About me

Welcome to Groove Guru, a hub for Vinyl collectors & enthousiasts! My name is Etienne, 47 from the Netherlands. Son of a Woodstock hippie, music was part of my upbringing. My Father always had a lot of vinyl records but when i finally flew out of the nest the collection exploded and my room turned quickly into a full Vinyl room. Currently his collection holds more then 10.000 vinyl records. Growing up i started collecting digital music, loved the search for new bands, especially outside of the Music Industry created bubble they put us on. Growing up on the Crossroads where analog met the digital world i created a personal digital library. For years i had the idea of a digital jukebox kind of system i wanted in my home but never found what i had in mind. Then i came across Roon and found my digital jukebox. Connected it to my audioset and thought that was it! But i started to realize i was missing the tactile feeling of holding music mediums. The circle was complete when the record player finally came back in my life. Now i could loan records from my dad and have the true experience again of taking time to listen to music again. My background is Organic chemistry / Chemical Technology, with years of experience in Scientific Research & Development combined with auditor for pharmaceutical companies. These worlds collided and helped me create Groove Guru!

Searching for the next collectible went global looking through more and more sites. That search is part of the fun!

Over the years I built a list of sites I would go through manually to find that next item. This took quite some effort but as I said I love the search. It was this list that gave me the initial idea. A tool that could help collectors search easier and on an even larger scale. When the idea turned from a list into a vision, the seed was planted. Combining it with a collection tracker and some helpfull tools and Groove Guru was born!

My focus then shifted to the educational part and first i created The Groove Chronicles, the history of Vinyl! And the hunger grew for more. It was the creation of the Deadwax tool (Pressing information source) that gave me a glimpse of what turned out to the educational tool that gave the website its name, The Groove Guru. An impressive dossier that gives you all the information on an album you never knew you wanted.

A simple idea turned into this amazing place for Vinyl collectors & enthousiasts backed by a server retrieving and holding an immense database to feed each tool and the powerful search function. I came to the point that a hobby tool became a serious website asking serious investment in time and resources. And with so much more ideas for tools and features, the step was taken to turn this into a business. Why, because I want something sustainable to share with the world and with the ability to grow even further.

For the love of Vinyl