CoversCovers

Covers arrived in 2009, in the same batch as PopTron and Mission Control, nine years into SomaFM and well past the point where the obvious genre rooms had been claimed. It remains the one channel organised around a relationship between records rather than a sound: Rusty Hodge, running the station out of San Francisco since 2000 on listener donations and no advertising at all, took a format that usually turns up as a novelty segment inside somebody else's show and gave it a frequency of its own.

Era and genre are left wide open. The Cure take on the Doors and Senor Coconut rebuilds them again in Latin electronics; Me First and the Gimme Gimmes sprint through the Beach Boys, Ministry drag Dylan through the mud, and Obadiah Parker plays Hey Ya alone on an acoustic guitar. Tribute compilations and B-sides fill the rest, which is why the names scroll past unrecognised.