Chalk up another victory for independent music. The phoenix of radio is rising from the ashes, ripping across the sky and tearing through the airwaves. Here comes project Radio Liberation with Seattle’s influential, listener-supported radio station KEXP partnering with Radio New York (WNYE) to establish a new order, hell bent upon returning independent and alternative music back to the discerning listener. The unprecedented partnership will launch March 24 on WNYE.
The KEXP-WNYE partnership is significant not only for the amount of programming to be shared (39 hours a week), but also the extent of collaboration between the two stations. Radio Liberation will bring to WNYE a nightly world music show and a weekly music variety show, and it will produce hundreds of live performances each year between the two stations, increasing access to both New York bands and touring artists. KEXP’s approach to presenting its genre of music, alternately referred to as indie, college or eclectic rock, is currently not available in New York.
Through the Radio Liberation partnership, KEXP will be able to reach another 14 million terrestrial listeners in New York, sharing Seattle’s unique music community with New Yorkers.
At KEXP, the DJs choose what they play, with a few limitations: certain bands are in rotation, and a local band must be played once an hour at a minimum. The station’s dozens of volunteers dedicate themselves to helping discover bands. The DJs consider themselves curators and aspire to juxtapose songs in a way that illuminates them - creating context for the music and forging a stronger connection between the listener, the Artist and the station.
Forward-thinking KEXP has always embraced and even created technology to overcome its limited signal and emerge as a national tastemaker in indie music. In 2000, KEXP (then known as KCMU) became the first station to offer uncompressed, CD-quality audio live over the Internet. In 2001, at the request of KEXP DJs, University of Washington engineers invented CD players that could connect to the Web to retrieve song and band information, which could then be transferred to a real-time playlist at www.kexp.org. In 2002, the station began offering a streaming archive of all programs from the past two weeks, as well as all of KEXP’s hundreds of in-studio performances. It is also the nation’s first terrestrial station to provide a low-bandwidth stream for mobile phones and handheld devices.
About one-third of KEXP’s listener-members live outside the state of Washington, with large clusters of listeners in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
KEXP has built a reputation as a champion of new and emerging artists and musical forms. KEXP’s mission is to enrich people’s lives by providing a wide array of music and by exploring, developing and applying relevant technology to deepen and extend musical experiences. Listeners enjoy KEXP at 90.3 FM in Seattle and around the world at KEXP.org.
Seattle’s KEXP-FM, NYC Station Team Up | Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Radio NY and Seattle’s KEXP FM to Bring ‘Music That Matters’ | The New York Observer
KEXP And Radio New York Liberate Listeners From The Norm — KEXP/WNYE Press Release
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Now playing: KEXP Live
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As reported by Digital Media Wire, in a panel entitled Band as Brand at the Canadian Music Week’s digital music & media summit, Terry McBride of Nettwerk Music Group suggests that in order to align the Artists’ interests with those of their record label or management company, they should get stock options, much like the company executives get. That way, it would be a true partnership in building the artists’ brands for the long run.
