play music from. Yes, I fucking bought it all. I gave people who used Napster shit for it. I gave people who worked at Napster shit for it. I felt like I was doing the right thing at the time. But you give in to a bully once, you pay for it and pay for it.

So here is my plan:

• This is the playlist.
• Please don’t stream it from outside the US or anything. And if you do, don’t call it Monkey Radio, or they’ll think it’s me.
• I have cut off all corporate welfare to my employer (AOLTW, 20% of the RIAA. Yes, I did buy their stock via their purchase plan, and yes, I now realize all I did was throw money into a pile so people could take it from me first and slow down the fall of the stock price. Enlightenment can be so expensive :/ )
• I’m gonna look into licensing each track directly from each label (it’s unclear right now how that would work)
• Some other net djs and I are looking into setting up a subscription service that costs exactly what 1 listener costs.
• I’m gonna calculate what I supposedly owe to the RIAA and give it to EFF instead.

As a side note, the playlist he posted in 2002 would become a critical primary source when attempting to rebuild it. More on that in another Deep Dive.

2002 - 2014

The drama settled; Monkey Radio remained on the air through 2014 (though over time Underwood stepped back from the public eye, posting less frequently on forums) and as noted in the post above he ended the subsidy provided by AOL Time Warner, directly assuming the remaining financial burden of running the station. Popularity rose on the stream in the mid-00s, with snapshots showing high listening stats in December of 2006:

Listeners: 195 | Peak listeners: 247 | Average listen time: 2:28:54

In January of 2007 the site was revamped into a minimalist logo and groove link that would remain in place for the remainder of the station’s lifespan. 128k and 24k streams fell out over time in favor of the 192k stream as the internet grew more robust to high-data transfers.

It went off-air briefly in 2011 while locating new hosting, and was used by a small but dedicated cadre of listeners until 2014 (the January 2 2014 capture shows 26 listeners, the final snapshot showing a running stream. The screenshot below features the final capture on Wayback):

Aside: Skin Deep

For some folks, Monkey Radio arrived on their desktop not as a sound, but as a skin: specifically, for Winamp, a popular media player at the time.

The skin is even still available to download!