The year was 1994. Tony Zeoli, a local Boston DJ who was a founding employee of X-Mix DJ Remix Service and X-Mix Artist Management, had learned about the World Wide Web a few years earlier through a friend who had introduced him a few years earlier, when she took him to the apartment of a Harvard University IT employee, who showed them how to access the web through Telnet and other early web 1.0 software. That inspired Tony to get online himself, doing so through the first online portals, Prodigy and AOL.
Once online, Tony began seeking out DJs and dance music. He found DJs online in a few early newsgroups, as well as through the Prodigy and AOL platforms, but streaming audio had yet to be invented. It was all text and images being passed through these platforms, but you couldn’t listen to anything…yet.
Tony had an idea. What if you could stream DJ mixes on the Internet? How would that transform not only his own DJ career, but it would bring him and other DJs a global audience. He set out to investigate.
Tony learned about a major Internet trade show, Internet World, which was held at the World Trade Center in Boston and the Javitz Center in New York City, among other major convention centers around the country. It was there that Tony learned about a company called Real Networks, who’s nascent streaming audio software, Real Audio, was just coming to market. The discovery led Tony to work with one Boston’s first web development companies to build netmix.com, which would be the very first DJ streaming service online.
Because Tony was a Billboard Dance Chart reporting DJ, as well as a founding employee of the X-Mix Remix service and DJ management company, he’d connected with many DJs and dance music record labels from around the world at the Winter Music Conference, an annual DJ industry trade show and conference held at the Fountainbleu Hotel on South Beach in Miami, FL. With those connections, Tony was able to secure DJ mixes from the world’s most influential DJs, streaming them online through the netmix.com website.
From 1995 to 2000, netmix.com was one of the most important destinations for DJ mixes online. Netmix was acquired in 2000, but due to market conditions leading to the dotcom 1.0 crash, netmix.com went dark.
Over the ensuing years, Tony attempted to bring netmix.com back online, but his work in other aspects of digital media took precedence. Websites like Soundcloud and Mixcloud grew to quickly take over as go-to online spaces to stream DJ mixes.
Soon, TLDs would evolve from the first 16 extensions like .com, .net, .org, .gov, .mil, and .edu to .TV, .IO, and ultimately .FM . Another company in the Atlanta area acquired netmix.fm. It held on to the domain for over 20 years. In 2024, that company abandoned the domain name with the .FM extension and it became available. In 2019, Tony started a new company, Radio Station by netmix®, which provides streamers and audio broadcasters with tools to manage their radio show schedules online and stream uninterrupted with a persistent audio player bar, Stream Player, in WordPress. As a a bonus to Radio Station users, he shifted the role of netmix.com to a radio station directory populated with stations using the Radio Station WordPress plugin, so they could benefit from an SEO back link to their sites.
Randomly, Tony checked on the netmx.fm TLD saw that it was available. He quickly purchased it and began the plan to build this website as an archive of early netmix.com DJ show archives.
