Indie Pop Rocks!Indie Pop Rocks!

Indie Pop Rocks! arrived on SomaFM in 2002, alongside CliqHop and Beat Blender in the first wave of expansion past the network's original three channels — only Drone Zone, Groove Salad and Secret Agent have been on air longer. Rusty Hodge had launched the station two years earlier from a basement garage in Bernal Heights, after running a micropower transmitter out at Burning Man, and the network has been funded by its listeners and free of advertising in every year since then.

The brief is unsigned bands and new independent releases with older indie tracks threaded through, which in practice means Jay Som and Torres next to Iron & Wine and Elvis Perkins, Softcult and Piroshka at the shoegaze end, and The Pastels further back. The channel is built to be ahead of the bands rather than to celebrate them a decade afterwards.