SomaFM

SomaFM Archived News

Please note that this news is most likely very out of date, and is only archived here for historical reasons.

Merry Christmas from all of us at SomaFM! - Christmas Eve, 2007

From now on the days get longer and the nights get shorter. As Big Url says on Xmas in Frisko, "We'd like to wish all our pagan friends a Happy Solstice!" - 21-Dec-07

SomaFM is up for a PLUG Award again this year (Online Radio Station of the Year), and while we didn't win last year, we're hoping to this year. If you like us, please go vote for SomaFM for Online Station of the Year. Thanks!

Substantially more bandwidth added for the MP3 Holiday channels, you shouldn't have any trouble connecting now but they're already full again. We are working on getting even more. Try the Windows Media 32k streams in the mean time (which sound quite good). (This is costing us a lot of money, so if you haven't done so already, please support SomaFM today! 6-Dec-07

We have a new Windows Media server in place with tons of capacity, so no more buffering or connection refused messages. 5-Dec-07

Windows Media streams are back up and running. If you're still having problems, please contact us with the details of which stream and which speed connection you're using, and we'll try to get it all sorted out. 25-Nov-07

The holiday season has officially begun! Our annual holiday channels (Xmas in Frisko and Christmas Lounge) have returned.

San Francisco's Ambient Mafia is throwing a rare underground ambient party, Saturday night, "Two rooms of downtempo, ambient, trip hop, glitch, atmospheric d+b, midtempo, dub, and bossa nova in a virgin UG San Francisco location!" Saturday, November 10th, 2007 9pm - 6am // 18+ (21+ to drink) $10 at the door. (UPDATE: if you weren't there, you missed an exceptionally great party!)

Happy Halloween! 31-Oct-07

5.6 Earthquake in San Francisco 8:04pm Pacific, 30-Oct-07. We're OK, for the latest news on the quake listen to KGO 810, our local news station. USGS info on the quake.

Well, the Iceland Airwaves Music Festival in Reykjavik has largely come to a close; a few small things happening to day and one or two "secret shows" at NASA tonight. We'll be updating festival coverage blog throughout the day today. 21-Oct-07

SomaFM is on the road! Rusty and Merin will be at the Iceland Airwaves Music Festival in Reykjavik this week (17-21 Oct 2007), handing out stickers and even some Tshirts! And Elise will be at CMJ in New York City 18-20 Oct 2007. Maybe we'll see you there? Updates in a special section on the blog. 16-Oct-07

I'm getting reports of some people having problems connecting after some changes we've made to the site. If you can't connect and could before, please please contact me with the details of your problem, include the type of computer, browser and media player you're using and we'll get it straightened out. 15-Oct-07

Rusty will be on CNET LIVE today at 1pm Pacific talking about the copyright royalty problems faced by internet radio. 11-Oct-07

RIAA wins a verdict of $222,000.00 for Minnesota woman sharing 24 songs. Does this seem right to you? 4-Oct-07

We'll miss you, Miss Moneypenny. 30-Sep-07

There is still no solution on the net radio royalties front. We still need you to call your congressperson and ask them to co-sponsor the Internet Radio Equality Act. If this bill doesn't pass, SomaFM will be forced off the air by royalties in excess of $1 million a year!

In San Francisco this weekend? Be sure to check out the Treasure Island Music Festival, featuring Thievery Corporation, Gotan Project, DJ Shadow and more. 13-Sep-07

SoundExchange extends offer to Small Webcasters, but it's a useless offer. This week, we step back up the fight for passage of the Internet Radio Equality Act.

Thanks to everyone for your support this August, we exceeded our fund-raising goal before the end of the month! Thanks! 24-Aug-07

We need to raise at least $25,000 in August to pay off our royalty obligations and operational expenses for the first half of 2007. As of August 19th, we've raised just under $23,000, which is great! But we still have a ways to go.

With your $50 support, you'll get a SomaFM Tshirt, or at the $35 support level get our Indie Pop Rocks! compilation CD. Or get both for $75! And if that's more than you can budget right now, we have automatic monthly subscriptions you can cancel at any time starting at $1 a month.

RIP Tony Wilson: thanks for all the music you introduced us to. 15-Aug-07

Server capacity issues this morning have been solved. You should be able to connect easily now. Noon PST, 20-Aug-07

We had an extremely successful visit to Washington, DC. Read about it in Rusty's blog. 1-Aug-2007

Rusty and Elise are in Washington DC today and tomorrow, meeting with members of congress and their staff, and we're hearing a lot of positive support for internet radio from them, but we still need more support for HR.2060 and S.1353, so please this week, call your representatives. So we still need you to call your representatives. If they're not supporting the IREA, we need them to support it. If they are supporting it, thank them and tell them it is still important that the IREA is voted on. If you've already called them, call them again. There is no settlement with the RIAA/SoundExchange yet, there is only a stalemate. Make it clear you want congress to act on this. 30-Jul-07

While we thought we had progress last week on the royalty issues, it now is obvious the RIAA was using this "truce" to derail the passage of the Internet Radio Equality Act. By announcing that SoundExchange was very close to a deal with webcasters, the RIAA was successful at derailing the campaign by making the public believe that internet radio was not going to die on July 15th. Instead of a mass execution, they hope to quietly kill off net stations one by one, and hope that no one will notice. So we still need you to call your representatives. If they're not supporting the IREA, we need them to support it. If they are supporting it, thank them and tell them it is still important that the IREA is voted on. If you've already called them, call them again. Don't let them think the battle is over.

We are having an outage on most streams right now. A power outage affected our data center at 1:50pm pacific time, and power has now been restored, but some of our streaming servers did not come back up. Cliqhop, Drone Zone, Beat Blender, Doomed are currently down and may not be back up before 3:30pm. Some web page access might also be slow. UPDATE: all systems back in place now. Read the the gory details. 4:15pm pacific, 24-Jul-07

Tuner2 has a great resource on how to listen to net radio like SomaFM in your car, including lists of compatible phones and ways to interface to your car stereo. 18-Jul-07

Congressman Ed Markey jumps to webcasters defense! 17-Jul-07

Thanks to all your calls, a congressional roundtable (mini-hearing) occurred Thursday and one of the outcomes of that, SoundExchange stated that "For the people who want to comply with the law and are in bona fide negotiations with us, we don't want those people to be intimidated. And we don't want them to stop streaming." Simson qualified his statement by noting, "That's just so long as they're continuing to pay under the license they had." So effectively, we have some reprieve until the negotiations are concluded. 13-Jul-07

Every now and then, we recommend another radio station that we've found and really like. Planet Pootwaddle is a station that's really original and really fun. It's kind of like a blend of Ill Street Lounge, American Graffiti, Secret Agent and some old-school FM from the late 60s and early 70s. Very creative, very fun. Check it out.

SomaFM calls on Congress to insist that the RIAA comes to a settlement on royalty rates with webcasters before July 15th payment deadline.

I need you to call SomaFM's congressional representative, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at (202) 225-4965 and ask her to use her office's influence to demand that the RIAA come to a settlement with small webcasters. Identify yourself as a listener to SomaFM which is based in her district. It doesn't look like the IREA will get passed before the July 15th deadline with the RIAA's aggressive and false-pretense lobbying against it. Our only hope now is for a settlement, which ideally will be codified into law later. More...

Summer has started, and SomaFM has lots of bills to pay: our quarterly royalty payments are due; our streaming costs continue to increase; and we have to go back to Washington, DC to meet with more congressional representatives. If you haven't supported SomaFM lately, please support us now! With your $50 support, you'll get a SomaFM Tshirt, or at the $35 support level get our Indie Pop Rocks! compilation CD. Or get both for $75! And if that's more than you can budget right now, your support of any amount helps us!

Happy Independence Day to everyone in the US! Take a moment to appreciate your freedoms and indepence, and remember not to take it from granted. We still have lots of work to do, giant Corporations (and their representatives, such as the RIAA) are now the biggest threat to our personal freedoms. 4-Jul-07.

Thanks to the almost 300 people who showed up for the Save Net Radio benefit last night; we raised over $2000. Now don't forget to call your congressperson and ask them to co-sponsor the Internet Radio Equality Act.

SomaFM's Elise Nordling will be speaking at the BAVC Innovation Salon II: Rescuing The Music Industry on June 28th at 7pm at the San Francisco Apple Store.

Third Ear and Synapse 2007 presents: Steve Roach Live at Grace Cathedral: Mystic Chords and Deep Immersions in San Francisco on Friday, June 29th at 8pm (Doors at 7pm). We play a lot of Steve's music on Drone Zone and Space Station Soma. Perhaps we'll see you there?

Tags Trance Trip is back up. And we remind you that if you ever need a Comcast cable modem installed really, really fast... you should just forget about it and be prepared to wait 10 days.

SomaFM needs your help to save internet radio: we're faced with new royalties for the music we pay, which retroactively increased our royalties from about $20,000 for 2006 to over $600,000 for 2006. And they get worse over the next years, when we'll be forced to pay over $1 million a year to stay on the air. US Residents: please help us out by calling your Senators and Representatives and asking them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act, which makes the rates that internet radio pays the same as the satellite radio services pay. (Learn more...)

It costs a lot of money to run SomaFM, and since we don't run ads, we have to ask you to financially support us. We have several automatic monthly payment plans from $1 a month to $12.99 a month. We have T-shirts at the $50 support level. Show us some love and give us some green, we want to be around a long time for you!

The latest news on the new royalty legislation and the battle between small webcasters and the RIAA is in Rusty's blog.

We'd really appreciate it if you would take our short survey to tell us a bit about yourself. (Your personal information will be kept private and not linked to the data we collect.)

Groove Salad was off the air due to technical issues from Noon until 3pm pacific today, sorry about that. 23-May-07

We are entirely listener supported, and commercial free. Please help us keep it that way.

NEWSFLASH: Internet Radio Equality Act introduced in the Senate. Call or write your Senators and Represenative now to support the Internet Radio Equality Act! (Learn more about new royalty rates that will put SomaFM out of business if not changed.) 10-May-07

As of 1am pacific time (0800GMT) we are doing some work on our servers. We will be back by 0940GMT. 21-May-07

We are still in great danger of being forced off the air due to the recent royalty ruling. Please keep the calls and letters coming to your congressman. We still need more of them to sign up as co-sponsors of HS.2060. If you live in the US, call or write your congressman, and ask them to co-sponsor H.R. 2060, the "Internet Radio Equality Act". We already have over 42 co-sponsors so far, but we need over 100.

SomaFM at Mission Open Studios this Friday: Please join Soma FM (and our artist studiomates) for an open studios reception! This Friday May 11th, 7pm - 11pm (or a bit later), 1890 Bryant Street, Suite 303, San Francisco, CA 94110, between 17th and 18th in the northeast Mission. (Map)

Reminder: We need to raise at least $15,000 each month to meet our current minimum operating budget. (The newly announced royalty rates will substantially increase our costs!) With your $50 support, you'll get a SomaFM Tshirt, or at the $35 support level get our Indie Pop Rocks! compilation CD. Or get both for $75! And if that's more than you can budget right now, your support of any amount helps us!

