Waiting to be discovered...

Never really thought people would tune in so quickly when I started streaming music over the Net.

And it didn't take long until I grabbed the attention of some guys boosting the station quite a bit.

First of all, I was given a relay-server on the other side of the pond offering 250 to 300 listening slots for free. Behind stood a guy called Troy Davis who discovered, liked and supported SwissGroove for 2 years from then.

I also got in touch with Alex Dal Farra, former head of multimedia-content working for Sunrise, who was about to establish a multichannel music-platform for all the customers signing up for broadband-internet.

He wanted to have SwissGroove on that platform, too, meaning, SwissGroove was for the first time listed on a prominent Swiss website. The stream was ip-restricted but that didn't matter as the exposure SwissGroove got by being listed on their website meant much more. SwissGroove was listed among stations such as the pioneering & leading Lounge-Radio.com, the later popular buureradio.ch, swissdeejays.ch or sunrise ip-radio.

This all took place by the end of 2003 beginning of 2004.

But growing also meant that all the things involved had to be a bit more professional.

Several listeners suggested that I should introduce radio jingles instead of our own voiced liners.

I knew that without Jingles a radio isn't really a radio but I also knew that Jingles meant spending a lot of money.

Luckily, I came across England's company Devaweb who have been on the market since 1999 creating high quality, effective audio branding for radio stations in the UK, Europe and beyond with Chris Stevens as founder and force behind it all.

And the message was clear: SwissGroove is the planet's grooviest webradio streaming groovy music of various genres at high quality.

Most of the first produced sweepers are still being played today and they are among the best ever created. Some months later, when more material was needed I turned again towards Devaweb. Besides them, productionpark.com was another great producer of the first professionally voiced sweepers, progamme trailers and liners heard on SwissGroove.

The cost of running a webradio were high. By the end of 2003, I already spent around 12'000 Swiss Francs for the first 8 months in operation. Most of the money was spent to pay for royalty fees and streaming servers, quite a big amount was invested into new music since, at that time, I hardly got any promo-cds from any label. If I wanted to play new music on SwissGroove, I also had to pay for it.

Luckily, I came across the right person regarding this matter when searching more about a smooth jazz community in Switzerland. The format/genre got to my attention more and more and I tried to find out whether or not there was a community of this genre in Switzerland. There kind of wasn't really one but there was a person in Switzerland who has been into smooth jazz from the moment smooth jazz actually got its format back in the late 80's/early 90's. His name: Peter Böhi.

Without him, SwissGroove would never have become a serious name within the webradio's landscape, since, as a collector of music, he has introduced lots of music and tracks that can hardly be found on today's music market. And as a real music aficionado, he 's put his hands on so many other diamonds & pearls of various music-genres, he was the man to be met and his musical experience and expertise has since then greatly influenced and formed SwissGroove.

Peter Böhi forms, with Thomas Illes, Sven Epting and lately myself again, the core team of SwissGroove and has been president of the organization since the middle of 2007.