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Arts & Culture

Seattle’s Independent Music Station KEXP Hits Bay Area Airwaves

The station brings its eclectic musical programming to 92.7 FM San Francisco.
Nastia Voynovskaya
A radio host and engineer sit in a studio in front of a sign that reads "KEXP Seattle."
KEXP DJ Cheryl Waters broadcasts out of the Seattle Center on January 28, 2015 in Seattle, Washington. (Suzi Pratt/Getty Images)

If you’re a fan of acts like Japanese pop-funk band CHAI, Amsterdam Turkish psych rockers Altin Gün or Colombian electro-pop band Bomba Estéreo, there’s a chance that you’ve heard KEXP. The Seattle public radio station has 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube, where its in-studio concerts regularly garner tens of thousands of views. In fact, a large portion KEXP’s fanbase resides in the Bay Area — making the region well suited for KEXP’s expansion, which hits local airwaves March 19 on 92.7 FM.

“We hope that we can add value to the local ecosystem. And in that, one of our focuses has been to connect with and to build relationships with the other stations out there, both terrestrial and online,” said Chief Programming Officer Chris Kellogg in a recent interview.

Those other like-minded stations include San Francisco’s KALW, which features DJs active in the Bay Area’s live music and nightlife scenes, UC Berkeley’s KALX and BFF.FM, which streams an eclectic array of DIY programing out of San Francisco’s Mission District.

“We really think that there is space for all of us and that we can and look forward to opportunities for us to uplift each other,” Kellogg added.

KEXP emerged out of University of Washington in 1972, and established itself as a tastemaker in the late 1980s, when Nirvana and Soundgarden put the spotlight on Seattle.

Its Bay Area expansion materialized in October 2023, when it won an auction to purchase KREV 92.7 FM Alameda/San Francisco, which most recently operated as a hip-hop station. KEXP sources about half its budget from listener pledges, and funded the acquisition thanks to a $10 million bequest in a donor’s will, which the station has strategically invested.

Programming on KEXP Bay Area will mirror the DJ-driven, genre-less array of shows on KEXP Seattle, and the station will soon begin recruiting a host for a Bay Area music show it plans to launch, tentatively, in August. Already, KEXP Seattle boasts the longest running local music show in the Northwest, Audioasis.

“My hope — and what success will look like — is that over time, we’re able to develop that same sort of trust that we have with a lot of local folks here [in Seattle], as a destination to tap into what’s happening currently in the Bay Area musically across many, many genres,” Kellogg said. “When you tune in to 92.7 FM on Saturday nights when we launch the local music show, you’re going to likely hear something that you haven’t heard before, and you’re going to hear it alongside something that you do know, and that’s going to be exciting.”

In the meantime, KEXP’s CEO Ethan Raup is soliciting feedback from Bay Area music lovers and artists.

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