The proposed "May 8th day of silence" for internet radio has been postponed due to the recent copyright office ruling that the new royalty rates would not be due until July 15th.

This morning's meeting with Nancy Pelosi's office went great. Thanks for all your calls into her office this morning, they really understand how important this issue is! 4-May-07

URGENT ACTION!!! A bill has been introduced that will save SomaFM and other independent net radio stations from the huge royalty payments that the copyright office recently imposed. Call your Representative right now and ask to cosponsor the "Internet Radio Equality Act", H.R. 2060, introduced by Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Donald Manzullo (R-IL). This bill will set royalty rates that internet radio pays to the same reasonable level that satellite radio pays.
US Citizens: Please call the House switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to speak to your representative, and ask them to support H.R. 2060, the "Internet Radio Equality Act" today! (find you representative)

Rusty and Elise are in Washington, DC today, lobbying for passage of H.R.2060, the Internet Radio Equality Act. Read more about what's happening in the blog. 1-May-07

Rusty and Elise will be in Washington, DC next week going door to door on Capitol Hill, telling our story to congress. We still need "ground support" from you- we need to you call or write your representatives and ask them to support legislation that sets fair royalty rates for internet radio stations. New rulings force internet radio to pay much, much higher royalties than satellite or over-the-air radio. Independent net radio will have to pay royalties that are several times their gross revenues. All we're asking for is fair royalty rates, or else independent internet radio will be forced to shut down.

We could use your extra financial support right now to help fight the current royalty rulings. We even have automatic monthly payment plans that start from $1 a month. If you listen to SomaFM regularly, we'd really appreciate it if you supported us at the $2.99 a month level.

If you're in San Francisco, next Sunday, May 6th is the 8th annual How Weird Street Faire. Maybe we'll see you there? 25-Apr-07

The Copyright Royalty Board, a three judge panel responsible for the March 2nd ruling that set webcast royalties at their new increased rate, has denied all parties' motion for rehearing of the ruling on procedural grounds. This is a big setback, and means that it's even more important to contact your congressional representatives and alert them to this issue. 16-Apr-07

Happy Earth Day, and to all our special friends, happy 4/20! 20-Apr-07

Independent internet radio stations are in danger of being put out of business by newly announced royalty rates that are retroactive to 2006. SomaFM will have to pay $600,000 in royalties for 2006 and $1 million for 2007 under these new rates. (In the past, we've paid 12% of our revenues, but these new rates are three times our total revenues for 2006! Here's how you can help keep independent internet radio alive. 30-Mar-07

Windows Media Player users: our new 64k streams will install the Abacast streaming plug-in, but the 32k streams do not require a plug in and work like they always have. So if you are having probems with the new 64k streams, use the 32k streams.

PodTech's Eddie Codel interviews SomaFM's Rusty Hodge, about the history of SomaFM, royalty rate increases, and the future of internet radio. 30-Mar-07

If you are experiencing problems with our Windows Media streams (which are now through Abacast), please contact us with the details of your problems, we're trying to fix any problems that you might be encountering. 32k Windows Media streams should work exactly as before. 30-Mar-07

Today in the Washington Post: SoundExchange Executive Director John Simson says small operators who play music and don't try to sell ads "will have a hard time paying the rates" and that he thinks there are too many internet radio stations now, so it's OK if a bunch of them go off the air. The heyday of advertising-free Internet radio might be coming to an end. SoundExchange is the royalty agency that was formed by the RIAA after they successfully got legislation passed in the US requiring high royalty fees for internet radio stations. Simson and SoundExchange are heavily driven by the major record labels. They don't want the competition from independent webcasters playing great music from independent and unsigned artists, because it's a threat to the major labels' business models.

Please contact your Senators and your Representative right away. If you've already done so, please contact them again to ask them what they have done to save independent internet radio broadcasters. If you can call them, that's even better. But it's easy to write to them. I've written up a sample message which you can just copy and paste, or use it as a guideline and add your own thoughts.

We need to raise at least $15,000 each month to meet our current minimum operating budget. (The newly announced royalty rates will substantially increase our costs!) With your $50 support, you'll get a SomaFM Tshirt, or at the $35 support level get our Indie Pop Rocks! compilation CD. Or get both for $75! And if that's more than you can budget right now, your support of any amount helps us!

The Copyright Royalty Board has announced new copyright licensing fees for internet radio stations. The new fees are a staggering increase over our previous annual royalty rate of about $22,000 to over $600,000 for 2006. And the fees are even higher in 2007, based on our current listenership, they'll be over $1 million dollars for 2007! (Which is 3-4 times what we hope to raise in 2007). If you think this is unfair to internet radio, and you are an American citizen, you can send a letter to your congressman showing your support for internet radio. We already have the attention of Congress, so now you have to let them know you support internet radio and that royalty rates shouldn't be structured in a way that will put small webcasters out of business.

If you're at SXSW in Austin, keep your eye out for SomaFM. We have lots of stickers and some Tshirts if you ask us nicely! 16-Mar-07

Demands for higher royalty payments by a US copyright body could shut down net radio stations, they warn (BBC) 8-Mar-2007

Fee ruling may imperil Internet radio: ``Some small stations say a panel's decision to hike music royalties may put them out of business.`` (Los Angeles Times) 7-Mar-2007

Many people have been asking how the new royalty rates will affect SomaFM. At this point, the final ruling hasn't been publicly released, so we don't know the full details. And there is going to be an appeal as well. In the mean time, sign the online petition and learn how else you can help. 5-Mar-07

We now have red t-shirts as well as black ones available to our subscibers at the $50 level.

Thanks to everyone who supported us in February (we feared we wouldn't raise enough money and have to put a bunch of exppenses on Rusty's personal credit card, but you all came through in the last few days). 28-Feb-07

SomaFM's Indie Pop Rocks hosts a FREE!!! Noisepop Happy Hour event featuring: Loquat (who is also on our Indie Pop Rocks vol. 1 compilation and Dodo Bird (Meric Long). It happens Thursday, March 1st from 5:00 - 8:00pm at Thee Parkside, 1600 17th Street @ Wisconsin in San Francisco (21 and over please). The first 10 people who come up to the SomaFM table and say "I love Indie Pop Rocks" get a free CD! (Update: Thanks to everyone who turned out. It was a great show, and nice to meet so many great people!)

SomaFM has an ongoing, pressing needs for funds to support our broadcasts. It costs us real money (not to mention real time and real effort!) to keep the tunes flowing. We need to raise at least $15,000 each month to meet our minimum operating budget. We need to raise at least $700 today to make our budget for February. Please show your appreciation for SomaFM by supporting us now. With your $50 support, you'll get a SomaFM Tshirt, or at the $35 support level get our Indie Pop Rocks! compilation CD. Or get both for $75! And if that's more than you can budget right now, your support of any amount helps us! (Update: we made it just in the nick of time.)

One of our streaming providers will be upgrading their servers Feb 8, 2007 from about 12:00 EST until about 16:00 EST. Channels will be down for 15-20 minutes while this upgrade is completed. Not all channels will be down at the same time. If you can't connect, either try another channel or bitrate. Windows Media streams will not be affected.

Happy Birthday to SomaFM's Elise Nordling, music director and host of Indie Pop Rocks! We love you Elise, SomaFM would't be what it is without you. 7-Feb-07

Spread the word about SomaFM by linking to us. We've got banners, badges, even simple text links.

Thank you for all your financial support of SomaFM. We met our January budget with a couple days to spare. 29-Jan-07

Space Station Soma's 128k stream is sometimes taking a long time to initially connect during peak hours, but it will eventually connect (it often takes 10-20 seconds to initially connect). Once you're connected, it streams fine. 19-Jan-07

Americans: Sen. Dianne Feinstein has re-introduced the PERFORM Act, a backdoor assault on your right to record off the radio. Internet webcasters (as well as Satellite and digital radio stations) would have to adopt digital rights management (DRM) restrictions or lose the statutory license for broadcasting music. Letters from constituents like you helped beat this dangerous proposal last year -- take action now to block it again. Tell your representatives to oppose the PERFORM Act now. It only takes a couple seconds if you have an Autofill toolbar (like the Google toolbar).

American lawmakers have introduced a bill to outlaw recording of internet and satellite radio streams, and in its present form would require us to start broadcasting in a DRM-protected format, which would mean no more streaming MP3 or aacPlus streams. As soon as we learn more, we'll let you know. There is some additional discussion of this on Shashdot. UPDATE: it appears that this bill is only targetting stream ripping tools that automatically split up tracks from internet broadcasters, and recording of entire programs (e.g. Groove Salad from 10pm -11pm) would still be allowed. The DRM may be as simple as modifying our "metadata" formats. 17-Jan-06

Some of our 128k streams are filling up during peak hours (11am-1pm pacific time, or 1500-1700 GMT. If you can't connect immediatly, try again in 1 minute or try the 56k, aacPlus or Windows Media streams instead. 4-Jan-07

Happy New Year!

As we head into the new year, and our 8th year of broadcasting commercial-free music that can't be found on the mainstream radio dial, we'd like wish you all a wonderful 2007 and look forward to playing you new, wonderful music that you won't hear anywhere else. 26-Dec-06

Happy Holiday season from SomaFM. Be sure to check out our Xmas in Frisko channel if you want some unusual holiday music from SomaFM! And our Christmas Lounge (new for 2006!) if you want fun holiday fare with a loungey, groovin' twist.

More capacity added to Xmas in Frisko. Thanks to Neptune Multimedia for providing high-bandwidth hosting.

Thank you to everyone who supported us during our end of year fund drive, we raised $25,000 towards paying off our outstanding expenses for 2006! Thanks for supporting listener-supported, commercial-free, independent internet radio on SomaFM! -- Rusty Hodge 14-Dec-06

For your information: Shoutcast.com provides a large amount of free bandwidth for our 128k streams, and they have recently started inserting a 5-second "powered by Shoutcast" message when you first connect to a stream server they are providing. Let us know if you notice anything strange, and tell us which media player you are using.

Secret Agent was "running silent" late last night and this morning. It's back broadcasting properly again. 10:30am PST 14-Dec-06

We had to reconfigure servers for the Xmas in Frisko stream this morning, which had been overloaded and not letting people connect. The new server is in place, so you shouldn't have any issues connecting now. 7am Pacific, 13-Dec-06

Thank you to everyone who has supported us on our end of the year fund drive. We need to raise at least $25,000 in December to pay off our remaining bills and operational expenses for the year. So far, we've raised over $23,000 in December, but we still have a little way to go. Don't forget we have T-shirts for our $50 level supporters and our exclusive Indie Pop Rocks compilation CD with your $35 support level. And we even have automatic monthly subscriptions that you can sign up for with as little as $1 a month. Even a poor student can afford $1 a month, so you have no reason to not be a SomaFM supporter! 12-Dec-06

We are still behind budget for 2006. We need to raise at least $25,000 in December to pay off all our bills and operational expenses for the year. Less than 1% of our listeners support SomaFM. Other music services charge $5-13 a month for commercial free music. Won't you please support us, and prove that listener-supported, commercial-free, independent internet radio is a viable alternative? UPDATE: We are now over three quarters of the way there and have raised $22,500 toward our goal as of 12-Dec-06. Thanks to everyone!

We now have red t-shirts as well as black ones available. We also have FREE stickers if you send us a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

A big thanks to Neptune Multimedia Stream Hosting for donating hosting for our Xmas channel and Ill Street Lounge that would otherwise cost us $2000 a month.

Happy Thanksgiving! Thanks for listening to SomaFM and all the support you've given us this year - SomaFM Loves You! 23-Nov-06

Support SomaFM: With your voluntary $50 subscription to SomaFM, you'll get a SomaFM tshirt and some SomaFM stickers! We don't interrupt our music with ads like all the other stations, and we rely on your voluntary support of $5-50 to stay on the air. Compare that to satellite radio - which costs you over $150 a year and still has ads on many of their channels!

SomaFM is taking part in San Francisco's Open Studios, this weekend (Sat & Sun, 11-6pm) and running all weekend. Come down and visit us! More details... Thanks to everyone who came by!

Our streaming "transmitter" move went well tonight, everything is back on the air (including Indie Pop rocks, which was the last to come back up). Thanks for bearing with us and please let us know if you notice anything strange or not working properly. 10:00pm Pacific, 10-Oct-06

SomaFM will be off the air for a few hours tonight, Tues, Oct 10th returning to the air no later than 6am pacific time, Wednesday, Oct 11. We are moving our stream-casting equipment to a more cost effective and versatile location.

We reconfigured several of our streaming servers Sunday night to add more capacity and balance the load on them. If you've bookmarked any of our streams, make sure you update them from the links on our site (otherwise you might end up connecting to the wrong station). 8-Oct-06

Windows media streams now working fine again (this morning's outage was resolved). Friday, 6-Oct-06

Spread the word about SomaFM by linking to us. We've got banners, badges, even simple text links.

We had to re-configure some of our relay servers today, so if you're having problems connecting or hearing the same 6 seconds over and over, you're connecting to the wrong servers. Make sure you use the links below, or if you're using iTunes, you may need to quit and restart iTunes to get it to "clear the cache" and connect to the proper servers.

SomaFM will be at was at the Sugar Valley festial in San Francisco, an "extension" to the Castro Street Faire today, on October 1, 2006 from 11 am to 6 pm. Thanks to everyone who came by and said hi! 1-Oct-06

AT&T and SBC are blocking email from SomaFM for some reason. If you mail us and we don't respond, and if you have an ATT, Worldnet or SBC email address, this may be why.

Attention iTunes users: these is a bug in iTunes 7 that causes audio to skip and glitch when playing back through an Airport Express. UPDATE: iTunes 7.01 fixes this problem. 1-Oct-06

Secret Agent and Ill Street Lounge fans: Direct from France, JEAN JACQUES PERREY LIVE IN CONCERT in San Francisco. This is a truly rare/special event in an intimate setting. Tue, August 29, 2006 8pm sharp; doors ope $15n 7pm! Recombinant Media Labs, 763 Brannan/bet. 6th-7th Sts, San Francisco. (If you missed it, this was a great show! Photos here.)

We have some big bandwidth bills coming up again, so if you haven't supported SomaFM lately, now is a good time, since we've got some great items for our supporters - Tshirts at the $50 support level, and the Indie Pop Rocks compilation CD at the $35 level. Of course, any amount helps; if everyone listening right now donated $3 we'd cover all our August expenses!

Windows Media streams working properly again. Sorry about the downtime; we're working on upgrading our Windows Media streams to be more reliable.

If you're having trouble connecting to our 128k MP3 streams, please try using WinAmp instead. AOL has provided us lots of bandwidth for people using WinAmp to connect to our streams. 15-Aug-06

iTunes users: we are hearing reports that sometimes the links from the iTunes Radio menu aren't working, but we think we've fixed the problems. Let us know if you're still having problems.

Support SomaFM: With your voluntary $50 subscription to SomaFM, you'll get a SomaFM tshirt! (Make sure you use the special tshirt donation link.)

AS you know the US is experiencing a heatwave. Not just in California where SomaFM is based, but also on the East coast where many of our streaming servers live. Scattered power outages are affecting some of our servers today. Please bear with us. You might need to try connecting a few times before you get through. (Or wait a couple minutes and try again.) 24-Jul-06

Dashboard users: New faster and more efficient version of Dan Steingart's SomaFM widget that tells you what songs have been played recently on any of our streams. If you don't have it, get it now, and if you have the old version make sure you upgrade!

Check out Groove Salad's Taste of the Week Podcast, a weekly guide to new and interesting music on Groove Salad from SomaFM and alt.NPR.

Thanks to everyone who supported us in our fund drive this week! We met our budget goal for July. Now I just have to get busy packing and sending out all those Tshirts and CDs! Thanks Again! -- rusty 14-Jul-06

SomaFM really needs your financial support. Did you know less than 5% of our listeners support us at all? We have significant upcoming expenses (bandwidth and music royalties) and need your financial support more now than ever. (So far we're about 70% of the way there. Thanks for everyone who has supported us so far!)

SomaFM + The Local 303 art opening this Wednesday, July 12th from 7-10pm at the Arc Cafe, 1890 Bryant in San Francisco. Music provided (of course) by SomaFM.

Our studio mates at the Local 303 are having an opening this Wednesday, July 12th from 7-10pm at the Arc Cafe, 1890 Bryant in San Francisco. (the cafe is on the York and Mariposa corner of the building). SomaFM's Merin McDonell will be showing some work, along with Joshua Ellingson who created the logo for Cliqhop. Music provided (of course) by SomaFM.

Our first compilation CD is out for Indie Pop Rocks. Available exclusively to our supporters.

Our friend Steve Marusic had a great suggestion for "spacing out" this week: listen to Groove Salad or Space Station Soma, and listen to NASA's audio/video feed of the space shuttle launch. The launch went off great today at Tuesday, July 4, at 2:38 p.m. EDT (11:38 a.m. Pacific), and Discovery is now in orbit around the earth.

A shout out to everyone at SF Pride 2006 - 25-Jun-06

Legendary composer and dj Mixmaster Morris (Ninja Tune, Irrestible Force) will be performing at the Ambi-Sonic 3 year anniversary party this Friday (23-June) in San Francisco, at the Lucid Bar, 580 Sutter (between Powell and Mason). 21 & Over. Hope to see you there.

IEEE has a great article on why the DMCA is bad for you. Sure we've been saying that for a long time, but this article talks about all the technical innovation that's been squelched by the DMCA. It's definitely looking like the only solution is a complete overhaul or overturning the DMCA. 5-Jun-06

SomaFM relies entirely on your support. While we could make lots of money filling our streams with ads, we have chosen to provide an ad-free radio environment and rely on your voluntary support. A recommended support level is $35 a year or $20 for 6 months. And for a limited time, with your $50 premium level of support, we'll send you a lovely SomaFM tshirt.

Check out the Groove Salad "Taste of the Week" podcast - a weekly appetizer of new, rare and favorite music. Subscribe at alt.npr or via iTunes.

We have a new Orban aacPlus plugin available for Windows Media Player, it's a quick install and then you can listen to our excellent sounding aacPlus feeds right in your Windows Media player!

The first ever Boards of Canada video, Dayvan Cowboy, has been released by Warp Records. Check it out.

INTERNET RADIO UNDER ATTACK AGAIN: We have just learned that in the US, a bill to ban MP3 streaming has been introduced in the Senate. It would also band all other open-standard streaming formats (like aacPlus and 3GPP we also use here at SomaFM), and force us to use a system with DRM - which means Windows Media or Real Audio. PLEASE write to your senators and representatives and ask them to oppose the "PERFORM Act". Please do this right now.

Remember to tell your friends about your favorite SomaFM channel. It's more fun when all your friends are also listening!

Happy Earth Day! -- April 22, 2006

If you live in Silicon Valley, California, for the next couple weeks, our friends at 91.5 KKUP will be broadcasting Groove Salad while they rebuild their studios. Tune in if you can. It starts at 6pm Friday, April 7th. KKUP is listener supported community radio and one of the last truly independent community radio stations, and we really admire them.

SomaFM gets a nice write up in the Boston Herald today... cheers to all of you in Boston! 31-Mar-06

Come join SomaFM's Indie Pop Rocks as we host our first ever Noisepop Festival Happy Hour. We'll be at Thee Parkside on Saturday April 1st from 5:00 - 8:00pm, with the Pale Pacific and the Invisible Cities. It's going to be a great show! ...and did we mention it's free? Thee Parkside is located at 1600 17th street, at Wisconsin Street, in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood. [map] We hope to see you there!

If you live in South America, Africa, and Asia make sure you try and see the Eclipse today! If you don't, there is an eclipse webcast from NASA you can check out! 29-Mar-06

We've added a few new channel, right now they're only MP3 format, but we'll have them in aacPlus, 3GPP and WindowsMedia soon. 23-Mar-06

Check out Groove Salad's Taste of the Week Podcast, a short guide to new and interesting music on Groove Salad from SomaFM and alt.NPR.

Sunday's upgrades and expanaion here at the studio and in our datacenter are now completed, thanks for the patience! 19-Mar-06

We're doing some upgrades and expanaion here at the studio and in our datacenter, so there may be some short periods when we'll be off the air Sunday evening (pacific time). 19-Mar-06

Are you at SXSW in Austin this week? Keep your eyes peeled for SomaFM's Elise Nordling (music director for Indie Pop Rocks) who will be on a couple panels as well as hanging out all week. She's got some SomaFM Indie Pop Rocks buttons to hand out too! 15-Mar-06

If you live in San Diego, California, you can now get Groove Salad on KPBS HD digital radio. We'll also be on the air in Juneau, Alaska soon on KTOO-FM's HD2 channel. The only catch is that HD radios aren't real easy to find yet. (Learm more about HD radio)

For many people, like all of us, music is an extremely important part of our life. It helps us do things. It helps us relax. It keeps us focused. It energizes us. It keeps us hanging in there when other things seem to be conspiring against us. Music makes our good times better, and our bad times not as bad. Mostly, music taps into a part of our psyche that wouldn't be tapped any other way.

This is why we run SomaFM, because we know how important music is to your life. Thanks for listening, thanks for supporting us, but most of all thank you for being a part of this. --rusty

If you live in San Diego, California, you can now get Groove Salad on KPBS HD digital radio. The only catch is that HD radios aren't real easy to find yet. (Learm more about HD radio)

Get SomaFM's aacPlus streams on your Pocket PC device. You'll get excellent audio quality and reliable streaming on most major wireless networks!

SomaFM is podcasting with alt.NPR, which includes "Groove Salad's Taste of the Week" (copy that link into your favorite podcast program), a 5 minute weekly appetizer of new, rare and favorite tracks heard on Groove Salad. Or use this direct iTunes link to automatically get it each week.

SomaFM plays music we love; music you may have never heard before. We hope you enjoy what you find here, and share our love of music.

Thanks to everyone who supported SomaFM in 2005! And here's to a great 2006! Happy New Year!

There has been a explosion of new internet radio stations, all vying for your attention, solely to profit by pounding you with commercials, popups, animated web pages, all that annoying stuff. We hate commercials and strive to give you an alternative to all that... we're not trying to make a quick buck. We're trying to make the kind of radio that we ourselves long to listen to.

Tonight in San Francisco: Come join SomaFM Indie Pop Rock's Elise and her pal Rosemary for their first night DJing at their new digs! This Wednesday night, January 4th, 9pm til close at the Argus Lounge (you know, the one with no name out front, just the peacock feather sign) located at 3187 Mission (where Valencia dead-ends).

Happy Solstice, a magical time of the year. And as an added benefit, the days start getting longer from here on out! 10:35 am PST 21-Dec-05

Musician David Byrne gets stung by the DMCA. It's getting to be the time that we can get a critical mass together to amend these ridiculous rules controlling internet radio (and which don't apply to traditional radio).

We've gotten more bandwidth donated for Xmas in Frisko (thanks to the really great people at AOL/Shoutcast) so you shouldn't have problems connecting any more. 15-Dec-05

Are we missing some wacky tune on Xmas in Frisko? If you have something we don't, please email it to Rusty (you can guess the email address at SomaFM.com, right?) as we'd love to get it in the mix.

Xmas in Frisko's 128k feed is a little too popular, we're at full capacity right now. The 56kb feed still has capacity as does the Windows Media feed, so if you can't connect to the 128k feed, try one of those instead. 12-Dec-05

After a lot of wrestling, we have the studio server for Indie Pop Rocks back online again, so we're back on the air. Thanks for your patience.

The indie pop rocks studio server has crashed; this is the machine we use to play back all the music live over the web to you. We are in the process of restoring this machine now but it will take a bit longer to get everything reinstalled. Yes we are lame and don't have the best backups. Yes we are poor and can't afford spare equipment to use as a "hot standby" system. So please be patient; we should have things working by Tuesday evening at the latest. 12-Dec-05

SomaFM is on the official ballot for PLUG Independent Music awards. Vote for us and help spread the word about SomaFM!

Check out Groove Salad's Taste of the Week Podcast, a short guide to new and interesting music on Groove Salad. 7-Dec-05

Groove Salad will be off the air for aprox 10 minutes at 7:30pm pacific (now) for a technical fix.

Singapore hangs Australian drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van. Is this really necessary? Singapore has executed more than 100 people for drug-related offenses since 1999, saying its tough laws and penalties are an effective deterrent against a crime that ruins lives. This barbaric response to drugs is not the solution. -Rusty 1-Dec-05

SomaFM is on the official ballot for PLUG Independent Music awards. Vote for us and help spread the word about SomaFM! 22-Nov-05

SomaFM is proud to be participating in alt.NPR, a series of podcast-only content distributed by National Public Radio, which includes "Groove Salad's Taste of the Week", a 5 minute weekly appetizer of new, rare and favorite tracks heard on Groove Salad. There is a direct iTunes link as well. 7-Nov-05

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at SomaFM. We have lots of things to be thankful this year, including all your past support. Here's a toast to you! 24-Nov-05

FOR A LIMITED TIME: Donate $50 and get a nice SomaFM tshirt! (Make sure you use the special tshirt donation link.)

Slim Devices came out with their new Squeezebox 3 which in our opinion is quite stylish *and* plays SomaFM broadcasts over their Squeeze Network. Now if they would just come out with a model that will work in the car!

The RIAA is trying to kill off internet radio again, proposing new rates that would cause SomaFM to have to pay $74,000.00 a month - almost a million dollars a year! - to broadcast. And this money won't go to the artists we play here on SomaFM, it will go to the statistically most popular artists. Evil, evil, evil. We'll post more as soon as we know more. 2-Nov-05

Our very dark, scary, goth-industrial Soma Haunt stream is up for Halloween. 26-Oct-05

Rest in peace, Rosa Parks. Your courage and conviction sparked a revolution and made the world a better place. 25-Oct-05

If you love SomaFM, please support our station with a $25 or more donation and keep the commercial free music flowing! We have a big royalty payment coming up soon could really use your support right now. 14-Oct-05

October 13th 2005 is the date of the the first John Peel Day. While we don't usually like to promote other radio stations :-) we without hesitation send love and respect to the late John Peel, an amazing man who did so much for music in our lifetimes. 13-Oct-05

It's Fleet Week here in San Francisco, so we have to say hi to all our Sailor friends who are in town! 6-Oct-05

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, wants to outlaw P2P networks, saying the US Government must enact stronger enforcement measures. "If we don't stop it," she said, "it's going to destroy these intellectual property industries." If you live in California, contact Senator Feinstein and let her know how you feel about this! SomaFM supports artist rights, but Feinstein is only interested in protecting the copyright monopolies of the large entertainment companies and not about protecting the fair use rights of citizens! 30-Sep-05

Score one for the people! The RIAA sues another person over P2P sharing, only Candy Chan, mom of the accused doesn't give in and settles, but fights it in court, and wins!. Way to go Candy! Respect from SomaFM for standing up for your rights! 28-Sep-05

The RIAA is up to it again. Now they want to stop you from recording digital radio, including internet radio and satellite and the new digital FM broadcasts as well. That's right. The RIAA is trying to to sneak a provision into a bill about digital television transition that would allow the FCC to impose home copy protection provisions on digital radio, something the FCC doesn't have the authority to do, and has never proposed doing. Americans: write to your representatives online and ask them too oppose this bill or else remove the provisions applying to digital radio.

It's big, Italian, and pink. You gotta love the giant bunny: a 200-foot-long toy rabbit lies on the side of the 5,000 foot high Colletto Fava mountain in northern Italy's Piedmont region. 25-Sep-05

If you love SomaFM and haven't supported us lately, please support the station with a $25 or more donation and keep the commercial free music flowing!

Happy Love Parade San Francisco! 24-Sep-05

Want SomaFM in your car? Well very soon, Groove Salad comes to National Public Radio. The catch is you'll need a radio in your car that supports HD Radio, the digital FM radio format that is being rolled out across the US. HD Radio allows stations to broadcast "secondary" channels with completely different content. In the case of many NPR stations, they'll be broadcasting full time music channels on this secondary channel, and we're really excited to be a part of this. 24-Sep-05

Indie Pop Rocks music director/dj Elise will be spinning a night of indie rock in San Francisco, Wednesday, September 21th 9pm to close at The Casanova Bar - 527 Valencia Street, San Francisco just a couple blocks from the 16th street BART station. As always, "cheap pool, good beer, no cover". She'll also be handing out some SomaFM stickers - so make sure you ask! 21-Sep-05

Some of our 128k relay servers were down in the last hour due to a hardware failure, they're back up now. Sorry for the unexpected interruption. 2:30pm pacific, 20-Sep-05

We now have both a Kornfabulator Widget (thanks Doug!) and a SomaFM OSX Widget (thanks Dan!), so you can get your widget fix and your Soma fix at the same time.

Thanks to Doug Papenthien, SomaFM now has a neat new Kornfabulator Widget that among other things, launches our streams directly and has an automatic adjustment of play times to your local time zone. Check it out. Thanks Doug!

We're back from Burning Man (we'll have some pictures up soon) and wanted to say hi to everyone who stopped by our camp and brought us trinkets and goodies. It was great meeting everyone, and it was amazing how many friends of SomaFM we met in "real life". Also, a big up to Elise who stayed back in San Francisco to watch over the station - when our (soon to be former) web hosting provider accidentally pulled the network plug on SomaFM.com, she came to the rescue and got the site back on the air. 5-Sep-05

Our hearts go our to our friends in the South - especially New Orleans and the surrounding areas - hit so hard by Hurricane Katrina. 1-Sep-05

Yes, some of us will be at Burning Man, we'll be near 2 o'clock and Amnesia, look for the SomaFM sign and our cute little Drone Dome (which will has an ambient sound installation). We'll be broadcasting Groove Salad, Drone Zone and Secret Agent on the playa. Stop by and visit us, and we'll give you some SomaFM stickers.

A sad note: On Aug 21, 2005, one of the pioneers of and a name synonymous with electronic music, Bob Moog, passed away. Thanks Bob for all the incredible tools you brought us for making music. You were a real innovator.

We did a quick server update tonight which interrupted the streams around 9:45 pm pacific time, but all is back up now. Sunday night, 21-Aug-05

SomaFM gets San Francisco Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay Award for "Best Way to Avoid the Top 40"! Thanks so much!

Our aacPlus and 3GPP streams are back on the air. And if you happen to have a Sprint Samsung A800 phone, check out our 3GPP streams in aacPlus on your stereo headphones. I think you'll be blown away at how good your phone can sound. And you can even plug the phone into an adapter for your car stereo, and have SomaFM on the road with you!

Thanks to Dan, we now have a SomaFM OSX Widget that shows the now playing and has a fast link to listen to the stations. Thanks Dan!

If you're wondering why SomaFM is not podcasting, this article explains the legal issues we are trying to deal with.

This recent payola scandal made me realize the reason most big corporate radio stations suck so much is they're not picking their music based on how good it is, they're picking their music based on how much the big labels are paying them. That's just wrong, and I'm glad to see that the NY Attorney General going after them for doing this.

A couple of times record labels have sent us money along with CDs they were promoting - I was so offended that we tossed those CDs in the trash, took the money and bought some really good CDs from the local record store to play instead!

If you caught any of Live 8 last weekend, you hopefully saw the amazing performance by Pink Floyd, and if you didn't, AOL has video of Breathe live available, it's a great performance by some of the most influential musicians of all time.

Our hearts go out to all our friends in London who have been injured in the terrible attacks today. I don't know what else to say, it's a terrible thing and it's extremely sad to see the world in this kind of state. 7-Jul-05

If you love SomaFM and haven't supported us lately, please support the station with a $20 or more donation and keep the commercial free music flowing!

Happy Independence Day America! "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it." -- Learned Hand. 4-Jul-05

Having a party this weekend? Hook your computer to the stereo and let SomaFM be your personal DJ. Your friends will be impressed with your fine selection of music. A great party vibe starts with great music. (And don't forget to dim the lights!)

Grokster loses Supreme Court Case, producers of Internet file-sharing software could be held liable if their products are used primarily to download copyrighted movies and music from the Internet. 27-Jun-05

A shout out to everyone at SF Pride 2005! 26-Jun-05

Our studio move went very well, here's what we did: we took all the playout systems (the machines that playback the songs, process the audio, encode the streams) to a "colo" data center where they'll have super phat connections to the internet and our stream relays. They also are in a building that's designed to withstand a 7.5 earthquake with no damage (it's build on giant rollers), has great continuous power and generators for extended power outages, and is an overall much better to keep the equipment than in the old basement.

We run it all by remote control, so if out internet connection goes down at the basement HQ the playout systems will run on autopilot until our network connection returns. Normally, our network at the basement studio doesn't go out completely, it just gets flakey and somewhat unreliable - it will still work for remote controlling the playout systems. I'm sure this is probably much more than you really needed to know but I mostly wanted to let you know everything we're doing to continually make SomaFM better. --Rusty 26-Jun-05

We are having problems with the net connection to the studio, which is causing skipping and re-buffering. We will have to take most of the stations off the air for a while on Saturday (today) to reconfigure things to work around the problem. Sorry about this. Everything should be running well again by Monday at the latest.

A power outage at Equinix Chicago where some of the SomaFM servers live knocked Secret Agent off the air, as well as everything but the 128k MP3 feeds. Services are being restored now, and should be all back shortly. 10pm pacific, 25-Jun-05

If you love SomaFM and haven't supported us lately, please support the station with a $20 or more donation and keep the commercial free music flowing!

Groove Salad, Indie Pop Rocks and Secret Agent are now on your 3GPP mobile phones! In the US, if you have Sprint's service with a Sanyo MM-7400, MM-5600 or Samsung MMA700 you can receive our 3GPP broadcasts now. In the rest of the world, any late model 3GPP compliant phone that supports aacPlus should work. And phones that run Windows Mobile will stream our Windows Media streams, and Treo users with Pocket Tunes can stream our 56k MP3 streams.

Happy Summer from all of us at SomaFM! 21-Jun-05

SomaFM needs your financial support to keep our commercial free broadcasts on the air. Won't you please help us out with a $25 or more donation? Less than one in 100 of our listeners financally support the station, it would mean a lot to us if you did!

We updated some servers tonight, if your stream bookmarks aren't working, make sure you're using the links from here. 17-Jun-05

We've been doing a lot of upgrades at SomaFM, we're now streaming in more formats than ever. We are one of the first online stations to stream to 3GPP mobile phones. We were also one of the first stations streaming with aacPlus for high quality without using up all your bandwidth. But we can't be all about firsts- so now we're one of the last stations to finally start offering our streams in Windows Media Player formats (in addition to all the other formats). We want to make SomaFM as accessible as possible!

SomaFM's DJ Elise from Indie Pop Rocks will be spinning Wednesday, June 15th in San Francisco at The Casanova Bar, 527 Valencia Street (near 16th) from 9PM - close. "Good Beer, Cheap Pool, ask for Glimmercat".

A server outage has caused our our 24kb MP3 and 56kb MP3 streams, our aacPlus streams and our 3GPP phone streams to be offline from 12:45pm until 2pm pacific 3-Jun-05

SomaFM gets a nice mention in the Village Voice's Web Radio Picks! Check it out!

Listener stats are messed up right now, not all servers are reporting in... so only about 1/6th of our listeners are showing up in the stats. (I just post this so you won't think something is wrong!)

We've switched some of our servers around, so we should have some better capacity on most of our channels. Make sure you're using the links from our site, as your Winamp bookmarks may be out of date. 25-May-05

SomaFM needs your financial support to keep our commercial free broadcasts on the air. Won't you please help us out with a $25 or more donation? Less than one in 100 of our listeners financally support the station, it would mean a lot to us if you did!

A fascinating graphical history of sampling. If you're always trying to guess the sample, you'll like this site. 9-May-05

Business 2.0 magazine thingks that no one needs online radio, and they go on to mention that "Online radio hasn't entered the mainstream consciousness, and it is shaping up as a technology trend whose time has come and gone without anyone even noticing it." Aren't we lucky we're not part of the mainstream?!! 30-Apr-05

After a month off for SXSW, Elise and Rosemary will be throwing down all your favorite new and classic indie tracks this Wednesday night, April 20th, at the Casanova in San Francisco (on Valencia near 16th). And gosh, how'd we'd love to see YOU. Come on by, have a beer, and say hi, okay?

Throughout April, Monday through Friday at 1pm Pacific time (20:00 GMT), Indie Pop Rocks will be featuring interviews we did at South by Southwest in March.

Rusty will be speaking at the Summit on Internet Radio in Las Vegas (during NAB) Tuesday afternoon, April 19th, 2:30-6pm, at the Bellagio Hotel. If you're going to be in Vegas for NAB stop by and say hi.

Drone Zone's 56k feed has plenty of capacity again. (New server online)

Our friends at Roku are selling their SoundBridge Network Audio player which will give you access to SomaFM without using your computer! Just plug it into the DSL line and go!

Teen sentenced to 3 months in jail for possession of pirated MP3s and movies. Meanwhile, my car gets broken into multiple times and the cops are to busy to even take a police report when I call.

Goodbye, and thanks for all the wonderful music Martin Denny... the father of the Tiki Lounge "Exotica" movement passed away in his sleep at home in Hawaii at 93. He was a great inspiration to us, and we feature a lot of his music on Secret Agent. 7-Mar-05

In case you haven't seen it, our friends at Roku are now selling their SoundBridge Network Audio player which will give you access to SomaFM without using your computer! This is probably the coolest "network tuner" we've seen.

Don't forget Tag's Trance Trip when you want to dance or need some high energy music! (Soon we'll redesign the front page so Tag's isn't way at the bottom.)

Pam Bricker Dies at age 50, best known for her vocal work for Thievery Corporation. We'll miss her voice. (Too many great people have died lately, it's kind of depressing. I report it here because I don't want them to be forgotten.) 27-Feb-05

Jef Raskin, father of the Apple Macintosh, has died. Jef was a brilliant user interface designer and inspired so much of contemporary computer operating system design. Thank's for everything Jef, we'll miss you.

Groove Salad aacPlus stream back. Groove Salad had about 15 minutes of downtime this evening but is back on the air now. Indie Pop Rocks 24k stream is also back on the air. 26-Feb-05

We'll miss you, Hunter S. Thompson. You always said you wanted to choose the time of your passing. Still it's really sad to see you go. 20-Feb-05

Thanks to Matt at emit records for sending us some great new stuff including the new Gel-Sol 1104 release now playing on Groove Salad and Drone Zone.

Got XM or Sirius and want to hear SomaFM on it? Contact them and ask for it, that's the only way it's going to happen. For XM, use their online request form or call 1-800-967-2346. For Sirius customers, email genfeedback@sirius-radio.com or call 1-888-539-7474.

Indie Pop Rocks now streams in CD Quality 64kb aacPlus as well as 128k MP3. If you have WinAmp 5.04 or later, or VLC 0.8.1 or newer (Mac, PC, Linux) you should check out this new format - it really sounds good and saves a ton of bandwidth!

Cliqhop is back working properly, Indie Pop aacPlus servers updated - make sure you use the link from this page and not an outdated bookmark. Beat Blender 128k working properly, Beat Blender 24k will be back tomorrow. 6-Jan-05 2:40pm pacific time

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Thanks for making 2004 an incredible year for SomaFM. Here's to a great 2005!

We're updating the systems for Indie Pop Rocks and Cliqhop, you might hear some glitches tonight. 1am pacific time.

Looks like we got the network problems fixed. Yet another Netgear switch died. Mind you this was a fancy rack mount professional one... not some cheap thing. Netgear stuff sucks... it fails so much I can't believe it. 29-Dec-04

Our hearts go out to all the victims of the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami that hit Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, India and others. 27-Dec-04

Cliqhop has a new server, and is running quite reliably now. 26-Dec-04

Merry Christmas everyone. We're going to ignore the email and the IM, queue up a long set of songs, light up a "yule log" and just relax with our friends for the next 48 hours. -- Christmas Eve, 24-Dec-04

Xmas in Frisko, our irreverent annual holiday broadcast, has returned. Also in 24k MP3 so you can listen when you're at the parents and they only have dialup!

New server for Cliqhop is much more reliable and won't be dropping out like the old one.

(We just added more capacity for Xmas in Frisko 128k so if you were having trouble connecting before, you should be able to get on now!)

SomaFM welcome's Tag's Trance Trip, a journey into Progressive House and Trance. (The good trance, not that bad trance!)

We're back on the air after Monday morning's outage. We have a temporary replacement server in place now and all is working fine. 29-Nov-04

STUDIO OUTAGE: a hardware failure at our main studio has most stations temporarily off the air. It is taking longer to fix than anticipated, sorry. (Beat Blender and Tag's Trance not affected.) 29-Nov-04

We have lots more capacity on Indie Pop Rocks 128k now... so you shouldn't have any problem listening during peak hours anymore! (And remember, tell all your friends to listen too!) 18-Nov-04

Elise from SomaFM will be presenting a night of indie rock in San Francisco tonight, Wednesday, November 17th 9pm to close at The Casanova Bar - 527 Valencia Street, San Francisco just a couple blocks from the 16th street BART station. As always, "cheap pool, good beer, no cover".

Drone Zone reliability problems have been solved, and you should have no more problems staying connected.

Dropping problems should be gone now and all channels are working well.

SomaFM welcomes Tag's Trance Trip to our family! Because sometimes you want to dance before you chill.

All streams are working properly and at full capacity, including 56k and 24k streams. Don't forget about the Groove Salad aacPlus feed if you're running WinAmp 5.04 or Foobar2000. (Now listening numbers are still being under-reported due to a problem with the statistics server).

SomaFM has been very unreliable lately and it sucks. Tonight, we started deploying some new servers, at some different ISPs, and will be transitioning to the new servers over the next few days. I personally apologize to you all for the poor streaming we've been providing lately, we are working on making things better. --Rusty

We're now running the latest Orban Opticodec-PC aacPlus stream that works with WinAmp 5.04 and Foobar2000 for Windows. Give it a listen and then tell us what you think! You've never heard a 48k stream sound this good. Mac users, tell Apple to support "HE-AAC" streaming in iTunes!

Our friend Ian Rhett has a great new song which is really approriate for the US Presidential debates happening tonight. It's a great song. (WARNING: "strong liberal content") 30-Sep-04

Groove Salad's 128k feed now working at full capacity again. 11am Pacific time, 14-Sep-04

Americans: Major record labels and movie studios are trying to get congress to pass ia law that will restrict your ability to make recordings of radio and television (and even of your own records!). Take part in a call-in day to Congress on September 14 to oppose this new legislation!

