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.

Wonderful Music

Check out this wonderful music channel made in Italy playing a mix of Lounge, ChillOut, Nu Jazz, Smooth Jazz & Bossa Nova.

http://www.swissgroove.ch/listen_lounge.m3u

The website will soon be online, too, at

http://www.wonderfulmusic.eu

More challenges...

Just had a look of what the website looked like back in May 2003. It was something like this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030501222621/http://www.swissgroove.ch/

There was lots of work to be done, every day, and, besides working for money.

I signed up for another server to provide a stream at lower bitrate so that modem and ISDN users were also able to tune into the station. However, the stream at lower bitrate, also after having it run for a longer period, never proved worth.

The guys at radiostreamer.com did quite a good job, especially when they merged with John Simkiss's company Beannet. The technical support was top-notch, mainly thanks to that man, who always took time to look into any problem that arose and was also a great guy to talk to.

On the other hand, radiostreamer.com was expensive to me as I paid everything myself. So I had to constantly check prices and test servers at other providers.

In July I came across radiostream.de whose servers were hosted at various locations around Germany. The had an offer for 250 slots at 128 kbps in the range of 200.- USD. I contacted them and was immediately set up with a test-server that, unfortunately, turned out to be below the quality I was looking for.

Their support was also very good and they really did everything possible to keep up with their promises. Finally, after a few days, they set up a new server at a different location/datacenter and things improved much.

I also got another good offer from a host in Luxemburg who thought that SwissGroove wouldn't increase their numbers of listeners quickly. It was an offer based on limited bandwidth. After only 3 days, I had about 100 simultanious listeners during daytime and that meant that the bandwidth limit offered with the server would be reached only 2 days later. So I had to cancel the account and disconnect the server in order not to run into a financial disaster.

Things at radiostream.de were very changeable. Some weeks their servers ran like clockwork. On others, things got out of hand. Finally, they moved servers back into a level3 datacenter and the performance was just amazing. Very quickly, all the 250 slots were taken during peak hours and again, I had to look around for another solution.

Besides all the technical difficulties, there had been more challenges to overcome with IFPI Switzerland, the International Federation Of Producers Of Phonograms And Videograms. In order to stream music legally, I had to have a contract with them and pay what they ask for.

When I read their contract, I could hardly believe what was written there. They asked me to offer my stream only to listeners within Switzerland. They would only let me stream using the Real Media format and they asked me to keep records from all the people connecting to the stream, etc. etc.

Besides that, they wanted CHF 5'000.- per year so that I was allowed to make the stream publicly available and to make copies of the CDs for streaming.

I called them many times in order to make them lower the amount they asked for but they never wanted to renegociate it. The only thing they offered me was a payment plan.

It was time to either quit or to put up with the rules, pay and keep going. Though I got myself a hobby I could hardly afford, it was also one difficult to just let go.

I paid the amount IFPI asked for but also kept my own rules concerning the technical and geographical aspects of an online radio station.

Besides, it wasn't just another radio station the internet accommodated already plenty of.

It was, after all, the planet's grooviest webradio!

Streaming music and its challenges

The first days streaming from my home turned out to be pretty tricky since ADSL lines at those times disconnected without warning and on quite regular basis. Moreover, when starting to stream at 128 kbps, the line itself could not be used much for surfing the Net or other heavy down-/uploads. So I decided at once to upgrade my ADSL account to the highest possible within the business sector. I also started to look around for a provider offering shoutcast-server at reasonable prices.

In 2003, bandwidth was costy and many providers charged 4 US Dollars or more per listening slot at 128kbps. I looked at offers in the US as providers in Europe were scares and without much experience within that sector. Providers in Switzerland wouldn't want to offer shoutcast servers as they preferred to sell Real Media & Windows Media Servers at outraging prices.

So I first signed up with Mediacast, Denver, who also ran servers in Chicago and NYC.

As a novice, I didn't know what kind of trouble I would run into when signing up with a provider on the other side of the pond. It wasn't actually the provider itself that turned out to be troublesome - it was the distance between the stream-source and the server.

Tracerts showed hops over 20 POPs and pings were in the 300 ms region which made my stream skipped like hell at 128 kbps. I had to lower the bitrate temporarly and looked desperately for another solution.

After searching for days I came across the provider radiostreamer.com who had their servers located (also) in hamburg. I signed up for 50 slots by paying USD 2.75 per slot. The overall connectivity was okay but quite often the servers went down for various reasons.

So running a webradio like this was kind of a adventure. Anything could happen anytime. The only thing I could really count on at that time was the music automation software I used: OTS JUKE/DJ (AV), the australian built software was rock solid and it hardly ever let me down. It sounded pretty good compared to many other software used at that time having a built in sound dynamic volume processing and an awesome auto mix point detection.

I beefed it up with the DSP OzoneMP by Izotope and the Encoder from Spacialaudio.

The first 3 months I had everything running on a Toshiba Notebook. Then I bought a well equipped PC with loads of RAM so that I had two identical set ups should one of the machines go down. One was used for the actual live-stream, the other (spare) one for ripping CDS, updating the webpage, etc.

All was setup in a 2 bedroom appartment. My girlfriend & I made radio in one room and love in the other, had a small kitchen where we cooked some fine food and an even smaller entree with a round table accommodating 4-5 people. We had all we needed.

Music in various flavors

There was music played on the radio and there was the music I listened to in my room. There was music I shared with my friends and there was music I mainly listened on my very own next to a lit candle.

I just watched a concert on TV (www.3sat.de - Themenabend) by Roger Hodgson playing music from his solo career as well as from the time as leadsinger and songwriter of Supertramp.

