Whole Wheat Radio

» see wholewheatradio.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In the years this station was streaming acoustic music out of Alaska I was in internet cafes in Turkey, where music on the internet meant an mp3 with the wrong bitrate and a filename somebody had typed by hand. Whole Wheat Radio was the other answer to the same question, and it was small enough to run on first names.

Jim Kloss put it on the air in August 2002 from Talkeetna, a town of under a thousand people at the end of a spur road north of Anchorage. He called it Radio Free Talkeetna for four months and renamed it that December. Kloss was a software developer before this, with a BBS and a file transfer program behind him, which explains why a folk station in the Alaskan interior ended up with better infrastructure than most commercial webcasters had.

The stream was 56 kbit mp3PRO over SHOUTcast, running every hour of every day, independent music with the acoustic and folk end of it dominant. No playlist consultant and no rotation clock. The catalog itself was kept on a wiki that the listeners edited, which in 2002 was an unusual thing to hand to your audience and is still an unusual thing to hand to your audience.

Listeners were Wheatheads. They accumulated something called wheatberries for taking part, they could queue records themselves as electronic DJs, and they could leave spoken messages that went out over the air as phonegrams. The station was podcasting before most people had heard the word.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The part that still looks ahead of its time is the house concerts. Musicians came to the cabin and played live to the stream, and the audience could tip while it was happening, with the money going to the performer. Marian Call played it. So did Amanda Shires, along with Rod Picott and other working songwriters off the same circuit. That is a real bill for a station broadcasting out of a private house in a town most Americans have never driven through.

Set that against the year. In 2002 the American webcasting business was being crushed by the royalty rates that came out of the DMCA arbitration, and the standard survival move was to license a catalog you did not choose and sell ads against it. Kloss went the other way entirely, playing musicians who wanted to be played and putting the payment channel directly between the listener and the artist. Bandcamp is six years away from opening at this point.

~ the split ~

By 2010 there were two Whole Wheat Radios sharing one set of servers. One was a music station whose purpose was getting independent artists heard and paid. The other was a chat community that had grown up in the same rooms over eight years and had its own reasons for showing up.

Kloss chose the first one and cut back the social side. Some of the community moved to an unsanctioned Facebook group rather than accept it, and the argument that followed is the oldest one on the internet, between the person paying for the thing and the people living in it. He closed the station rather than keep running something he had come to resent. His own words were that he no longer loved the job.

~ what carried over ~

The stream stopped on 20 October 2010. Kloss's own note, written on the anniversary years later, dates it to the 21st, which is either a timezone or a memory, and it is worth leaving the disagreement visible rather than picking one. The Wheat Palace, the venue side of it, carried on with private events into 2011.

The note he left up is unsparing about why. He wrote that some of the sweetest people he has known lived on those pages alongside some of the most revolting, and that ridding himself of the second group meant losing part of the first, which he accepted. He called turning the switch off one of the better decisions of his life, and called the station itself an early look at what the internet was going to become.

~ the long tail ~

wholewheatradio.org still answers. It is a single page carrying that note and a thank-you to the writer who documented the station's place in webcasting history. Buried in it is a link to an archive stream Kloss brought back sporadically in 2021 to play old Whole Wheat audio, for no stated reason beyond the fact that it was possible.

Jim Kloss died in 2023. Almost everything he built here is now a product somebody sells, from the tip jar running under a live set to the listener-maintained catalog. He was doing all of it from a cabin in Alaska on a 56k stream while the industry was still arguing about whether internet radio should be allowed to exist.

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