Type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Media player |
Founded | United States |
Defunct | April 26, 2013 |
Fate | Merged into LiveXLive |
Headquarters | United States |
Parent | AOL |
Website | http://spinner.com |
Spinner was an online music and entertainment service. [1] An AOL Music property, it was acquired by AOL on June 1, 1999, along with Nullsoft for $400 million. [2] [3] [4] Based in San Francisco, California, the website was the first Internet music service and was the largest by 2001, while offering promotional features from high-profile recording artists. [5] In 2002, AOL combined Spinner with the former's Netscape portal to form Netscape Radio. [6] Spinner broadcast over 100 radio stations, [7] including Radio CMJ. [8]
In 2008, Spinner was revamped by AOL as a music website aimed at the "music aficionado". [9] The website offers exclusive interviews of recording artists, [10] streams of albums and live performances, and a free music download daily. [11]
Spinner, along with all AOL music sites, was abruptly shut down in April 2013. [12] [13] The URLs to all former AOL music sites, including Spinner, were re-directed to aolradio.slacker.com starting in August 2013. Several AOL Music blogs, along with Comics Alliance, were sold to Townsquare Media in June 2013. [14]
Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than 1 percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee Brendan Eich created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages and a founding engineer of Netscape Lou Montulli created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.
Justin Frankel is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates music production and development software such as the REAPER digital audio workstation, the NINJAM collaborative music tool and the Jesusonic expandable effects processor. In 2002, he was named in the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
ChatZilla was an IRC client that is part of SeaMonkey. It was previously an extension for Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox, introduced in 2000. It is cross-platform open source software which has been noted for its consistent appearance across platforms, CSS appearance customization and scripting.
Nullsoft, Inc. was an American software house founded in Sedona, Arizona, in 1997 by Justin Frankel. Its products included the Winamp media player and the SHOUTcast MP3 streaming media server. In later years, their open source installer system, the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) became an alternative to commercial products like InstallShield. The company's name is a parody of Microsoft. Mike the Llama is the company's mascot; this is frequently referred to in promotional material citing llamas. Frankel introduced the llama in Winamp's startup sound clip, inspired by the lyrics of Wesley Willis: "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!"
Shoutcast is a service for streaming media over the Internet to media players, using its own cross-platform proprietary software. It allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding format. The most common use of Shoutcast is for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts; however, there are also video streams. The software is available to use for free or as a paid cloud service with additional professional features.
Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), is a music visualization plugin for Winamp, MediaMonkey and. It was designed by Winamp creator, Justin Frankel and was first shipped in version 2.0a4 with Winamp 2.61. AVS has a customizable design which allows users to create their own visualization effects, or "presets". AVS was made open source software in May 2005, released under a BSD-style license. AVS is currently at version 2.83 and is included with Winamp, though the distributed version has later been reverted due to compatibility issues. Winamp currently ships with version 2.82 for Windows Vista and 2.81d for older Windows versions.
Harris Publications Inc. was an American special interest media company, operating over 75 brands with print, digital, mobile and live event platforms prior to its sale to Athlon Media in 2016. It has produced magazines that educate, entertain, inform and inspire. Subject matters spanned an array of interests including decorating, gardening, beauty, automotive, sports, outdoor living, history, tactical, entertainment and wellness. Harris' titles covered a variety of markets and focused on niche special interests, primarily in the United States.
Ultravox or Ultravox Media On Demand Server (UltraMODS), is a streaming video project by AOL. The goal is to create something like SHOUTcast but for routers, so that the data is handled much better, can handle more users efficiently, and channel changing is much faster.
Mozilla was the mascot of Netscape Communications Corporation and subsequently the Mozilla Foundation. Its appearance has varied and the mascot has been retired from active use.
Townsquare Media, Inc. is an American radio network and media company based in Purchase, New York. The company started in radio and expanded into digital media toward the end of the 2000s, starting with the acquisition of the MOG Music Network. As of 2019, Townsquare was the third-largest AM–FM operator in the country, owning over 321 radio stations in 67 markets.
Michael Zager is an American record producer, composer, and arranger of original music for commercials, albums, network television, and theme music for films. He teaches music at Florida Atlantic University. Zager was a member of jazz rock band Ten Wheel Drive from 1968 to 1973.
AOL Radio powered by Slacker was an online radio service available in the United States only. It had over 200 free internet radio stations.
Netscape Navigator 9 is a discontinued web browser that was produced by the Netscape Communications division of parent AOL, first announced on January 23, 2007. It was the ninth major release of the Netscape line of browsers. After AOL outsourced the development of Netscape Browser 8 to Mercurial Communications in 2004, Netscape Navigator 9 marked the first Netscape browser to be produced in-house since the Netscape 7 suite. It also saw the return of the classic Navigator name, which was previously used during Netscape's heyday between versions 1.0 and 4.08 in the 1990s. Netscape Navigator 9 is based on Mozilla Firefox 2.0.
Propeller was a social news aggregator operated by AOL-Netscape. It was similar to Digg; users could vote for which stories are to be included on the front page and could comment on them as well. As of October 1, 2010, Propeller ceased to be active.
Noisecreep is a hard rock and heavy metal music news and media website based in the United States. The site was created by AOL Music in March 2009.
Young Buffalo is an indie rock band from Oxford, Mississippi.
"Scent of a Woman" is a single by American rock band Cheap Trick, released as the lead single from their 2003 album Special One. It was the band's first single in four years, from their first studio album in six years.
ComicsAlliance was an American website dedicated to covering the comic book industry as well as comic-related media, and is owned by Townsquare Media. The site has been nominated for multiple awards including a 2015 Eisner Award win in the category Best Comics Periodical/Journalism.