La radio
A personal favourite of our antipodean cousins, Soma FM is one of the larger internet-only broadcasters boasting 5.8 million “listening hours” per month. However, they haven’t amassed this figure by playing mainstream music. They’ve got 18 unique unique channels with Groove Salad and Drone Zone being the first two we would recommend. Being listener supported and commercial free means no advertising or annoying interruptions. They describe their mission as searching out and exposing new music to people who may otherwise never encounter it. Since they work on a small listener supported budget they have to move slowly towards their goal of making Soma FM available in as many ways possible – but because they don’t have to answer to investors of venture capitalists, they can broadcast exactly what they want to.
Where does the name Soma come from? It’s a play on words. Soma is the name of many things, but in our case is based on the future’s perfect pleasure drug and the fact that we started broadcasting from San Francisco’s South of Market area, known also as SoMa.