Beat Blender is back on the air after a temporary outage. 23-Aug-04

Oops, we did it again. A studio upgrade didn't go as planned, and Groove Salad was off the air from 7:30am this morning until 11am pacific. It's back on the air now, sorry for everyone who didn't get their Groove Salad fix this morning. 18-Aug-04

We performed some upgrades to equipment at our studio this weekend, and this should have reduced any skipping and dropouts that have been occurring!

Americans: Disney wants the FCC to regulate all devices capable of recording from any audio broadcasting medium or from the Internet. FM radio, XM, Sirius, Streamripper, Total Recorder, and others are all the targets.

Superfreak Rick James has passed away. He may be gone, but his influence lives on. 6-Aug-04

We will miss you, Piero Piccioni, but your music will continue to live on Secret Agent. SomaFM is happy that we could expose more people to your awesome music. 24-Jul-04

You can listen to Groove Salad on Live365 if you're having problems with our normal 128k feed.

There are some technical problems on the 128k Groove Salad feed currently, 56k feed is available. Secret Agent 128k has reduced capacity (350 listeners max). 7-Jul-04

The internet is a little choppy this morning, we're seeing random dropped connections and skipping on some of the channels. 6:30am 6-Jul-04

Happy 4th of July weekend America. SomaFM wishes peace, liberty and freedom for all.

There is a nice article in the San Francisco Chronicle about SomaFM today! 30-Jun-04

Some problems on the internet are currently affecting lots of our servers... making them unreachable at times. The problem becan at 7:30pm pacific time and should be cleared up in a few hours. UPDATE 11:30pm Pacific- all feeds except Groove Salad 128k are running properly. 27-Jun-04

Earlier Problems today with Groove Salad have been resolved. We have a new server on order that won't have these crashing problems. 10:30am pacific 16-Jun-04

Farewell, Ray Charles. We will miss you but your music and influence will live on forever. 10-Jun-04

If you are using Windows Media Player and are having problems connecting, try using WinAmp or iTunes instead.

If you are using Windows Media Player and are having problems connecting, try using WinAmp or iTunes instead.

XMMS users: if you're getting 404 errors, make sure that "icecast/shoutcast streaming metadata" is enabled in the XMMS preferences and the problem will go away.

Happy May Day, and a warm welcome to the European Union's 10 new members: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta 1-May-04

The RIAA is trying to restrict recording of digital radio now, and are going as far as asking the government to force hardware manufacturers to add a "buy button" to all digital radio receivers. I am shocked by the RIAA's arrogance and greed. Next you know, they'll want a tax on everyone who hums a song.

Next week (April 19th - 25th 2004) is National TV Turn Off Week in the USA. The goal is to not watch TV all week, and instead do other things, ideally listening to SomaFM in the process!

Beatblender 128k is back, make sure you use the links from our front page as we've had to move its server. 24k stream will be back on Monday. 4:55pm pacific 16-Apr-04

Beatblender is temporarily down due to some server issues. Hopefully back up in the next hour. 3:52pm pacific 16-Apr-04

MILESTONE: SomaFM reached over 7000 listeners at the same time today, at 12:32:07 PST. Thank you so much for helping our station grow. We love you! 31-Mar-04

If you haven't heard, em:t records is back. They're a pioneering label in the ambient electronic genre, and we play a lot of their music including several tracks off their latest release. 26-Mar-04

Powerfailure at the studio! We'll be off until the power is back. Sorry! 9:40pm pacific 26-Mar-04

We had to do some unplanned server restarts tonight, so if you can't get on, wait 10 minutes and try again. 18-Mar-04 11:20pm pacific

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Elise will be spinning indie pop tonight in San Francisco at The Casanova Bar, 527 Valencia Street (near 16th) from 9PM - close. If you don't wear green, you might get pinched. 17-Mar-04

Our hearts go out to our friends in Madrid after today's horrible bombings. 11-Mar-04

It's time to REPEAL THE DMCA. First the DMCA is used to make internet broadcasters pay huge royalties to record companies. Now it's being used to keep you from making backup copies of your DVDs! At this rate, consumers will soon be unable to make copies of anything. Goodbye to Fair Use!

I just have to share this: the 10 worst album covers of all time. - rusty

SomaFM is always looking for good new music. If you are an artist or label and think your music would fit on any of our channels, send it to us! Signed or unsigned, if it's good we'll play it.

We're back now, but at 2:40pm pacific a power failure at the studio has taken us off the air for over 20 minnutes. (More accurately, power failure combined with a defective UPS caused this.) 2-Feb-04

The RIAA is cracking down on DJ mix CDs and is confiscating mix CDs from independent record stores across the US. 25-Jan-03

Happy New Year! Thank you for making 2003 an amazing year for us. More people than we ever dreamed of are listening to SomaFM and we have YOU to thank for it. We all raise a toast to you and your good taste in radio stations!

There is a big storm in San Francisco right now, we've already had one power outage but if we get any more, our power backup system may not last long enough. So if we're off the air, that's why. 1-Jan-2004

Merry Christmas from all of us at SomaFM from Rusty, Merin, Elise, Shawn, and Roy. SomaFM Loves You! 25-Dec-03

And we sincerely hope everyone gets what they want for Christmas.

MILESTONE: SomaFM reached over 6000 concurrent listeners for the first time today at 11:25:08 PST - no doubt the popularity of our Xmas in Frisco stream helped this! Thanks for listening and spreading the word. 15-Dec-03

Fellow San Franciscans- REMEMEBR TO VOTE TODAY, December 9th! You can find your polling place here (thanks to the League of Women Voters).

This is a very important election that will set the direction of the city for years to come. If you don't vote, you won't have any input to what happens in the future. PLEASE VOTE! And if you're not near your polling place and still want to vote, you can always request a "provisional ballot" - it's like an absentee ballot but you don't have to get it ahead of time. Even if you're not sure if you are registered, you can request a provisional ballot - the department of elections will then determine if you are registered and if you are will count your vote. YOU HAVE NO EXCUSES NOT TO VOTE!

Happy Holidays! Once again, Xmas in Frisko, our irreverent holiday channel is on the air. 24k Stream also available. 30-Nov-03 -->

Brief outage tonight from 23:35 pacific 29-Nov-03, everything back at 00:40 30-Nov-03. A Netgear switch at our studio died.

Happy Thanksgiving! SomaFM is thankful for you and all our other listeners, and all the support and good words that you give us. -- Rusty, Merin, Elise, Roy and Shawn. 27-Nov-03

We restarted the Groove Salad 128k servers because they were acting up this morning. 25-Nov-03

If you were having trouble accessing Groove Salad this morning, it should be fixed now. 9:15am Pacific 24-Nov-03

Drone Zone and Secret Agent 128k streams are back at full capacity. Make sure you use the links from our site, as the locations have changed. (Your old bookmarks may not work.) 20-Nov-03

Indie Pop Rocks music director Elise (aka DJ Glimmercat) will be spinning Wednesday nite Nov 19th in San Francisco at The Casanova Bar, 527 Valencia Street (near 16th) from 9PM - close. "Good beer, cheap pool, no cover!"

Some of our streaming servers have been moved (hence the problems in the last 36 hours). Drone Zone 128k has extremely limited capacity for the next day, Secret Agent has somewhat reduced capacity as well (128k opnly). Make sure you use the listen links from this site, not your bookmarks as they have changed. 14-Nov-03

MILESTONE: We hit 5000 concurrent listeners today at 11:40:50 PDT! Thank you all for your support in spreading the word! 22-Oct-03

We will miss you, Elliot Smith. Your legend will live on. 22-Oct-03

Drone Zone 128k stream running at greatly reduced capacity until we get the large repeater fixed. 18-Oct-03

Fellow San Francisco broadcster San Francisco Liberation Radio raided by the FCC. Big Media corporations win again. 17-Oct-03

The network is a little rough today, we're seeing lots of rebuffering and dropouts. Sorry! 14-Oct-03

DJ Danfuzz (Drone Zone) will be doing a midnight set at 26 Mix in San Francisco tonight (Monday). There will also be chilled grooves starting at 10pm with Mike Wertheim and Roxnadz. 13-Oct-03

Thanks to some hard work by Elise tonight, we have all the song titles on Indie Pop Rocks fixed so they display correctly now. 9-Oct-03

There was an unknown problem affecting many of our channels at 5pm pacific, but things are back now. 2-Oct-03

There was a network outage again today at 1pm pacific, and it is now working again. We like to be open and tell you about everything we know, even if it makes us seem like we have lots of outages. 23-Sep-03

Things are back to normal. A telecommunications outage cut off our main streaming server from the rest of the internet at approximately 5:45pm pacific, and was restored at 7:30pm. Things have been crazy the last few days here with all the network problems... hopefully things will calm down for a while finally. 17-Sep-03

WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES: Some days are not so great. We finally got our studio network connection working properly, but now our main streaming server (which feeds all the others) is off the air for an unknown reason as of aprox 6pm pacific time. We hope to get this resolved soon. Beat Blender is unaffected however, it comes from a different server. All other channels are down though. Sorry! 17-Sep-03

All streaming servers are working properly, and our ISP reports that they have fixed the problems with out studio connection. 17-Sep-03

Here's what our ISP is telling us about our network problems: "We have been having problems with our SFO router and border routers for a few weeks now. Coinsedentally, the fix is scheduled for this evening's maintenance window. We are completely replacing and upgrading the hardware at this location. This is an effort to eliminate all of the packet loss occuring and to perform a necessary network upgrade." 16-Sep-03

UPDATED UPDATE: everything except Drone Zone 128k working mostly as of 11:45am pacific time, 16-Sep-03 - BUT now we're seeing problems again. Beat Blender not affected. 1:45pm pacific 16-Sep-03

Beat Blender 24k stream is back (in addition to the 128k stream).

Current stream problems: Drone Zone 128k at ultra minimum capacity, our main repeater is malfunctioning and we are investigating. There are interruptions on other channels as well, the ISP that provides the bandwidth at our studio is having network problems still. Much better than yesterday, but still annoying. We continue to work on it. 16-Sep-03

We're having some unknown network problems today causing streams to drop from time to time. 15-Sep-03

We'll miss you Johnny Cash: the American music legend passed away at his home Friday morning. His music will live on forever. 12-Sep-03

Beatblender's server had a hard drive crash. A replacement has been ordered, and we hope to have it back sometime on Friday. (Sorry!) 11-Sep-03

More capacity added to Groove Salad 56k and 24k streams, and to Secret Agent 56k stream. (These have been filling up daily, hopefully now everyone who wants to listen can!) 9-Sep-03

Rest in Peace: Warren Zevon finally gets some sleep. We'll miss him, but never forget him. He died at his home on 7-Sep-2003.

