LiquidFM
Digital Radio
LiquidFM is my largest project to date, serving hundreds of listeners each day with fresh livesets straight from top DJs within the many genres of trance and house. As you might know or have guessed by now, it’s an online radio station streaming music, trance and house, to every corner of the world. This page is dedicated to the story behind LiquidFM, and how it evolved into what it is today.
It all started back in 2003 when a close friend, who was an eager fan of hardstyle, asked me to help him create a norwegian hardstyle community and a web cast. We launched hardstyle.no, which was nothing but a basic website and a webcast stream at the time. It became an instant success not only in Norway but also internationally, as there were very few serious actors offering proper hardstyle content. We averaged 100 listeners in no time, and decided to move everything to a new international domain, and so HardBase.NET (or HB.NET) was born.
HardBase became a huge success, but I never really shared my friends interest and passion for hardstyle. As HardBase became even more established, I found the oppurtunity to use my newfound connections and network to create an additional stream that would focus on trance and house, which were and still are my favourite genres. Initially I created a small sub-section on hardbase.net for trance- and house-related content, but I quickly found the two genres, the listeners and their interests to be too different, and I realized that a trance section on HardBase would never become a success.
Incidentally, I knew someone who already had some basic streams running, but unfortunately didn’t have the time to manage them at all and they were basically running idle. After having some conversations with him, we came to an agreement, and Powershout was born, hosting several different streams and genres, originally separated into trance, house, club, goa and psy-trance. I launched a website with a minimum of content, featuring only links to the different streams and information on what they were playing at the time.
The genres offered by Powershout has since changed slighly as we’ve merged, removed and added some genres, but it’s basically the same today as it was when we launched. The trance channel were clearly the most successfull stream, and as I found it very time consuming and difficult to manage all streams and their content well, I decided to focus on one of them, namely the trance channel.
DJ Turntables
I launched a large-scale website which included a forum, fresh news, articles and reviews among other things. Powershout Trance quickly became a force to be reckoned with, and one of the specialities were the many liveshows featured on the radio. This was not very common for webradio’s at the time, specially not within the genres of trance and house. Pre-recorded sets were the most dominant form of shows, and they still are today, but doesn’t offer nearly as much interactivity as a real liveshow does.
Powershout grew quite big, but I never felt I had the freedom to reach it’s true potential. HardBase.NET were pushing 500 listeners at the time and were among the 3 largest stations of it’s kind at the time, and eventually moved on to become Hard.FM, which still exists today. Powershout had alot of things going for it, but I felt too bound by the name, the sponsors, the original owner and the many streams and genres that came with it. I put alot of hard work and effort into Powershout, and it was with a heavy heart I left Powershout to itself.
After much back and forth, I decided to start over yet again with the knowledge and network I had established, and registered LiquidFM which incidentally relates to the name of my DJ show at the time, Liquid Sessions. After sorting out a new sponsorship and other formalities, Liquid.FM was launched in March 2005, with a fully flethed website. Everything went quite smooth from here, and LiquidFM became one of the larger web stations within its genre, trance and house.
Growing ever larger, I found myself in need of help with the management and other things, and several kind souls have since stepped up to help run and manage LiquidFM.
Headphones
The summer 2007 I found it was time for a much needed update and reorganization of LiquidFM. The website was getting outdated and needed a major overhaul, and we needed some better organization among the staff. I set out on my largest website project to this date early October 2007, and it took me nearly 2 months to complete. We set the launch date to 1st of December, and accompanied the new website with a major event that lasted for 6 days straight. With DJs from every corner providing us with special mixes and sets, this was definitely a week to remember for us at LiquidFM.
Since that day LiquidFM has continued to grow, of course not without bumps along the way, but thanks to the great staff and people stepping up from the community we’ve managed to get by. And now we’re once again planning some major changes to provide our listeners with the best we can offer. If you’re curious about our plans you should better stick around as it’ll all be revealed soon enough.
There are indeed some great times ahead so stay tuned, literally – Liquid.FM!