	Music overlooked by commercial radio finds a home on public stations playing varieties of rock and folk. Above: My Morning Jacket performs Jan. 8 for members of Seattle's KEXP. (Photo copyright by Gregory A. Perez for KEXP.)

Going by gut, music stations craft mixes for their markets

Originally published in Current, Feb. 26, 2007
By Mike Janssen

The new pop station in Juneau, Alaska, plays music that wouldn’t be out of place on many commercial radio stations — the Eagles, Sheryl Crow, the Black Eyed Peas, Alanis Morissette. One thing its listeners don’t hear: commercials.

That’s because Excellent Radio 100.7, which launched Jan. 12, is a new venture of KTOO, the local pubcaster. After buying a commercial pop station last year, KTOO’s programmers toyed with switching it to jazz or classical music but decided that serving a younger audience with top-40 hits remained a vital public service in their small market.

Like KTOO, a cohort of public stations around the country has migrated to pop, eclectic or Adult Album Alternative (aka Triple A) formats. RadioMilwaukee and Minnesota Public Radio’s 89.3 The Current are among a second wave of contemporary music stations hitting the airwaves, following paths blazed by such elder siblings as Philadelphia’s WXPN, New York’s WFUV and KCRW in Los Angeles.

These stations have grabbed the chance to fill a vacuum left by commercial radio, which largely overlooks indie bands and up-and-coming singer-songwriters as well as the musical innovators of yesteryear. They mix their own formats to bring younger listeners to public radio, a much-discussed goal in the system. Some stations succeed at the task and now boast many listeners in their 30s.

The stations’ music mixes vary widely, reflecting the ways in which the programmers gauge audience tastes — some basing their choices on intuition, listener feedback, turnout at local concerts or their sense of fan support for new acts.

Their approach and focus on public service set them apart from commercial competitors. Andy Kline, p.d. at Excellent Radio, says the pubcaster could easily have programmed the new station with a prepackaged adult contemporary service, but it chose to roll its own format.

“We would have maintained the same listenership that the [defunct commercial] station had,” he says. “But that didn’t fit into the mission of public radio — to bring something more, an approach that had a philosophy to it beyond just ‘Give them what they want.’”

Gut check: Nirvana for breakfast?

Some of the growing interest in new-music formats can be traced to Seattle, where KEXP has attracted attention throughout public radio for its ambitious marketing efforts beyond its home city and its success in building a large online audience.

John Richards, morning host and associate p.d., expects KEXP’s online audience to equal its broadcast audience within a few years, even though the FM average-quarter-hour audience is growing — 78 percent since 2000, reaching 5,000 last year.

KEXP’s programmers have been helping other public stations create their own music formats, Richards says, including RadioMilwaukee. The Wisconsin station, owned by Milwaukee’s school board, launched a format Friday amined at young listeners. RadioMilwaukee execs declined an interview request for this article.

The Seattle station has aired contemporary music for 30 years, originally under the call letters KCMU. But deejays have evolved from the college-radio mold of showcasing their own tastes and now focus on musical flow and the listener’s experience, Richards says.

Richards shies from imposing a label on KEXP’s wide-ranging playlist, preferring to describe it as “everything” or simply “KEXP music.” The station features 14 specialty shows covering genres including jazz, hip-hop, blues and rockabilly.

Like other programmers, Richards relies on a gut feeling for listener preference. “You don’t know what the audience wants,” he says. “Should I be playing Nirvana’s Bleach at 8 a.m.? I don’t know. . . . But we build up this relationship with the audience, and our core listeners respond during pledge drives.”

KEXP programmers review new releases and determine which to include in their new-music rotation, divided into heavy-, medium- and light-play categories. Roughly 60 percent of the music aired is recently released. Deejays draw the rest from KEXP’s extensive library of older material.

Hosts choose their own tunes within rotation guidelines, take listener requests and also play a local band each hour. Listeners should expect to hear new material but also know that KEXP will play the newest releases from talked-about bands, Richards says.

