Only when I heard an announcer's voice was I able to identify it as a FM station not known to me. There was mostly music played and the announcements were scarce and done casually, if not to say non-challantly. None of the loud & exciting voices you heard on other stations telling you how great the song was you just heard and how marvellous the day and how exciting their own radio is.
I noticed some days later that their playlist was full of artists and songs you could hardly hear on any other terrestrial radio station. They didn't have Jingles played but rather dry cuts of sweepers and station Ids just mentioning "GrooveFM" or "You're listening to GrooveFM". Pretty unusual for a radio at that time.
They also operated their radio without the typical sparkling & highly compressed FM sound. It was more listening to an own record at home than having tuned in to an FM station.
The makers were musicians and/or music-lovers and few music-journalists, having good connections to international artists of various genres and labels. They played not only sounds from CDs but also music recorded from their personal collections of their vinyl-records.
I had my radio station back that offered me an even better selection than any other radio I've heard before.
I mean, check out their playlist anytime you want and you'll find something exciting or interesting stuff not heard on any other station (like tonite 23/12):
| Edellisiä: | Marvin Gaye - Got To Give It Up | osta |
|---|---|---|
| Martha & The Vandellas - (Love Is Like A) Heatwave | osta | |
| Bee Gees - Night Fever | osta | |
| Tulossa: | Chaka Khan & Rufus - Ain't Nobody | osta |
| Commodores - Easy | osta | |
| Booker T. & The MG's - Green Onions | osta |
Which radio-station out there plays Booker T, Marvin Gaye or Martha & The Vandellas within a couple of minutes apart? None for sure.
Their jazzy tracks can mainly be found during daytime, the evenings and nights belong more to Soul, Funk/Disco & Blues.
I left Finland in 2001 and settled down in Switzerland again. The first thing I did back in Switzerland was trying to track down if GrooveFM.fi was offering their programme over the internet. At that time their page suggested nothing like that but when I e-mailed them they answered shortly indicating a link to a fantastic 128 kbps OGG-Vorbis stream of their music. They also indicated that they had to pay big money to offer such a stream and that I shouldn't spread the information as listening to their stream abroad was not covered within their webcasting-licence.
That didn't bother me and I didn't want to give these infos to anybody else as I was happy and wouldn't want anything else.
About 4 months later, they had to shut down their stream for whatever reasons and only offered their programme to listeners in the South of Finland via cable and FM.
Broadband Internet was still very expensive around that time in Switzerland but I was paying for top-notch service so I could surf the web at high speed. I scanned the net for other online radio stations but what I found didn't really satisfy my needs and interests.
I got myself informed about the system requirements of running a webradio and soon came across shoutcast. I had already fiddled around with a software for djs and budget-radio stations called OTS DJ/JUKE which I found perfect for mixing tracks. I installed an encoder and set up a shoutcast-server locally using my 512 kbps ADSL line. With that I was able to stream at 96 kbps with about 5 people connected simultaneously. I hit the auto-dj button on my OTS and streamed music at random. It was only a test but it all seemed to work well and the sound reproduction was quite remarkable.
I was at a point where I ask myself, well, if I am about to play music for other people to tune in, what would it be? Of course, it had to be something like GrooveFM.fi but shouldn't really sound exactly like it. And in addition, there were still tracks I loved to hear without GrooveFM.fi playing them.
So I decided to set up a playlist of songs of Blues, Soul, Funk, Rock, RnB, Latin, Reggae, Smooth Jazz, NuJazz, Lounge & Electronica.
I streamed this content between 4 - 8 pm CET for the first week to find out if anybody at all would tune in. At that time shoutcast.com listed about 1'500 stations, growing quickly day by day.
As soon as the station got listed on the yp it wouldn't take long until the first listener found it and tuned in, then a second, then a third and on day 2, after one hour of continous streaming, all the 5 listening-slots were taken.
The stream was titled Radio Atlanta or Atlantis for the first days, but, after brain-storming with my wife, we changed it to SwissGroove, a name/brand we both fancied.
In March 2003, I registered the domain www.swissgroove.ch and set up a mini-website with a tune-in section and a few infos about the what's and the why's. At the same time I bought 20 listening slots at a shoutcast provider in the USA and in May I started streaming 24 hours nonstop.
SwissGroove was finally born!
My next blog "" soon to follow after Christmas. Merry Christmas to all of you out there & happy New Year!
PS: Just found out that GrooveFM.fi is actually streaming over the Net again. It's an 70 kbps OGG-Vorbis stream at:
http://217.30.180.242:8000/gvfm.ogg.m3u
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