Elise from SomaFM will be presenting a night of indie rock with DJ Rock Foxy and Glimmercat (aka rosemary and elise!) Tuesday, September 9th (tonight!) 9pm to close at The Casanova Bar - 527 Valencia Street, San Francisco just a couple blocks from the 16th street BART station.

Indie Pop Rocks had a glitch around 11:30am Pacific but is back at full capacity. 9-Sep-03

The SomaFM crew is back from Burning Man. We really loved meeting everyone who came by to say hi to us! 2-Sep-03

Greetings from the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. The satellite internet wasn't working reliably until today, so we couldn't send you any updates or pictures. But we're really loved meeting everyone who came by to say hi to us!

Also, Indie Pop Rocks is silent because we're all out here in the desert, and apparently one of the cats walked on the keyboard for the computer that plays the indie pop stream, and hit the pause button... We'll be back Monday night and have it fixed then.

Once again, SomaFM will be at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada this week (between 26-Aug and 1-Sep-03). However, we will not be able to broadcast over the air this year because of enforcement actions by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), who have stated that they will confiscate all equipment and fine ($10,000 a day!) any unlicensed micropower broadcasters. Sadly, the company that produces the Burning Man event has made a deal with the FCC to permit only one FM station (their Burning Man Information Radio station).

We will be camped at 9:30 and Esplanade and will be playing chilled grooves in our camp, so come on by for a cocktail in the evening.

We are now done with studio maintenance today, so channels are all back online now. Sunday, 8pm pacific 24-Aug-03

We were having some server problems this morning, but restarted everything in the hopes that would fix things. 18-Aug-03

Shoutout to our friends on the East Coast who are without power still. We hope you're hanging with friends and having as good of a time as you can. We saw about 1000 people "tune out" a little after 1pm pacific today so we knew something big was up. 14-Aug-03

Network problems from earlier this week have been resolved (hopefully for good). 12-Aug-03

Network reliability problems continue to annoy us. We haven't been able to isolate the problem yet, but we continue to work on it. It's mostly a problem in the mornings (Pacific time). 11-Aug-03

We have discontinued the Windows Media feed of Groove Salad for a while, because there were never more than 40 people using it (and it was costing a lot to provide it through Abacast). In the future, we may add RealAudio format and AACplus. 8/7/03

Fans of Big Url: Sorry but he is no longer available for working with us at SomaFM. We have some old recordings of him, but sadly, he's gone.

UPDATE: Last nights network problems are partially resolved and the Drone Zone 128k feed is now working properly. (Thanks Tom!) But there are still some problems with the ISP at the studio causing dropouts. 1:00 pm Pacific, 6-Aug-03

The network is choppy tonight, causing some skipping and rebuffering. Sorry about that, we're looking into the problems. 7:30pm 5-Aug-03

Artists & Labels: you can submit your music for consideration for airplay. We are playing lots of independent and small label artists now, we might play yours too!

The network outage affecting San Francisco and our studios has been resolved, and we're back on the air. 16-Jul-03

Things are working again. Thanks for your patience! 15-Jul-03

We finally repaired most of the problems from our server crash this weekend, including the problem with the links to the streams now working on many browsers and the bouncing mail problems... so resend any messages you may have sent us this weekend if you haven't gotten a reply yet. 10am Pacific, 14-Jul-03

A hard disk failed on our web server, so we had to switch over to a backup. We're cheap and can't afford those fancy fault-tolerant systems, so sorry for the downtime. We had to go back to last weeks backup, so there is some missing posts in news and the guestbooks. 13-Jul-03.

On Saturday, July 5th, we'll be heading down to San Francisco's RedEye Lounge to help T Spigot celebrate the release of their new Water Music release, Experiments in The Hypnotic Production of Crime. Oh, and it's also Rusty's birthday, so come down and buy him a drink.

Those annoying people at the RIAA now want to start hassling people even more. It's not enough that they've forced internet radio stations to pay thousands of dollars a year to them, they're now suing individuals who use file sharing programs.

Drone Zone's 128k feed is back again at full capacity (a few problems today and yesterday were causing it to have limited capacity). 24-Jun-03

Have no fear, we are not moving away from our MP3 streams. But there are lots of people who can't access MP3 streams due to corporate firewalls, and they can receive the Windows Media streams. Also, the Windows Media streams sound better for modem users (32kb). It's all about more choice for you, and making SomaFM available to a wider audience.

Lots of additional capacity on Indie Pop Rocks - thanks to aarong for setting this up!! We also have some more capacity on Cliqhop thanks to Brent! 11-Jun-03

Additional capacity has been added to Indie Pop Rocks. 20-May-03

Listener counts are off for Groove Salad, Drone Zone and Secret Agent - the 128k streams aren't in the statistics right now but they are broadcasting just fine. 19-May-03

We had to kick the Drone Zone server, it got stuck for some reason. (hey, we run this on a shoestring budget... we can't afford the expensive stuff that Clear Channel can!) 10:30am Pacific time, 15-May-03

If you can't connect to a channel initially, try clicking on it again. We've noticed that some players don't always connect the first time.

All repeaters are working well now. Thanks to Tom for working on this!

Why we love San Francisco. It's the only place we could make SomaFM happen!

Drone Zone 128k is still having problems today, one of the repeaters is being flaky. Sorry, we're still working on it. 10-May-03

Secret Agent's 128k MP3 stream now has a bunch of added capacity, thanks to Tom and the nice folks at Shoutcast.com. (These are the same people who bring you WinAmp. Thanks guys!)

Our network problems that were occurring 1-May-03 from 10am-8pm pacific time are now solved. The culprit: a spammer was bombarding our mailserver at the studio with tens of thousands of spams to addresses that didn't exist. Our mailserver bounced these messages and the traffic was so high that it caused all sorts of problems and dropped connections to our servers. Our solution is to move the mail server off of that line and onto a dedicated connection. Sorry for all the problems today! 1-May-03

We've been having problems with the network connection from the Studio to the internet - starting around 10:30am pacific time this morning. Covad is looking into it, and it will hopefully be fixed soon. In the meantime, there will be lots of skipping and rebuffering... sorry! 1-May-03

Artists & Labels: you can submit your music for consideration for airplay. We are playing lots of independent and small label artists now, we might play yours too!

We continue to have problems with one of our servers, which is mostly affecting Beat Blender. We are working on it! (It's a long story, the original server's hard disk crashed, we rebuilt a new server, but have run into software problems.) 15-Apr-03

Americans: Happy Tax Day! Remember to get those tax returns filed by midnight, and listen to SomaFM while you're filling out the paperwork! 15-Apr-03

We are running an experimental Peercast stream of Secret Agent. Download Peercast, and give it a listen. 14-Apr-03

We're having a problem with one of our servers, Beatblender is mostly affected, and some other streams have less capacity. 2:48PDT 11-Apr-03

Cleaned up the HTML on the site to make it W3C compliant (thanks Wade for the help!) and also changed the fonts to that they're now resizable in your browser. 7-Apr-03

We've improved the song history pages, many artists are now linked to Amazon.com for more info. We are continuing to improve this, but for now you will find that the song details are much improved! No fooling! 1-Apr-03

SomaFM is your oasis away from the stress of everyday life.

Our website ISP is having some network routing problems today, so there will be sporadic web site outages... but try again in 15 seconds and it will be accessible again. 1-Apr-03

Our studio is off-air again, there is another network outage in San Francisco. Sorry! And thanks to our unknown neighbor for their wireless connection that we can get this update to you! 3pm pst 20-Mar-03

If you are in San Francisco, there is a really cool event happening this Tuesday (25-Mar-03) that you should go to: a benefit for Tim North, the creator of the Hoverdrum, who has been diagnosed with stomach cancer. This is a fundraiser to raise some cash for Tim to cover his medical expenses. And on top of that, it will be an amazing event. Check it out.

Yesterday's network problems seem mostly cleared up, hopefully we won't have any more today! 20-Mar-03

Our studio continues to have network problems, but our ISP Speakeasy is working on it. The result is that there is lots of skipping and rebuffering, and frankly it's really hard to listen to the streams right now. UPDATE: Speakeasy says that this is a router issue they're working with. FURTHER UPDATE: it's been fixed as of 1am PST 20-Mar-03

Many streams are experiencing skipping right now, we are looking into the problem, but it seems to be a west coast network problem. 19-Mar-03

Because so many people have been asking: no we will not send you MP3s. Musicians work hard to produce the music we play, the least you can do is go buy the CDs from the tracks you like!

No commercials. No venture capital. No path to profitability. Just great music you won't hear on the corporate FM dial, all thanks to your support. SomaFM loves you!

We had a network outage at our studio, and most streams were down from 5:45pst to 6:4-pst. Everything is back now. 17-Mar-03

It's a stormy weekend here in San Francisco, but we hope the weather is nicer where you are. If we go off the air for any reason, it means there must have been a large power outage here. 14-Mar-03

We're having a momentary technical problem- should be fixed in the next 5 minutes. Sorry! 2:45pm PST 12-Mar-03

Thanks to everyone for coming out Monday night, we had a blast. Oh, and in case you're wondering, Big Url is on vacation. He'll be back Tomorrow. 11-Mar-03

Teknoel made us some new animated desktops for Mac OSX that are quite cool. thanks Noel! 6-Mar-03

MILESTONE: Today, at 10:20am, SomaFM.com hit over 4000 concurrent listeners for the first time!!!! Thank you for spreading the word about SomaFM! 6-Mar-03

Some technical problems on the website this morning, the streams were not affected, but the web site was down from 5am-10am Pacific time. 4-Mar-03

Today is 03/03/03! We love dates like that.

I just wanted to say thanks again to everyone who has supported SomaFM lately. You are keeping us on the air when giant companies like Clear Channel are scaling down their web broadcasts. 16-Feb-03

Drone Zone is off the air from 6pm-7pm pacific time today for technical maintenance. 17-Feb-03

Happy Valentines Day Weekend! 14-Feb-03

SomaFM should be an essential part of any survival kit! 12-Feb-03

The problem with being a radio station with NO BUDGET is that you can't throw money at problems. We still are having a problem with some of the stream servers, which is mostly a router problem. We swapped out one set of hardware and are still seeing the issue. We are continuing to work this out. In a perfect world, we'd have a Cisco 3660 router and a fractional DS3 @ 5mbit/sec to feed the studio to the other servers. But that is really expensive... so we make do with what we have now and keep experimenting until it all works better. 11-Feb-03

Cliqhop is off the air for 48 hours due to technical issues. Same goes for all 24k feeds. Please bear with us while we isolate the problems. 11-Feb-03

Our ISP had a network outage from 8pm until 10:30pm PST tonight that put most of our channels off the air. We are back on now. We hope to get a backup net connection installed again soon! 10-Feb-03

There is a lot of skipping and rebuffering happening, one of our routers is acting up and we're getting a replacement for it within the next 24 hours hopefully. 10-Feb-03

Sunday's problems with the channels are fixed. Sorry for the downtime... of course it happened while the station was on autopilot and we were all out celebrating Elise's birthday party at Sub Lounge. It's really Jason and Adam's fault for mixing the drinks too strong and keeping them flowing too quickly... but what can you say, it was a birthday party for one of our best friends! Official blame should go to PG&E, San Francisco's power company. 9-Feb-03

We've been having some power problems at the studio and some of the streams have been down for a while. Working on getting them back up ASAP. 9-Feb-03

We're doing some network stuff at the studio, which may cause the streams to skip a bit for a while. Should be done by 3pm pacific, Sat 8-Feb-03.

