Groovers

» see groovers.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Groovers is not Groovera. That one was an American internet radio station and it already has a grave here. This one was Korean. It began by selling files rather than renting access, and it spent six years trying to make a country care about bit depth.

iriver set the company up in 2012, and that is the fact the rest of it hangs on. iriver built the MP3 players that Korean audio obsessives bought instead of iPods, and by 2012 most of that business had been absorbed into the phone people already carried. So a hardware company watching its hardware go redundant built a shop for the one thing a phone was still bad at. The site opened in January 2013 calling itself 국내최초 MQS 전문서비스, which staked a claim as the first dedicated high-quality service in the country.

MQS stood for Mastering Quality Sound. It was the company's own coinage rather than any industry standard, and in practice it meant FLAC between 24-bit/44kHz and 24-bit/192kHz. You bought tracks. In 2013 a single one cost 1,800 to 2,400 won, and an album could run to 28,000.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the format nobody else stocked ~

The catalog size is the number that makes the case. In June 2013 Groovers had roughly 15,000 lossless tracks. Naver Music, which had just started its own lossless tier, had about 500. For a few years Groovers was simply the only place in Korea where a serious catalog of this existed, and it knew it, which is why the claim to being first sat in the page title rather than buried in an about page.

Late in 2017 it supplied the first MQA-based streaming in Korea to LG's V30 handset, which is the closest the company ever got to the mass market. A phone maker needed a reason for anyone to care about the audio chip it had just paid for, and Groovers had the files.

~ the price of a master ~

Nothing published says how many people bought any of it. No subscriber count or sales figure survives in a form worth repeating. What survives is the pricing, and the pricing tells you who it was for: 28,000 won for one album is not an impulse, it is a decision made by somebody who already owns the headphones.

That is also the honest reason this one stays at arm's length from me. Korea in the 2010s had a per-track lossless market because it had the hardware culture to support one, built by the same company that built the store. Turkey did not have that. The audience for a 24-bit Korean download was small and sat inside one country, and the shop never needed anyone outside it.

~ absorbed by the parent ~

The ownership moved twice and both moves were iriver's. In 2016 iriver sold its stake to NHN Bugs. In early 2018 it bought the 53.9 percent back, which put Groovers wholly inside an iriver that by then sat under SK Telecom. On 28 January 2019 the two boards resolved to merge, with Groovers dissolved into the parent.

The closing notice is dated 28 February 2019 and carries the chief executive's signature. It gives a reason, and it is worth quoting as written rather than sharpened: a rapid change in how music was being consumed, together with difficulty providing technical support. No competitor is named and no successor service is offered. The merger took effect the next day.

The site then stopped, with the notice still on it. Captures through September 2019 show the same frozen page. By August 2024 the domain had become a parking lander, and today it resolves without answering.

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