From the first time I ever heard a music webcast in 1996 while working for MSN as a web critic, I have fantasized building an Internet radio station. On August 23, 2003, I finally did just that. It was something a bit impulsive, very exciting, and dramatically life-changing. As soon as I had learned about a web streaming technology called SHOUTCast, my reaction was "wow, if only I had know about this sooner" and I wasted no time deploying it and launching my first webcast from a very excessive downtempo playlist I had just put together a couple of months earlier for a nonprofit-related event I was co-hosting. I literally had Groovera's prototype stream running within two hours from discovering and downloading SHOUTCast. I launched the stream from my living room on the western-facing waterfront of Alki Point in Seattle on an old PC I had previously retired. Without any contemplation, I named the stream the first thing that came to mind - FrostByte Groove Lounge.

The journey began becoming quite exciting only within a couple of months. By then, I had developed a solid technical understanding of streaming media, bandwidth ramifications, service limitations, and stream stability. FrostByte Groove Lounge was growing quite fast and we ("royal we", of course) upgraded from supporting only six concurrent listeners via the bandwidth available with our cable Internet service to using hosting vendors offering SHOUTCast services. I was also getting feedback from people comparing what I was doing to one of our largest, earliest peers and the founder of that entity's even larger rival invited me to bring to his web radio station what I was doing with FrostByte Groove Lounge. I had never heard of either of these web radio entities and had no idea that there was anyone else doing something like this! I declined the offer as I had a vision of building a brand of our own and developing multiple future channels to go under our umbrella which, by then, I had established as OverXposure.com - a domain name I had reserved long before the radio channel for a band name I planned on using someday. I also learned quickly that there were politics within this realm of webcasters and we were from the onset destined to be an outsider which in the long-run turned out to be beneficial, remaining truly independent and having absolutely no backing at all from major media as those peers who came before us.

Between January and April 2004, the FrostByte Groove Lounge audience quadrupled and continued a steady growth trend at this rate until December 2005. Also in April 2004, we underwent our first brand transition, becoming OverXposure.FM and we removed about half of the songs in rotation FrostByte Groove Lounge to become the foundation for Ambient Popsicle. In 2005, we won two Web Radio Awards and were getting a lot of buzz around the Internet. We even had Roche Bobois and Bang & Olufsen stores in Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Denver, and Houston actively using FBGL in their showrooms as background music and to demo B&O equipment. In terms of popularity, things were looking quite good for us despite having inconsistent Quality of Service (QoS), going with the best vendors I could afford out-of-pocket and having little or no listener support at all. But the QoS issues that had long plagued us came to a disastrous head, ending our growth with an erroneous and negligent technical decision made by our SHOUTCast host on December 6, 2005 that cut our audience by 80%. We lost the Roche Bobois/B&O stores outside of Seattle as they could not have a broken audio stream in their high-end establishments, going from sounding great to being absolutely unlistenable on B&O sound systems. Making matters even worse, we were demoted on Google from top-five ranking in our keywords to 14,000 or lower within two days after canceling our Google Adwords supscription on December 15, 2005. FrostByte Groove Lounge never regained more than 20% of the audience we had lost. Not even a write-up in Time Magazine Europe and Time Magazine Asia in June 2006 helped to restore our numbers, nor did our introduction of Ambient Popsicle in July 2006. We also experienced further QoS issues with our newer host, this being our first dedicated server as opposed to a SHOUTCast host. It was clear that drastic measures had to be taken and I made an executive decision in September 2006 I am forever proud to have made. I retired the OverXposure.FM name in favor of Groovera.com - a portmanteau of the words "groove" and "vera" that came to me on my birthday in 2005. FrostByte Groove Lounge was retired and divided into Jet City Lounge and Low Mercury. I hired the datacenter in Chicago that we use today for our bandwidth, no longer going with cheap providers that were wrecking our reputation with poor service quality. It tripled our overhead expenses which I still paid for almost entirely out of pocket but was well worth it. Groovera.com was "unveiled" on September 15, 2006 at the 2006 Decibel Festival where I was honorably invited to play one of the DJ showcases.

The rest is history, as they say, and now Groovera Chilled Web Radio is coming upon its official second birthday, well-developed and produced from a three-year journey that preceded it with many highs and lows. Neither of the channels has quite the same audience size as FBGL once did, however our combined audience is far greater! Best of all, simply having better branding has proven far more advantageous that I had ever expected.

As a kid, I always wanted to become a radio jock. Silly as it was, I enjoyed playing "radio" by spinning records on my parents' stereo system and broadcasting to an unknown audience via a walkie-talkie held up against a speaker. My parents had a huge vinyl collection and my earliest memory is my dad putting on an album he had just bought and hearing for the first time Vanilla Fudge's rendition of "You Just Keep Me Hangin' On". In grade school, I would get up as early as 4:30 in the morning to to try and catch a legendary music TV show on cable. It was called "Video Concert Hall", is often credited as the precursor for MTV, and was broadcasted on an experimental Turner Broadcasting cable channel called the Madison Square Garden Network - which later became USA Network. That show changed my life and inspired me to always look beyond mainstream music!

