Radio Free Virgin was a digital radio broadcaster started in early 1999 and a member company of the Virgin Group. Their programming consisted of over 60 professionally programmed channels playing various genres of music. It quickly gained popularity and its downloadable radio player reached the 1 million downloads within a few months in early 2000. The company was privately held corporation funded by Richard Branson and was a unit of Virgin Audio Holdings, LLC. It was headed by Zack Zalon and Brendon Cassidy who were early pioneers in the internet music business. Dave Gordon was an early webmaster for the fledgling group.
While initially a completely free service, programming was ultimately broadcast over the Internet in a two-tier setup: a free tier that allowed access to a subset of channels and a monthly-subscription tier ("RFV Royal") for paying customers with higher-quality streaming audio and access to a greater number of channels. By March 2003, Radio Free Virgin servers accommodated 2.8 million unique listeners per month and Virgin was offering an integrated digital download and subscription service that was in direct competition with iTunes, Napster and Rhapsody called Virgin Digital. Radio Free Virgin (RFV) was also available at the time via the Philips Streamium device, delivering its channels in MP3Pro.
The term "Radio Free" is prefixed to several radio stations which were set up by United States Central Intelligence Agency to deliver news to countries strategically important to the foreign relations of the United States. The official stations are:
The term is also applied to other local radio and internet radio stations, such as:
The term has also been applied to subjects that are not radio shows: