I've been donating to SomaFM for many years, and it is my music provider of choice in my home office (Space Station Soma for me). Some years ago I had an afternoon to kill while visiting San Francisco and Rusty was kind enough to let me stop by and say hello. A quick 10 minute visit turned into one of the most interesting two hours I've spent in my entire life. Rusty gave me the whole tour of the software interface that runs SomaFM and we had a fascinating discussion about the history of SomaFM in particular and streaming music in general. Thanks again Rusty!
It's been several years but I also had the pleasure of meeting Rusty down at the studio once. My dad has now made it a habit; he's been to SF for work and pleasure four or five times now, and met up with him each time, I believe.
I have been listening to Soma for at least 15 years. Definitely a great place to have bookmarked.
I've been listening since 2004. Every 4 or 5 years I'll realize how much it's been a part of my life through thick and thin, and write him a gushing email. He always has the grace to reply.
SomeFM is such a rarity these days, a reminder of how we believed the Internet was going to be.
They take recurring donations. Probably the best way to help them and one of the best investments for me, as keeping it up and running is a way to keep these naive ideas alive.
The music is curated and is most excellent (for my taste, of course). I have Groove Salad on speed dial in my HomePods around the house (through TuneIn radio).
> SomeFM is such a rarity these days, a reminder of how we believed the Internet was going to be.
Let me start out by saying that SomaFM is great.
But when I started listening to SomaFM (nearly 20 years ago), I never imagined that for only $10/month I'd be able to listen to (essentially) any song whenever I wanted. That's amazing and so much more valuable (to me) than what Soma offers.
To each their own, I guess. I also pay for Apple Music and have access to all that music, but there is no substitute for curation with a sense of taste and musical direction.
For me, having access to all the music in the world is only marginally better than what I had before when buying CDs (or records even); I don't listen to more music than before. What I really love, instead, is being introduced to a new track that captures my interest, a track that I know I will be listening to multiple times in the future. The quality, and the fact that I would have probably not have found it by myself, or not liked it without the context.
When I was younger, when I had enough pocket money, I would go to the record store, and the problem wasn't how to get a CD, because they had oh so many!, but what CD to get. For this, I relied on friends, radio stations, and the shop keepers. They all had a good portion of the music world in their head, with their own taste and opinion about what's interesting, and I found many gems this way. Automated recommendations don't quite do it for me, nor I have been lucky with other people's playlists; I gotta get acquainted with the curator first in order to trust their curation.
So I listen to SomaFM, and when something gets me interested I go and buy it or add it to my library. Best of both worlds!
To be honest, Pandora has served that role for me over the years. I am always amazed to look back at my Pandora station history to see how it has evolved into different streams/genres, all stimulated from hearing new music through a Pandora channel, and then starting a new station after I liked it. This has created a web of new music I wouldn't have sought out otherwise.
Obviously, I do think that a human DJ may perform this role better in some cases/genres though.
Buying the Music Genome Project was one of the best purchases any company on this planet has ever made. https://www.pandora.com/about/mgp
I discovered a ton of fantastic music video Music Genome Project before the buy out, on some wonderful slick visualizations. The ability to transition this way & that around some base of music, to have a central idea & to be able to explore outwards, then come back, & transit out to another nearby genre, before coming back again... deeply compelling. MGP was great at broadening my listening horizons.
By contrast, it feels like most music services very quickly are like, "if you like this artist then you'll definitely like this ultra-popular heavily-played artist!" You're like 2 hops away from top 100 music, & they'll actively try to push you into the popular music. Please, I'd just listen to the radio if I wanted to be bored to death with pop music. Switch it up!
I'm a 70's-90's metal fan and once heard Ronnie James Dio 3 times in a row... all on different bands. Solo, Sabbath, and Rainbow =D Was fun but weird at the same time.
My favorite part of SomaFM is that I discover new artists (or get encouraged to go on a deep dive) fairly regularly. I've never bothered with Pandora or Spotify but the impression I get is that SomaFM is much better with the more niche genres.
I find the same. I feel more "weight" in a choice made by a human, who has their own "map" of the music and what connects it … so, I care to know about the choices made and why they were — the context of the choice.
I'm happier with a song pairing that has some arbitrary, personal history than one that's a logical walk down a relationship model.
