SomaFM News & Events

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5234 people listening now.
7990 peak concurrent listeners in the last 24 hours. (6488 average.)
12463 peak concurrent listeners in the last week. (7971 average.)

SomaFM listeners are all over the world.

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SomaFM Network News

We'll be broadcasting live from the San Francisco Download Festival at the Shoreline Ampitheater Saturday, July 19th from 11:30am until about 6:00pm Pacific time. Look for us there!

If you appreciate SomaFM, and haven't supported us in the last 12 months, please support us now. For the last several months, by the end of the month we find ourselves about $3000 short of our monthly budget needs. We really appreciate your support.

SomaFM is now streaming on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Just go to SomaFM.com on your iPhone/iTouch and you'll get an iPhone webapp mini site with links to all our streams. (more info and comments in our blog...) 20-Jun-08

Happy Independence Day to everyone in the US! Take a moment to appreciate your freedoms and indepence, and remember not to take it from granted. We still have lots of work to do, giant Corporations (and their representatives, like the RIAA) are now the biggest threat to our personal freedoms. 4-Jul-08

Thank you for your generous support of SomaFM in May and early June. We're close to back on track for making out budget, but the summer months are always a challenge for our fundraising. If you're a regular SomaFM listener and don't already support us financially, we'd be very thankful if you'd sign up for one of our monthly payment plans, even if it's just $1 a month. Thanks!

Our email server is back online, and if you wrote to us in the last week and didn't receive a response (and expected one), please contact us again. We apologize for any lost mail. 6-Jun-08

Our email server is donw again because if a power problem at ThePlanet.com, our email host. We are in the process of moving our email and web to our San Francisco datacenter, but it's not going as fast as originally planned. Our email server is back online, and we'll be getting to all your mail within the next 24 hours. If you've emailed SomaFM and haven't gotten a response, please email again. It is likely that mail sent Saturday through Monday bounced and we won't get it.

SomaFM's email is still down due to an extended outage caused by an overloaded electrical circuit at our internet provider (The Planet) that hosts our mail server. For the last 48 hours The Planet has been promising to have it online within 4 hours, and it is still down. (While we can send outgoing messages, we have no access to incoming mail. Please be patient if you are awaiting an email response from us.) 4-Jun-08

Our web site was down this weekend due to a significant outage at our web hosting provider. We are back up as of 3:20am pacific time, Monday morning, 2-Jun-08, however our email server is still out, and we are not sure when it will be available. More details...

For March and April, we were about $2500 behind on our budget. That means we're racking up our credit card balance to pay all the bills. May looks like we're going to be about another $2000 short. If you haven't supported SomaFM this year and care about keeping us on the air, please support SomaFM and keep independent, commercial-free radio on the air!

Our friends at Spacial Audio are conducting a survey about internet radio listening, it's a pretty quick survey. Thanks!

Please support SomaFM! If you contribute $50 you'll get a SomaFM Tshirt! We your financial support to keep us on the air. Less than 10% of our regular listeners support us financially, so most of the time we just barely scrape by. Help us increase that by supporting SomaFM today! Thanks!

We did some updates to some of the streaming servers last night (around 2:30 am pacific), and all seemed well, but shortly after I went home and went to sleep, Groove Salad and Space Station's feeds broke and didn't get fixed until late this morning. All is well now -- Rusty, 11am pacific, 7-May-08

Rusty will be in Las Vegas today speaking at the RAIN Internet Radio Summit at the Renaissance Las Vegas Hotel, right next to the Las Vegas Convention Center. If you're in Vegas for NAB, come on by. 14-Apr-08

It was nice to see so many of you tonight at Yuri's Night, the World Space Party. 13-Apr-08

We've been broadcasting from NASA"s Moffett Field all day, and will continue until 2AM tonight, as part of Yuri's Night, the World Space Party. There are some excellent acts we'll be bringing you, as well as audio from the outdoor stages and surrounding areas. Check it out! 12-Apr-08

Starting at 2pm pacific time today, SomaFM will be broadcasting live from Yuri's Night: the World Space Party in the San Francisco Bay Area at NASA Ames Moffett Field. You can join us, along with 8000 others, including astronauts, scientists, artists, engineers, musicians and DJs. Live broadcast starts at 2pm pacific. 7-Apr-08

Oops. Forgot to pull some huge April Fools prank today. Maybe that's for the best. 1-Apr-08

SomaFM creates radio that we ourselves want to listen to. And that means music without those annoying commercials. But in order to do that, we need your financial support! Any amount helps, and if you contribute $50 you'll get a SomaFM Tshirt!

Happy St. Patrick's Day (assuming you didn't already celebrate it early last weekend!) 17-Mar-08

As SXSW comes to an end, we posted some pictures online. 16-Mar-08

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Bay Area Takeover Party today. We'll get pictures and sounds up as soon as we can, internet problems not withstanding. Plus we'll be blogging and podcasting from SXSW for the rest of the week.

Right Now: Broadcasting Live from Justin.TV at the Bay Area Takeover! in Austin!

In Austin for SXSW? Today is the Bay Area Takeover Party, Thursday, March 13th, 2008, from 12-6pm, at the Beauty Bar, 617 E 7th St (near Red River), showcasing artists from the Bay Area's best independent record labels. There are two stages, featuring these great bands: Two Gallants, Film School, Scissors for Lefty, Von Iva, Loquat, 60 Watt Kid, Scrabbel, The Blacks, Birds and Batteries, Music For Animals, Social Studies, D.W. Holiday, The Union Trade, Form and Fate, and Aim Low Kid.

We are blogging and podcasting from SXSW in Austin, TX this week. 8-Mar-08

Live performances from SomaFM's Noisepop Happy Hour are now online. 4-Mar-08

Happy 9th Anniversary, SomaFM! 2-Mar-08

SomaFM Presents Noise Pop Happy Hour, this Saturday, March 1st, 5-8pm at Thee Parkside in San Francisco. FREE! Come by! UPDATE: Thanks everyone for coming out tonight, it was a great show! Nice to meet everyone!

A big thank you to everyone who supported SomaFM in February. We are almost out of our Indie Pop Rocks CDs now, but we have a new CD on the way. We still have plenty of Tshirts available for our $50 supporters.

Groove Salad was having problems this morning due to an unauthorized "relay server" that someone had set up, which was publishing itself as the server with the most capacity and redirecting listeners to it from our other less full server, and listeners were getting lots of skipping and dropouts. We've restricted that from our servers now, so things should be back to normal. 27-Feb-08

It looks like we're going to be about $4600 short of our budget in February, so if you're not already a SomaFM supporter and you like what we're doing, please support us with either a monthly subscription or a one time payment. Thanks! (Update: As of 26-Feb-08, we made month budget requirement! Thanks for the support!)

Our friend and studio mate Josh Ellingson will be at Wondercon this weekend in San Francisco, so we gave him a bunch of SomaFM stickers to distribute. He'll be in the Artist Alley section of Wondercon. The show opens to the public on Friday, Feb. 22, and runs through Sunday, Feb. 24 at Moscone Center South.

Thinking about traveling to Dubai? Be very careful!

Happy Valentine's Day! SomaFM Loves You!!!! 14-Feb-08

Happy Year Of The Rat! Not only is it the Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year) but today is also SomaFM's Elise Nordling's birthday as well. Happy birthday Elise! 7-Feb-08

Thanks to everyone who came through in the last couple days of January and supported SomaFM!

We're running about $2500 behind our budget for the month of January. I'm sure that everyone is paying off their christmas and holiday credit cards so cash is short. If you're not a SomaFM supporter already, please support us with a few dollars, it would really help. And we still have T-shirts and a limited number of our Indie Pop Rocks CDs left.

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. Martin Luther King, Jr.

SomaFM is having a party Friday night in San Francisco, Jan 11th, from 8pm-Midnight. Drop by if you can!

San Francisco is experiencing a really big (for us) rain and windstorm. Power is intermittent in some locations, but our servers should be able to keep running on backup power. There may be delays in answering your email or other communications today. 4-Jan-08

Hapy New Year!!!!!

Thank you, everyone, for all your support in 2007!!! We love you! Rusty, Elise, Merin, Shawn, Roy, Tag 31-Dec-07

<-- If you have a small (or any size) business, and you play to SomaFM in your workplace, then in most cases SomaFM is a deductible business expense for "background music service". Doesn't matter if you support us annually or monthly. (Disclaimer: please confirm the details with your tax professional.) 23-Dec-07 -->

Merry Christmas from all of us at SomaFM! - Christmas Eve, 2007

From now on the days get longer and the nights get shorter. As Big Url says on Xmas in Frisko, "We'd like to wish all our pagan friends a Happy Solstice!" - 21-Dec-07

SomaFM is up for a PLUG Award again this year (Online Radio Station of the Year), and while we didn't win last year, we're hoping to this year. If you like us, please go vote for SomaFM for Online Station of the Year. Thanks!

(More old news in the news archives.)