During the summer of 2001 I interned at an NYC-based startup called Clickradio. It was a part of the original dot-com boom, only by mid-2001 the dot-coms had most certainly stopped booming and shit was hitting the fan. The tanking economy was unfortunate for Clickradio, a service that did exactly what Pandora did before Pandora did it; in better times the company surely would’ve made it.

I spent that summer driving around Manhattan in a pimped-out promo truck with external computers and speaker bays adorned with Clickradio signage, parking in dense pedestrian areas and demoing our product to the masses. Preaching the benefits of an Internet radio station you could customize to fit your own tastes in 2001 — when broadband wasn’t even widespread yet — was kinda like preaching the benefits of a monthly fee / all-you-can-stream music service is in 2011 — when people are still obsessed with physical / file ownership. But I digress.

The reason I bring this all up: for some reason we had some kind of promo deal with Bay Area nu-metallers Systematic. We were always giving out Systematic stickers and sampler CDs from our truck to confused midtown businessmen whose definition of metal might be AC/DC. Systematic songs always came up on the Clickradio “metal” channel, so I got pretty familiar with the band. All things considered, I guess this band wasn’t really that bad… but they also weren’t really that good. Apparently Systematic got back together and did a reunion gig this past weekend. Click “Thumbs Up” if you like it and “Thumbs Down” if you don’t, and your Clickradio station will be customized to fit your own tastes!

-VN