I use Spotify but I loathe their recommendation algorithm. What I do when I want to discover new songs is that I search for a user playlist on r/spotify, or if there is a particular song I like, I use this website[1], which I recently discovered and which enables one to specify a song and get a list of public playlists featuring this song. It works pretty well in my case.
Here in Dublin we have Raidió Na Life, which has the best music programming of any "offline" radio. Everything spoken is in Irish, of which I understand almost nothing, but the music, is amazing.
Upvoted for reminding me how good Raidió na Life used to be. I haven’t listened to it in over 10 years. I used to know the Neuromantek DJs back in the 2000s. I’m amazed to see that their show is still running! These days, when I listen to the radio, it’s usually via Saorview but I must make the effort to hook up Raidió na Life and other radio stations to my home hi-fi (now that my Squeezebox has died).
They can only recommend what they understand. I am not aware of any automated recommender that listens to music to make decisions on how to recommend it. For that, humans are still good.
> I'd be able to listen to (essentially) any song whenever I wanted.
For a while now I've considered this to be more of a curse than anything else because at least personally I've noticed that the constant hopping replaces genuinely paying attention with quantity. I now pick a handful of albums per month or pick an NTS session I like and re-listen much more.
Oh my mother loves SomaFM. The thing is that you can just switch it on an it is good, and it will be in 5 years time as well without you having to do anything at all.
I really miss Shoutcast/Icecast being such an active part of my life. The quality is way down, and there's like 1/6th the channels there used to be. For electronica in particular, there was just so much. But there were also so many random niche stations!
SomaFM continues to be a great place for highly genre-d music. I make sure to give em money semi-regularly. Suburbs of Goa[1] is one of my favorite.
There are still quite a few though. I have several bookmarks on my normal PC and in AIMP on mobile. I never did "outgrow" my practice of using multiple bookmarked streaming stations as my daily "radio dial".
There may not be as much Icecast stuff but internet radio is doing very well.
Someone else has already mentioned nts.live (it has a huge range of stuff, more like a radio station) but other UK-based stations are balamii.com, supremefm.com and rinse.fm (Rinse used to be a pirate radio station but went legal).
Internet radio stations are the go to for up to date music really.
Radio Paradise [1] is also going strong after 20+ years. Fantastic curation and you can even stream in lossless for free (or at least I seem to be able to from the Android TV app).
One of the best things about it is how the main mix transcends genres. I consider it basically a rock station, but they'll also play Country, Jazz, Blues, Pop, Classical and miscellaneous other stuff. In a single song set you can easily go from Led Zeppelin to Radiohead to Johnny Cash to Arctic Monkeys to Stevie Wonder to Billie Eilish to JS Brahms to some West African singer you'd never had heard of otherwise. It's great for musical discovery.
I've been "harvesting" their playlist (via their published RSS feed) for ~5 years now, storing an entry for each played song in a MySQL db table. I'm not doing anything with this data right now, but at some point in the future when Bill & Rebecca retire, I take comfort in knowing I'll be able to munge together a lot of RP-quality playlists. :)
Any possibility of sharing that on GitHub or similar? I and I’m sure others would be interested! And if you decide to do so, thank you for your hard work!
What I like about RadioParadise is that I don't have to pigeon-hole the music I listen to. Sometimes you do want a particular genre, and other times I'm happy to be led by an expert curator. RadioParadise is superb for the latter.
So it says it’s a “lossless” stream but I don’t think it really is because my Yamaha receiver “Enhancer” (compressed music enhancer mode) mode still shows active. For truly lossless streams like Amazon Music’s HD/Ultra HD, my “Enhancer” indication disappears/does not show, because it’s receiving a lossless stream (at least 16/44.1)
Love SomaFM, have their 15 year anniversary channel list poster up in my office.
Been listening since the days of the original 3 channels (Groove Salad / Drone Zone / Secret Agent). I loved so much when cliqhop came out and streamed more abstract electronic music, especially since "electronic music" in streaming was always so heavily either ambient (cool) or club/dance music (ehh).
But I really want to highlight Metal Detector, the metal channel they started a few years ago. I've always found metal streaming stations underwhelming. MD is the first one I've heard that effortlessly cuts broadly across the various subgenres and eras, and doesn't fall into the traps of just playing the arena-filling stuff, or getting locked into one specific niche.
