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KEXP teased its San Francisco broadcast with a 72-hour stunt
CULTURE
KEXP teased its San Francisco broadcast with a 72-hour stunt
By Timothy Karoff
March 20, 2024
FILE: KEXP DJ Cheryl Waters conducts the first live broadcast at the groundbreaking of KEXP’s home at Seattle Center on Jan. 28, 2015, in Seattle.
Suzi Pratt/Getty Images
If you tuned your radio to 92.7 FM this weekend, you likely heard whispers of ghosts of Bay Area radio past. … Seattle nonprofit radio station KEXP-FM kicked off its first official Bay Area broadcast Tuesday morning, four months after purchasing a bankrupt Bay Area station for $3.75 million. For fans of indie music, the news is exciting. KEXP is well-loved for its Live on KEXP broadcasts, which have reached millions of eyes and ears over YouTube. But for some listeners, the real excitement came the weekend before the official launch, when a mysterious broadcast hijacked 92.7 FM.
Snippets of songs by local artists and archival radio clips faded in and out over a swirl of static and drone frequencies. If you tuned in at one minute, you’d hear a vintage Bay Area radio jingle; a minute later, you’d hear a faint, old-timey voice explaining the mechanics of FM broadcasting.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the broadcast was not what you could hear but what you couldn’t: No DJ stepped up to the microphone to explain the auditory zoo. Listeners were left to scratch their heads, from Friday morning all the way through the weekend.
The sound collage may have seemed like it emerged from nowhere, but it was actually an example of a common practice in radio: “stunting.” When a station dramatically pivots from one type of programming to another, broadcasters often pull “stunts” to punctuate the transition.
{snip}
KEXP teased its San Francisco broadcast with a 72-hour stunt
By Timothy Karoff
March 20, 2024
FILE: KEXP DJ Cheryl Waters conducts the first live broadcast at the groundbreaking of KEXP’s home at Seattle Center on Jan. 28, 2015, in Seattle.
Suzi Pratt/Getty Images
If you tuned your radio to 92.7 FM this weekend, you likely heard whispers of ghosts of Bay Area radio past. … Seattle nonprofit radio station KEXP-FM kicked off its first official Bay Area broadcast Tuesday morning, four months after purchasing a bankrupt Bay Area station for $3.75 million. For fans of indie music, the news is exciting. KEXP is well-loved for its Live on KEXP broadcasts, which have reached millions of eyes and ears over YouTube. But for some listeners, the real excitement came the weekend before the official launch, when a mysterious broadcast hijacked 92.7 FM.
Snippets of songs by local artists and archival radio clips faded in and out over a swirl of static and drone frequencies. If you tuned in at one minute, you’d hear a vintage Bay Area radio jingle; a minute later, you’d hear a faint, old-timey voice explaining the mechanics of FM broadcasting.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the broadcast was not what you could hear but what you couldn’t: No DJ stepped up to the microphone to explain the auditory zoo. Listeners were left to scratch their heads, from Friday morning all the way through the weekend.
The sound collage may have seemed like it emerged from nowhere, but it was actually an example of a common practice in radio: “stunting.” When a station dramatically pivots from one type of programming to another, broadcasters often pull “stunts” to punctuate the transition.
{snip}