Poolside FM: Endless Summer in a Retro Mac Window

Poolside FM is an internet radio station that has decided it is permanently July 1987. Press play and you get a nonstop stream of sun-drenched summer music, wrapped inside a retro computer desktop interface, with grainy VHS holiday footage playing in a little window beside it. It describes itself as the ultra-summer internet radio station playing an infinity pool of summer sounds 24/7, and honestly, that’s the whole review.

What is Poolside FM?

Most internet radio is a play button and a track title. Poolside FM is a whole environment. You land on something that looks like a beige-era desktop operating system, draggable windows, chunky pixel icons, the works, and the music is just one of the things running on it.

The video is the masterstroke. Somebody’s holiday camcorder footage loops away in the corner: pools, palm trees, sunglasses, people waving at a camera decades ago. It has no relationship to the song playing and that’s exactly why it works. Your brain fills in a memory you never had.

The project has since grown into Poolsuite, a slightly larger universe of summer-themed things, but the front door is unchanged. Music, sun, low-resolution nostalgia.

What keeps it from being a novelty is the music itself. The selections are curated, not shuffled, sun-bleached pop, breezy grooves, the kind of tracks that sound like they were mixed next to an actual swimming pool. You could strip the whole interface away and it would still be a good radio station. The interface just means you never want to.

What can you do on Poolside FM?

• Just press play. That’s it. That’s the tutorial. It runs 24/7 and needs nothing from you.
• Browse the mixtapes. Sets are curated rather than shuffled out of a recommendation engine, so they hang together like an actual DJ made them.
• Poke at the desktop. There are little apps and windows scattered around the interface: a newsroom, an event calendar, a guestbook, a members area. Half the fun is clicking things to see what opens.
• Leave it running as a second screen. The video loop and the sound together make an absurdly effective mood-setter for a dinner party, a long work afternoon, or a grim February Tuesday.
• Sign up for membership if you fall hard. There’s an optional paid tier with member perks, but nothing about the free experience feels crippled.

Tips to get the most out of it

Give it a whole monitor. This is not a background-tab site. The interface, the video and the color palette are doing most of the emotional work, and shrinking it to a favicon throws that away.

Use it as a February treatment. Poolside FM is at its most powerful in the dead of winter. It is essentially a lamp for your ears.

Drag the windows around. People miss that the desktop is genuinely interactive. Move things, open things, close things. The interface rewards fiddling in a way modern sites almost never do.

Turn it on ten minutes before guests arrive. It sets a room’s temperature faster than any playlist, and everyone asks what it is.

Don’t fight the shuffle. Poolside FM’s charm is that you don’t pick the song. Let it hand you something you’d never have searched for, then go find the artist afterwards.

Note the tracks you love as they pass. There’s no algorithm quietly building you a profile here, which is refreshing, but it also means nothing gets saved for you. Keep a scratch list.

If you like Poolside FM, also try…

• My90sTV: the same nostalgia trick, but as a channel-surfable 90s television set.
• Radiooooo: pick a country and a decade on a world map and hear what it sounded like there.
• Radio Garden: spin the globe and drop into live radio stations anywhere on Earth.
• Drive & Listen: dashcam footage plus local radio from cities around the world.

Dig into more of these in Music & Audio and Entertainment & Fun.

Open Poolside FM, press play, and pretend the weather outside is somebody else’s problem.