SomaFM is an amazing institution. I was introduced to it mid/early 2000's by travelling tech nomad from Germany that passed by Bucharest; I spread it to my family (dad keeps a recurring donation going and we have a family heirloom soma fm t-shirt). Fast forward to now, my 2mo old seems to enjoy Space Station Soma, and, if I'm lucky, falls asleep on Deep Space One.
I hope future generations will get to enjoy it. As others said (tbatchelli), "it's an example of how we believed the Internet is going to be".
I have a 2009 Mini connected to a Creative Labs 2.1 and it does.
But then, there's a Lenovo Yoga from like 2016 that plugs into a pair of SOLO7c and that doesn't.
Different stations I start with volume 55-85, they don't all have the same loudness (genre related, no doubt). But the use for radio is for me "fill space, drown out distractions, provide flow" so that I don't need it loud. I'm not actively listening to radio. I didn't choose the song. And that's the point.
Oh man! I haven't listened to SomaFM since like 2007. So glad they're still around, can't wait to dive back into my old favorite channels, like "Drone Zone" and "Secret Agent". Gonna start a recurring donation as well.
I’m so glad SomaFM is still around. It’s one of the last holdouts from when the internet was just a giant pool of possibilities. So much at that time was people just doing fun things because they could and while that’s still out there, most of what I see these days seems to be people optimizing the fun out of everything. DroneZone for me tonight.
My favorite SomaFM channel is Doomed. But, they now run it only around the time of Halloween. I would categorize it as Halloween Dark Industrial Ambient.
They had a new channel, The Dark Zone, which ran for awhile as a Special. It was OK, but Doomed is unique.
I discovered SomaFM channels (SomaFM, Secret agent, GrooveSalad) from iTunes Radio around 2003. Listened to it always while working on my computer while studying in university. Good memories and so happy they are still around!
Same here. I didn't realize it was still around and not only that the links still open in the apple music desktop app and you can save them in a playlist. Unfortunately doesn't look like they carry over to the phone app but they have a paid app.
If you’re into unique well curated collections of music across wide ranges of genres, I highly recommend checking out NTS Radio, it’s also listener supported:
SomaFM is one of the sites I like to donate to when I can. I also use their Amazon affiliate link as an Amazon bookmark. Drone Zone has been my main background music when working for a couple of years now!
A lot has changed over the past 20 years but playing http://somafm.com/groovesalad.pls on Winamp remains the same. I started donating $5/mo a few years ago because I appreciate having such a valuable constant in my life more and more as time goes on.
Love it! Been a fan for many years. Would still love to find the archive of music/sounds from musicforhackers.com from years ago. That was an epic channel.
That is cool! But no, Music for Hackers was a great combo of ambient/underground music overlaid with old movie audio samples and other stuff. Played from maybe 2000-2008 or something? Can't remember when it died.
I have very fond memories of Music for Hackers ("soundscapes for compromising a remote host"). Have never found anything that fills that particular niche the same way.
I had somehow forgotten about SomaFM, used to listen to it all the time but haven't in over a decade. I think I thought it had been shut down, I'm probably thinking of LastFM.
I friggen love SomaFM. I found it by accident over a decade ago on a Slackware installations (of all things).
Was looking through possible Bash command prompts by typing letters and hitting tab for autocomplete. "Hey, what is that? soma? what does that command do?" (It was a terminal music player with a number of stations, primarily SomaFM programmed in. There was another one called "Air Lounge" or something that was also good).
And boom, Groove Salad and Beat Blender were realized.
Around 1999 I created thumpradio.com, which was the "streaming" website for the Thump Radio radio show and (mad) parties in San Francisco. The site streamed all the radio shows, DJ sets (in RealAudio) and had artist bios and track downloads. You could stream music interwoven with interviews for days on end.
The site is long gone, with some ghosts of it on the Wayback Machine but I have forever memories from that time.
Still have cassette tapes of Thump Radio shows on KUSF, and memories of enjoying the RealAudio sets. I also remember them calling out the show identification in various languages, where the only words I understood were at the end: “… Thump Radio.” Great stuff — thank you.
HA! I recorded one of those show ids in Hebrew at the time. Completely forgot about that. I am pretty sure all those recordings do exist somewhere.
Mason Rothert was doing all things radio there and it was beautiful to watch (and listen).
SomaFM has been the soundtrack to about half of my life. In fact one of my daughters was pseudo-named after one of the DJ's. Thanks Elise for being so consistently awesome for so long and clearly an inspiration!
Additionally, I've been meaning to simplify adding SomaFM tracks that I like to Spotify playlists. This post inspired some real-time action... one click in the SomaFM app would be peachy, but I can deal with a keyboard combo.
It's a bit difficult to be get the exact song without the DJ's providing the Spotify song id but the metadata SomaFM does provide in their icecast streams [or sqlite db or www song history] is good enough to formulate a pretty good Spotify search (e.g. `spotify:search:artist:Brazilian%20Girls+track:Homme`).
You can easily associate the following code to a keyboard shortcut via Automator and have it search for the LIKELY song in the Spotify app.
SomaFM was what I used to listen to on backtrack Linux back in the day, as it was one of the sites bookmarked in firefox.
wierdly enough I literally remembered about them 2 hours ago and put on defcon radio. Weird to see it pop up again now after i had forgot about it for so long.
Thanks for sharing this page with all HN visitors. I didn't know it until today. I see that all the folks around here have a great teast with all this old stuff from the early days of the Internet, it reminds me that old time too.
First used it as background music for a 60s secret agent themed party. Since then it's been a holiday tradition to listen to the Christmas stations. Every year when I find out it's still online it's like a nice present.
I made a $50 donation many years ago, and some months later a black t-shirt with SOMA FM emblazoned on it arrived completely out of the blue. To this day, it's the only garment I own (and still wear) with a story attached.
The SomaFM macOS/iOS apps, of course, use SQLite to save favorited songs by station.
I always donate to Soma too, but it is nice that once curated, you can often also enjoy, export, or transfer artist tracks you love to on demand services using Datasette or otherwise: `/Users/{USER}/Library/Containers/com.somafm.somafmmac/Data/Library/Application\ Support/SomaFM/SomaFM.sqlite3.db`
or
`/Users/{USER}/Library/Containers/SomaFM/Data/Library/Application\ Support/SomaFM/SomaFM.sqlite3.db`
I still listen to SomaFM on the Logitech squeezeboxes littered around my house. My streaming music experience is stalled out in 2005, but I'm still blown away by how awesome it is. I'm grateful for SomaFM.
Really impressive that they've stayed online nearly 20 years. I used to listen to this and MonkeyRadio all the time. They've added a lot of new channels though.
I have been listening to SomaFM for more than 15 years now. There are some real gems on it. It's a vestige of what was one of the best time for internet at the turn of the century. I often set deep space one to a 15 minutes timer before falling asleep.
The only thing I don't like is how 1 out of every 25 songs is just random noises with out of tune deep bass. Oh well, then I switch to drone zone or liquid or something :).
Found this thanks to HN and have been really enjoying it for work and study music over the last month. It's hard to keep a good playlist that doesn't get stale, anyone have other stations? I also use Music for Programming[1] and various lofi playlists often.
I volunteered to DJ my jazz college radio station back in the day and gave up quickly. The reason being was that my knowledge of the genre was so shallow that I didn't know where to start, especially when it came to putting music on for a dedicated radio program.
So I kind of wonder about that when listening to indie music. Maybe there isn't a goal of getting a comprehensive view on a genre, simply enjoying music that's not overproduced and the same thing you hear all the time? I suppose that's what I get hung up on: that when I listen to music I think I have a goal of understanding a genre from the top down.
This isn't a criticism of course. The likely response is that I should just listen and "enjoy the music" without expectations of gaining a deep knowledge of the craft. It's still something I struggle to wrap my head around though.
Check out streamtuner2 it has lots of streaming services plugins for icecast/Xiph/somafm/internet radio/etc. Multi platform linux/win/mac/etc. Written in python.
I found SomaFM 22(!) years ago via Shoutcast, and have been a listener ever since, even making sure to come back after they briefly went off the air due to an early-00s fight over streaming fees. Love it love it. Thanks for keeping SomaFM ad-free all these years, Rusty - I will donate till I die. <3
I'm going to add a shout-out to my lower-tech SF favorite, community-supported KPOO 89.5, featuring a wonderful array of programs hosted by kindly volunteer DJs. Plus, their stream works most of the time. (If you're in range, I recommend sticking to actual FM to be safe.)