Ever since my personal tastes began to develop, I have enjoyed frequently being the first to introduce many people to newer artists and sounds. In those decades, several have become legendary in their successes. I even had my own aspirations to become a rock star which I embarked upon and retired in favor of serendipitously finding myself in a high-tech career. Little did I know that this unexpected career path would one day enable me to create on my own the opportunity in the music world that had previously been denied to me, whether as a radio guy or an artist. I am far more glad it happened this way and I am most delighted to build the soundtrack of your life with its results! Although I still work a full-time day job in high-tech, I am glad to bring you some of the newest music in this niche and I wish to someday dedicate my entire day to this endeavor. My service is not limited to the audience but also includes a service to the small labels, the great artists who remain inexplicably obscure in our very insular American music market, and to those unsigned artists we play who, in many cases, are receiving through Groovera some of their earliest opportunities to be heard by a worldwide audience. I know very well how tough it is for emerging artists to break into the scene and how difficult it is for both the artists and small labels to make a profit. Even though we are a long way from seeing profits of our own or covering our operational overhead (at least subscriptions cover about 1/3 of this now), we enjoy knowing that together with these artists and labels that we are building a market for what we all do so we can all dedicate our lives to this craft. I am happy to be part of this music revolution!

If I could have possibly known how immensely challenging it is to start a radio station as a "do-it-yourself" endeavor by myself and with no budget, knowing nothing about how costly and profit-less it is, how arduous the maintenance can be, how challenging it can be sometimes to keep the systems running smoothly, how often the magnitude of the effort goes unrecognized, or how thankless and demanding some people can be - as if we owed them something - then I might have not considered starting this endeavor at all. But when we account for growth and demand, the demonstrated appreciation shown to us by those who feel a positive difference Groovera makes in their lives, or observing the music careers building with the artists we showcase, there is by far nothing I have ever been as proud of participating in and doing. I even realize the tremendous difference it has made in my own life. I love this, too, and cannot live without it either!

As of June 2008, I am no longer alone in the active efforts to keep Groovera growing. We now have a fantastic team of volunteers who have all been Groovera's biggest fans, dating back to when we were still OverXposure.FM. Together we are making improvements, getting caught up on an old backlog of tasks, and getting things done like never before, coming from genuine love for this!

Thank you everyone - the audience, the labels and the artists - for giving me a reason to do this and for being part of Groovera's journey these past five years! May there be many more! Stay tuned for some new channels and upcoming website improvements...surprises await!

Many special thanks to:

• Lyn Quitslund - for all your love, support, mentorship, and rescues, for being my dearest friend, and for not questioning what the hell I was doing when I started this!
• Karen Pewthers-Yirak - for all your support and your generosity
• Charlene Maguire - for being one of our very first listeners and the years of conversations during this evolvement!
• Manny Gonzalez - for your generosity and continued support, even while having your own web radio station now!
• Tyler Stone - for opening the door for me upon arrival in the Bay Area music scene and indirectly introducing me to some of my favorite people
• Pace Arko - for bringing me into the business partnership that got me seriously thinking about doing this, even if that partnership was short-lived (DAMN IT - iTunes was our idea!!!)
• Adam Berliant, Don Chappell, Jeff Margolese, and Sean Amann - for taking chances in giving me the career opportunities that led to my making all this possible
• Doug Martindale - for your friendship and that gift that enabled us to buy our first real server
• April Palmer - for believing in me from the very beginning and helping me lay the cornerstone for the life I live today
• Natashia Collier - for giving me that ride that day in 1991, following me to Seattle and an enduring friendship
• Steve Lynch - for teaching me about the pitfalls of the music business, mentorship, and an enduring friendship
• My parents - for bringing me into the world with a soul and putting music in it
• My maternal grandfather - for that brain I've inherited from you and all your guidance in the afterlife
• Irene Sleight - for being my sweetie and for all your love, support and advice

Many thanks to these phenomenal radio stations for being the influences that inspired me along the way: KELI (Tulsa, 1973-1978), KRAV (Tulsa, 1978 - 1982), KBEZ (Tulsa, 1973 - 1982), KMOD (Tulsa, 1973 - 1992), WJUL (Lowell, MA 1984), KCMU (Seattle, nowadays KEXP 1994-1997), TheDJ.com (nowadays Spinner, 1996-1998), AllMusic.com (no longer radio, 1997-1999), LiveConcerts.com (1998), and Stitch.com's Radio Free Underground (defunct, 1997-1999).