Happy birthday to Elise, music director for Indie Pop Rocks! Happy birthday! We love you! 7-Feb-03

We've been working on some behind the scenes stuff, so I haven't had a lot of things to report lately. We're mostly working on a really improved playlist / now playing section, with links to buy the music you're listening to. The problem is that it takes a lot of work to get the database together for handling that... so it's taking a little while. But I just wanted to let you know what's happening. -Rusty 5-Feb-03

Secret Agent and Indie Pop Rocks are reaching capacity every day, we're looking to get more capacity for them. You can always try a couple times to connect, and also try the slower bandwidth streams which aren't as popular. 29-Jan-03

Future SomaFM plans update: We plan on bringing the Jazz channel back, the DnB channel, the Electro channel and the House Party. As soon as we finish paying off the RIAA, we will expand our program offerings again. Meanwhile, the SomaFM crew is busy working on more special programming that we think you'll really like. 26-Jan-03

More bandwidth for Drone Zone now... Groove Salad and Drone Zone now have lots of capacity. Thanks Tom! 22-Jan-03

Ok, so there is a big power outage in San Francisco... that's causing us some problems as several local ISPs are affected, and that's having a trickle down effect to us. 10:30pm PST 24-Jan-02

An interesting article on your fair use right to copy music and movies. It's a good article, worth reading. 17-Jan-03

We did a subtle facelift on the web site, and will be adding more features soon. 14-Jan-03

Onward into the new year! - 1-Jan-2003

Happy holidays from all of us at SomaFM!

Oh yeh, and Happy New Year too!!!! Sorry we don't have any special NYE broadcast planned, but Cliqhop will be returning early in 2003.

We're having a few network problems at the studio, so some of the streams are glitching. Should be fixed by midnight PST. 23-Dec-02

All our 128k streams (except Groove Salad) have been filling up, but we have really good sounding 56k streams that still have lots of capacity. So if your favorite channel is full (and you're getting errors connecting), try the 56k stream! 16-Dec-02

This afternoon's network issues have been resolved. 3:42pm Pacific Time 11-Dec-02

We're having a few network issues this afternoon, affecting our connection from the studio to the servers. Beatblender is unaffected (it comes from a different studio). 11-Dec-02

Cliqhop will return after the holidays. Additional capacity added to the Secret Agent 56k feed. If the 128k stream is full, try this one. 6-Dec-02

Wow, we overloaded our servers this morning (too many listeners on some of them), but we reconfigured things and all should be working correctly again. Sorry for the problems this morning! 2-Dec-02

Our grand re-opening is slughtly delayed - we've got 6 channels back up, and more are returning in the near future. Our new web site will be up soon. 30-Nov-02

There is some skipping and glitches right now, due to the fact that our studio to server connection is not as "fat" as it used to be (we downgraded it to save money while we were off the air).

As soon as we get our T1 and SDSL connections reinstalled at the studio, we'll put the more channels back on the air. Understand that we're not quite ready to return to the air as we were back in June because we're still re-installing our infrastructure. By the end of the month, just about everything should be back in place.

We're also planning a benefit concert and a few other things to help us raise money to cover the fee settlement.

It's all those letters, faxes and phone calls you made that got this law passed and enabled us to get back on the air! THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH! We couldn't have done this without you. 19-Nov-02

Our grand reopening is planned for Nov 30th, 2002.

HR5469 Passes the House and the Senate!!!! 15-Nov-02

Possible light on the horizon for our international listeners: we have received confirmation that at this time we will NOT have to pay CARP fees on our international listeners. We are looking into a way to restore our broadcasts to our international listeners. We are now testing several technical methods to implement outside the US only broadcasts. We will keep you posted. 4-Oct-02

Sign up for our mailing list to stay in touch, and to find out about future alternative ways to listen to SomaFM.

SomaFM loves you. We will miss you.

And for a limited time, you can get SomaFM T-shirts and stuff at the SomaFM Store.

From the Radio and Internet Newsletter: RAIN confirmed just minutes ago that HR 5469, the bill that proposed suspending webcasting royalty obligations for six months to allow the Net radio industry its court appeals, has been withdrawn without a vote. According to sources, the record industry and webcasters have agreed to hammer out a deal by Friday, which would become law and override the Librarian of Congress determination on webcasting royalties. 1-oct-02

Bad News - the deal with the RIAA has turned out to be a delaying tactic, and there is no hope in sight at this time. 1-Oct-02

URGENT! H.R. 5469 - Six-month moratorium on royalties - Vote in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, October 1st. (Introduced September 26th, 2002)

The House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., today introduced legislation, H.R. 5469, imposing a six-month moratorium on the unfair royalties we must pay for broadcasting. The bill will delay until April 20, 2003, the payments that webcasters would have been required to pay starting Oct. 20, 2002. If H.R. 5469 does not pass, there is little or no chance for us to win our appeal of the CARP ruling. HR 5469 will give the appeals court a chance to rule on the decision before the fees put almost all web broadcasters out of business.

Please Call your representative's office in Washington, DC! Here's how to do it, and what to say!

Here's some news about this:

• House Could Vote to Delay Net Broadcast Payments
• CNET: Bill could spare webcasters

Request for Appeal Filed - August 7, 2002

SomaFM and over 20 other net broadcasters have filed an appeal with the Copyright Office. Of course, the RIAA filed an appeal as well, saying that the CARP fees are too low. (We think that is a pretty greedy response from the RIAA.) More from News.com.

Good News - we're making progress with the RIAA. We are hoping to have a deal worked out in the next 4-8 weeks. As soon as we have the details, we'll let you know. 5-Sep-2002

There has been a response from the Librarian of Congress to the formal appeal that SomaFM and 20 other small webcasters filed with the appeals court a couple weeks ago:

"the Librarian of Congress filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals yesterday, arguing that webcasters who did not participate in the CARP are not "an aggrieved party who would be bound by the determination" and thus should not be allowed to file an appeal in court against his decision!"

The politics around the CARP decision get stranger and stranger all the time. Read more from the Radio and Internet Newsletter. 21-Aug-02

SomaFM at Burning Man!

Some good news for a change! SomaFM will be at Burning Man, the annual arts and culture festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. We'll be in the Irrational Geographic village, next to the Black Rock Coast Guard. In addition to our sound system, we'll be broadcasting on a micropower, FCC Part-15 approved FM transmitter at 102.3 FM. 9-Aug-02

Internet Radio Fairness Act introduced - July 29th, 2002

The Internet Radio Fairness Act has just been introduced to congress. If passed, this bill would allow SomaFM to return to the air. We need you to send a fax to your representatives asking them to support the Internet Radio Fairness Act. It will only take 3 minutes to fill out the form! We would also like you to call your representatives at their offices and ask them to support the Internet Radio Fairness Act as well. We need to bombard them with requests. Call them at their offices. Call them once a week. Tell your friends to do the same thing.

You can still help change the laws that have forced us off the air. Visit Save Internet Radio for more information on how to write your representatives. If the laws are changed, SomaFM can return to the air!!!

We could still use your financial support. We've spent mney on legal fees to file appeals, and have a lot of unpaid expenses from winding down the broadcasts. If you have listened to SomaFM over the last year and never donated, we could really use your help. Any amount helps. 7-Aug-02

The Internet Radio Fairness Act was introduced - this act will overturn the huge fees that have forced most small webcasters off the air. Click here to fax your representatives and voice support for this bill that if passed, will let SomaFM return to the net! 26-Jul-02

As of June 20th, 2002, SomaFM was forced to suspend our broadcasts or else pay well over $15,000 a month in royalties. We are sorry we had to do this, and continue to fight to restore our broadcasts.

The final decision on webcasting rates have been published on the Library of Congress's site. To say the results are disappointing is an understatement. While the rates were effectively cut in half, that still means that to stay on the air, SomaFM will have to pay about $500 a day in fees to the RIAA. Just to expose you to new music that you wouldn't hear anywhere else. Just to help you buy more records. Do they just not get it, or is the RIAA just greedy?

To quote from their announcement: The most significant difference between the CARP¹s determination and the Librarian¹s decision is that the Librarian has abandoned the CARP¹s two-tiered rate structure of 0.14¢ per performance for ³internet-only² transmissions and 0.07¢ for each retransmission of a performance in an AM/FM radio broadcast, and has decided that the rate of 0.07¢ will apply to both types of transmission. Some of the rates for noncommercial broadcasters have also been decreased, and the fee webcasters and broadcasters must pay for the making of ephemeral recordings has been reduced from 9% of the performance fees to 8.8%.

Read more in our special CARP section.

In other frightening news, the state of California in close to passing a law making it extremely hard to promote "any electronic music dance event of the type commonly referred to as rave" and to require the event promotors to prove they will be able to keep any participants from using any drugs. Why are rave promoters being singled out here?

The RIAA successfully has shutdown Audiogalaxy.com. This is sad for me, Audiogalaxy was the tool I used to discover lots of cool new music. In fact, in the last 30 days, I've bought 20 CDs of artists I didn't know of before because I heard them first on Audiogalaxy. Hre's a good article on the behind the scenes at AudioGalaxy. 17-Jun-02

Now the major record labels wants to put a 6% tax (or royalty) on used CD sales. Of course, the musicians won't see any of this... only the big record labels will see the profits from this. Next step: you'll be charged each time you listen to a song. Greedy bastards.

Please read our open letter to Congress, Artists, Composers, Record Companies, Sound Exchange and the RIAA. Please pass it on to as many people as possible including your senators and representatives. More CARP details here.

Only a few hours left to help SomaFM win a write-in Webby Award! Here's how it works. Click here to register to vote in the People's Choice section. Once you've registered, Vote for us in the Radio Category and the Music Category! We're a write-in candidate. So for the site name, enter "SomaFM". For the URL, put www.somafm.com. I can't tell you how cool it would be if we got enough votes to win this! -- Rusty 7-Jun-02

CARP UPDATE! The Library of Congress has rejected the proposed CARP rates. We don't know all the details yet, but we have 30 more days until a final decision comes down. This does not mean we have won the battle. It only means the game isn't over yet. Check out the