I see alot of ambient/electronic radios, but not much by way of pure chiptune. Which is a pity. I haven't found a true replacement for kohina.com yet, and that site is surely only hanging on until someone remembers that they're still paying a hosting bill.
My streaming life is mostly Radio Paradise and GrooveSalad (both). I’ve spent time looking for more stations to love (esp since my car streams TuneIn) but I haven’t really found other stations out there to listen to on the regular. They’re pretty singular.
WFMU is truly amazing. I've been listening to them for decades, have several friends who have done shows there and/or volunteered, and I even performed live on air there once many years ago. But what's truly amazing is their show archives and playlists, almost all the shows are recorded and streamable, going back many many years.
There are a bunch of radio stations that get this right currently, but WFMU is one of the only ones (or maybe THE only one?) that's been getting it right for soooooo long.
Consider adding WXPN to your repertoire. They're out of the University of Pennsylvania in Philly. Incredible selection of music and commercial free.
https://xpn.org/
Wow, I totally forget about this since Spotify. I used to listen to Groobe Salad all the time :) Thanks, donating and tuning in to some nice ambient beats and grooves!
Personally I love https://www.di.fm which is similar but geared towards electronic music. They have fantastic channels for most subgenres (think “dub techno”, “disco house” etc.) and they stream in 320kbps.
I don’t claim golden ears but Soma FM streaming at 128kbps seems needlessly outdated?
I found SomaFM to be a much better music discovery experience than the "big company" generic recommendation systems. I found some real gems there, and the gem-to-vanilla ratio is higher than most. I assume SomaFM's playlists must be manually/human curated, with tracks rotated in and out regularly, to be this good.
Wow, I haven't heard this name for a while. I switched from Soma to DI.FM years and years ago mostly because I was super active on DI's forums and they used to stream my mixes. Glad to see it's still around. It's definitely a gem from the old days of internet.
God I miss Tag's trance trip. (@tagloomis) https://twitter.com/tagloomis eventually merged with soma but its not the same as it used to be. Now its called the trip.
Listening to it right now. It's an easy platform to explore a bunch of different music. I'm usually parked on Secret Agent, Boot Liquor and occasionally other channels. Reminds me I should donate (which I do with random regularity).
Wonderful to see SomaFM getting some visibility here. Groove Salad and XMas in Frisco have always been great for me. Rusty has been a constant honestly since the end of the 90s and always been the go-to for me. Great Roku app too btw.
I still have bookmarks for groove salad and occasionally use them - on a 1.25ghz iMac G4 from years ago. The old Mac OS 9 version of iTunes still works and still plays internet radio streams.
Thanks to this HN post, I just installed the Android app of SomaFM.
But, I can't find a way to re-orient the app to landscape mode on my tablet. Is this not supported?
I remember this from way back when, even the channel icons, but it had blurred together with Digitally Imported. I didn't realize it was a separate entity until now.
I got annoyed with stuff "going gray" in my Spotify playlists, just vanishing out of the blue after I'd fallen in love with it and wanted it to be part of my mood and given that mood a name and curated a whole menagerie to go with it.
Soma's no answer to that, so this is way off-topic. But streaming services are no replacement for the CD. I'll rip and encode and curate on my own devices, especially now that it's trivial to pop a 128GB microSD card into my phone.
I'm with you. But you can imagine that for the average listener, especially those with limited free time and disposable income, tracks going gray is rare enough that it doesn't warrant switching back to buying CDs.
Being on streaming services seems like it's table stakes for new artists these days. All the friends of mine who seriously create music make sure to release it on Spotify. Those of us who make music less seriously still release it for free on Soundcloud. No, none of us are signed to major labels.
it's enough to buy 1 album per month. of course it s not the same, but i don't like to listen to every cd ever. The rare times i really wanted to hear something i could pirate it. I still enjoy radio streams for the low mental overhead though, plus u get the news too
Yeah, I totally agree. I'm just responding to the comment:
> I don't understand why internet radio has died. Sure, spotify etc but broadcast music is different. Radio didn't die because CDs existed
My point is that CDs and subscription streaming are two totally different beasts, and it's not surprising that the latter was more of a disruptor to FM/internet radio.
