Groovera

» see groovera.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The station's own history begins on 23 August 2003, under a name it did not keep, as OverXposure.FM. By 2005 Timothy James Quigley was running it out of his living room in Seattle as FrostByte Groove Lounge, and in September 2006 it settled on Groovera, which is the name it died under. On air he was Tommy Ohmz, and for most of seventeen years he was the entire organization.

What it broadcast was chill-out music, split by the end across six channels that each had a name and a character. Two of them were lounges, Jet City and Exotic. The others went by Low Mercury, Chill Surreal, Soul Nouveau and Audio Popsicle. Between them the programming ran from downtempo and nu-jazz through trip hop into psybient, and it eventually made room for vaporwave, which tells you the station kept listening to new things rather than freezing at the genre it started in.

It carried no advertising. The money came from listeners directly, on the model that a small station with a specific sound can be paid for by the people who want that sound to keep existing. Quigley died on 16 July 2020, two weeks short of his fiftieth birthday. He had been in the middle of renewing the Groovera trademark with his attorney when it happened.

The streams stopped on 29 July 2020, at eight minutes and thirteen seconds past noon, which is the sort of timestamp you only get when somebody wrote down the exact moment a machine went quiet. That was the eve of the birthday. By early the following year the site was serving a placeholder, and it has not come back.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it stayed on air ~

A station like this is not a business with a bus factor problem, it is one person and a server. Programming six channels of curated music means somebody chooses every track and then keeps the whole apparatus behind it upright, the licensing paid and the encoder running, while also keeping an audience convinced it is worth donating to. All of that lives in one head and none of it is written down anywhere useful.

Which is why the shutdown reads the way it does. There was no acquisition and no funding round that failed to close. The person stopped and the thing stopped thirteen days later, on a schedule that had presumably been set by whatever automation was still holding the playlist together.

~ the distance ~

Internet radio arrived in Turkey behind a bandwidth constraint. A 56k modem cannot hold a 128 kilobit stream, which is arithmetic rather than nostalgia, and until broadband turned up on a TTNet line around 2006 the whole category was something you read about rather than left playing. By the time the pipe was wide enough, the directories held thousands of these stations, listed by genre, most of them one person somewhere with a taste and a server.

Groovera was one of the names in that list and I could not have picked it out. That is the condition of the entire format. Every listener-funded station is enormous to a few hundred people and invisible to everyone else, and when it goes, the people who would notice are exactly the ones who already knew.

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