Hosts on MPR’s The Current enjoy a similar degree of freedom and even help to select the new albums for regular rotation, says Steve Nelson, p.d. He describes the station’s wide range as an “anti-format.” “We play the best new music alongside that music’s roots and influences,” he says.

Since its launch in January 2005, The Current has been expanding its back catalog of older releases. It now has 18,000 songs in its digital play-to-air system, and hosts bring their own music for their shifts.

The Current set out to reach an audience unserved by public radio, and data suggest it has succeeded. It shares only 46 percent of its audience with KNOW, Minnesota Public Radio’s news/talk station in the Twin Cities, and 22 percent with KSJN, MPR’s classical station.

“It’s a lofty goal, but we really want to make this a better place to live,” Nelson says. “It’s great that there is this movement of public radio stations trying to serve their communities in the way that only public radio can.”

Staying mainstream in Alaska

Both KEXP and The Current attract relatively young audiences for public stations. In fall 2006, The Current’s median listener age was 36 and KNOW’s was 52. The average KEXP listener is 33 years old.

Public radio programmers may be hungry for thirtysomethings, but the contemporary music on WTMD in Towson, Md., also draws listeners in their 40s and 50s. Generation Xers have aged into parenthood and home ownership, but “their cultural point of reference is Nirvana, not Bruce Springsteen,” says Steve Yasko, g.m.

“What we’ve been doing is really looking at our audience’s cultural references, age groups and tastes,” Yasko says, “and we see that they’re totally not being served by commercial radio. And as any good public radio station does, we will serve an audience that deserves to be served.”

The station, operated by Towson University, switched to Triple A in December 2002 from a smooth jazz and adult contemporary format. It enjoys strong core loyalty and is trying to broaden its cume, Yasko says.

Mike Vasilikos, WTMD’s p.d., follows his gut when creating playlists and favors new releases from bands already established as listener favorites. Performers who work on creating their own buzz also grab his attention, and the station prides itself on helping grow the fan bases of emerging artists such as Brandi Carlile and Regina Spektor.

Meanwhile, the music played on Juneau’s KTOO veers closer to the mainstream. In a town with just seven radio stations — three now owned by KTOO — the pubcaster sees pop as a worthy contribution to the culture.

Stations such as MPR’s The Current “provide an alternative for people where there is a top 40 station,” Kline says. “We are the top 40 station, so we’re the primary source. If we only provided an alternative to that, we wouldn’t be serving the people that we think really need service in this town.”

Juneau’s younger residents rely on a pop station to connect them to the music and culture of the lower 48, Kline says. But he adds that the service also provides an “on-ramp” for younger listeners to public radio and introduces them to the noncommercial model.

KTOO bought the station that became Excellent Radio and one other FM signal last year from White Oak Broadcasting, an owner piping in music from California. White Oak sought to sell both stations as a package, and KTOO saw a chance to split its previous signal’s news and eclectic music formats.

At the same time KTOO launched Excellent Radio,10 it converted its old FM channel to news and shifted its volunteer-hosted music shows to one of the new services, now called Rain Country Radio. Rain Country and Excellent Radio, are also the first stations in the country to rebroadcast the music programmed locally at KCRW, including Morning Becomes Eclectic, the station’s flagship show. The KCRW shows air overnight on the two services.

Kline hosts Excellent Radio live during afternoon shifts and records voice tracks for other dayparts. KTOO plans to hire more deejays for the station and involve students at local high schools in producing news modules.

Excellent Radio will air fund drives, but KTOO expects to draw only small contributions at first. Underwriters, however, have already shown interest in reaching the young audience, Kline says.

Going by gut, music stations craft mixes for their markets

Gut check: Nirvana for breakfast?

Staying mainstream in Alaska

Seattle

St. Paul

Juneau

Milwaukee