Our daughter, aged 13 months, played on the floor next to me and looked at me singing along these songs, which I remembered well. It touched me to see her jolting her head slightly to the rhythm of the music also applauding when the audience did. It seemed if she also liked the falsetto voice of Hodgson and the rhythmic and groovin' sound of songs like "School", "Dreamer", "Logical Song", "Sister Moonshine" and others....

I remembered Supertramp's open-air concert in the stadium in Basel in the 80's at a very hot summer day - one of the best open-air gig I ever seen & heard.

Genesis also belonged to the band's whose records I mainly listened to on my own. I thinks I even got the first one from my sister's collection but have bought others my them and also by Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett and Peter Gabriel.

I was a big fan of Mike Oldfield. His long instrumentals composed and played by himself got to my attention in the 80s with his albums Platinum, QE2 and Five Miles Out. ELP was another of my early favorites.

Black music and Latin music played, in early days, a minor role to me. Of course, I listened & liked groups like Kool & The Gang, Earth, Wind & Fire and artists like Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, The Commodores, Lionel Richie. But I maily got to know most of them during the 80s, past the time, when their biggest hits had been released.

Latin music meant Ray Barretto, Ruben Blades, Santana, Tito Puente, Gloria Estefan to me. It also meant Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff & UB40.

Some big (legendary) groups I had never liked, listened or bought records from were "The Who", "Abba", "The Beatles", "The Doors", "Bob Dylon", "Jimmy Hendrix", "Led Zeppelin", "The Rolling Stones", "U2", "Aerosmith", "The Bee Gees", "Miles Davis", "Elvis Presley", "Sex Pistols", "Janis Joplin" or "Johnny Cash".

In the 90s, I bought, among some others, records from these artists:

Tori Amos, Paula Cole, Sarah McLachlan, George Michael, Wilson Phillips, En Vogue, Janet Jackson, CeCe Peniston, Seal, Vanessa Williams, Anita Baker, Eric Clapton, Cranberries, Sheryl Crown, Crash Test Dummies, Gin Blossoms, Hootie & Blowfish, INXS, The The, Lenny Kravitz, K.D. Lang, John Mellencamp, Alanis Morisette, Pearl Jam, REM, Sting, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Robert Palmer, Amanda Marshall, Chantal Krevaziuk, Jewel, Everything But The Girl, Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, Joe Cocker.

Again, this collection of music doesn't show any signature. It was pretty mainstream mix of music with few exceptions. But the exceptions kept growing while the mainstream stuff got less and less.

Somewhere around 2000 I turned my attention to smaller labels and sounds of different flavours. I listened to Electronica, Chillout (Lounge/Downtempo), Smooth Jazz and Nu Jazz.

It was only a logical step that I turned away from terrestrial radio and paid attention to what happened to the radio and musical aspect on the Internet, especially when Broadband got introduced, since it was on the Internet where I gradually began to discover (and rediscover) new sounds, artists and genres.

And it was also a matter of time that I put my own radio project online so that more people could actually listen to music that had hardly been played elsewhere.

GrooveFM.fi vs. SwissGroove.ch

I caught the first tunes of GrooveFM Finland in a taxi driving me from the place I lived to the airport. First I thought that the taxi driver was listening to a music-tape or CD he recorded himself from various artists. It was a mix of acoustic & vocal jazz, smokey blues, dirty funk & the mellow sounds of soul. Every now and then they threw in a bit of Latin and Rhythm & Blues.

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

Get Into The Groove

When I was about 14 I earned my first own money and started to buy records as much as I could afford them. We write the year 1980: Disco is dead and Rock is back again.

On the radio they played a lot of tracks by Journey, Van Halen, Queen, Tom Petty, & Eagles.

I was more into Bob Seger, Christopher Cross, Dan Fogleberg, Billy Joel, Donald Fagen, kind of stuff. I prefered mostly soft & easy-listening tracks. My favorite tracks were "I'm Born Again" by Preston & Syreeta, "Against The Wind" Bob Seger and "Sailing" by Chris Cross - wasn't I damn romantic?

With friends the same age, we started listening and sharing the music we bought. When we met, we were like: "Hey listen to this great track, listen to that one...great beat, oh...I got a brand new one here, you gotta check it out..." and so on.

And I started to either dance to the music or put on records at parties to friends/people who wanted to get down. That was mainly during the years 82 - 87. We danced to the hits of the J. Geils Band, Dexy's Midnight Runners, Billy Ocean, Eddie Grant, Ray Parker Jr., Madonna, Talking Heads, Cyndi Lauper and many others.

It was the 80's pop music that ruled & dictated the rhythm of my life at that time and I wasn't looking or needing anything else.

But it was only in the 90's that I really started to feel the groove of music by listening to Acid-Jazz artists like Brand New Heavies, Working Week, Incognito and the Jazz-Funk band James Taylor Quartet. Here, it was not only my legs that wanted to move but also my soul.

By feeling the groove in music I became again more open and interested in Jazz, Soul, Funk & World music.

There are many descriptions about "the groove" of music. To me it means, that a song moves me deeply on a physical and mental level, a song that makes me shake, shiver, smile or almost cry. It can at times even put me into a light state of trance.

Here are a few examples of songs that are full of groove to me:

"I Can't Stand It" by the James Taylor Quartet (shake)
"Our Roots" by Pharoah Sanders (shake)
"Rising To The Top" by Blacknuss Allstars (shake)
"Good Love" by Incognito (shiver)
"Someone Will Take The Place Of You" by Isaac Hayes (shiver)
"Agua De Coco" by Marcos Valle (smile)
"IGY" by Donald Fagen (smile)
"Summer" by Booster (smile)
"Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell (cry)
"Language" by Suzanne Vega (cry)

Read my next blog..."GrooveFM.fi vs. SwissGroove.ch"