Groove: Monkey Radio Archive Goes Live
Launch day — 1507 tracks from the old Monkey Radio rotation are now streaming ad-free, plus the deep dives on how it all got rebuilt.
After a lot of late nights, spreadsheets, and old CDs, it’s finally on the air: the Monkey Radio Archive is live, and 1507 tracks from the old station’s rotation are streaming right now.
Tune in
The stream is up and running. Hit play on the Groove@192kbps page, or point your player straight at it:
- Live365 station profile — the full web player and station info.
- Direct MP3 stream — paste into VLC, Winamp, or any internet-radio app.
This first cut of the playlist is 1507 tracks deep — the bulk of what I’ve been able to track down and acquire so far. It’s not everything; the old station played a staggering, hard-to-pin-down range of music, much of which you’d only ever hear there. As I keep hunting down the rest — across digital stores, used CDs, and the occasional 12” — they’ll go up on the station too. Consider this a living archive that grows as the collection does.
How it got here
If you want the long version of how a half-remembered internet radio station gets reconstructed from forum playlists and detective work, the deep dives cover the whole journey:
- History Lesson — what Monkey Radio was, and why it mattered.
- The Sources — the 2002 forum playlist, the Wayback Machine, and the lists that fill the gaps.
- Album Consolidation — collapsing 1600+ scattered tracks into as few albums as possible.
- The Hunt: Finding the Tracks — chasing obscure releases across stores, CDs, and vinyl.
- Rebuilding a Radio — turning the recovered music back into a station.
There are also longer write-ups on individual albums over in Reviews and Musings for the records that defined the sound, and more Deep Dives may be added as the mood strikes.
A labor of love
To be clear about what this is: the Monkey Radio Archive is an unofficial fan tribute, not the original station and not affiliated with it. The only goal here is to preserve (as faithfully as I can) the experience of the station that was the soundtrack of the early internet. It’s a labor of love, built by someone who just didn’t want that sound to disappear.
And, like the original, it runs ad-free. No spots, no interruptions: just the music. Pour something, hit play, and settle in.
Welcome back. Let’s groove.