KEXP (90.3 FM) is a non-commercial radio station in Seattle, Washington, United States, specializing in indie music programmed by its disc jockeys. KEXP's studios are located at the Seattle Center. The transmitter is located in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The station is operated by the non-profit entity Friends of KEXP, an affiliate of the University of Washington. Since March 19, 2024, KEXP-FM's programming has been rebroadcast over Alameda, California–licensed KEXC, which serves the San Francisco Bay Area.
As well as daily variety mix shows featuring mostly alternative rock music, KEXP hosts weekly programs dedicated to other musical genres, such as hip-hop, Afrobeat, punk, ambient, alternative country, Latin music, and world music. The station also regularly hosts live, in-studio performances by artists. Alongside its analog transmitters serving Seattle and San Francisco, the station offers an online live stream, a real-time playlist with DJ notes, and an actively maintained YouTube channel.
Founded in 1972 as KCMU, the student-run station of the University of Washington, KEXP gained recognition for its influence on the regional music scene. It was the first station to air grunge bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden in the late 1980s. After partnering with the Experience Music Project, now the Museum of Pop Culture, in 2001, the station began to acquire an international listener base thanks to an early investment in internet streaming and its website. In 2014, the university transferred the FCC license of KEXP-FM to Friends of KEXP in exchange for on-air underwriting spots, granting the station independence in management and programming decisions.
History Early years as KCMU (1971–1985) The University of Washington (UW)'s involvement in radio broadcasting dates to the 1952 launch of KUOW-FM, which moved to 94.9 MHz in 1958. The station served as an environment for training communications students and provided classical music, fine arts, and sports programming. In the early 1970s, university budget cuts led to an increased professionalization of that station and decreased student involvement. The need for more student involvement had become apparent after a 1970 student strike at the UW, during which time airtime on KUOW was "taken over" and temporarily given to a student group known as the Student Communication Coalition and branding itself "Radio Free Seattle". As a result, four UW undergraduates—John Kean, Cliff Noonan, Victoria ("Tory") Fiedler, and Brent Wilcox—began planning to create a second UW station to be run by students. Noonan felt that there was insufficient student media in a time marked by student activism and protests; there was only a campus newspaper, The Daily, and Noonan had come from San Francisco, where he was aware of other college stations. The four students formulated a proposal and were able to secure the backing of the UW Board of Regents, which promised funding if the students could get a station approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). On July 13, 1971, UW filed an application for a new 10-watt non-commercial educational station on 90.5 MHz, which would be located in the Communications Building (abbreviated "CMU" on campus maps).
On October 5, the FCC granted the permit, and the UW Board of Regents approved the concept for the station (originally dubbed KPMG, for "Professional Media Group") the next month. It then fell to the students to put together the equipment and resources necessary to get KCMU going, including old turntables from a northwest Washington radio station and an old transmitter being discarded by KNHC at Nathan Hale High School as it was upgrading its own facilities; the students also received a $2,500 grant from the Board of Regents. Construction tasks included retrofitting a third-floor room in the building, erecting a transmitter tower atop McMahon Hall, and manually upgrading a telephone line to send audio from the Communications Building to the facility. KCMU began broadcasting on May 10, 1972. The station split its airtime between information and "folk-rock and blues" music. That summer, it sent reporters to both the Democratic and Republican national political conventions. The station also produced alternative student-led coverage of UW athletic events, including women's basketball, which was not being aired at the time by the commercial rightsholder for university sports, KIRO. The limited-power station served few listeners; a 2007 column recounting the station's early history noted that it "barely reached the Ave", the commercial heart of Seattle's University District, and UW administrators ordered a programming overhaul in 1975 to increase the audience. During the 1970s, the station produced several people who went on to managerial and on-air positions in Seattle broadcasting, among them Steve Pool.
In 1980, the university filed to increase KCMU's power from 10 watts to 182 in the wake of changes to FCC regulations encouraging many 10-watt stations to increase power. The $5,000 upgrade, carried out in June 1982, also marked the beginning of stereo broadcasts. During this time, the station began programming new wave music on weekdays from 3 p.m. to midnight; the station adopted new wave as its full-time musical format in July 1981 after KZAM (1540 AM), a commercial outlet broadcasting the same music, dropped it due to low ratings.
The shift in music and impending technical overhaul came as further university budget cuts meant the end of financial support from the UW's School of Communications; a one-time grant from the university student activities and fees committee kept the station on the air during the 1981–1982 school year and gave its backers time to hold fundraising events, the first in its history. This marked a permanent shift to being listener-supported, though KUOW provided engineering and accounting services. As part of its operating agreement, the station aired five-minute hourly newscasts prepared by the university's journalism students. In 1982, KCMU once again gained commercial competition in the form of KJET (1590 AM), which adopted the new wave format.
Championing the "Seattle sound" (1985–1992) KCMU was at the center of a new music scene in the mid-1980s that would eventually emerge as grunge. In the words of early 1980s music director Faith Henschel, the station had long been "very sympathetic to local bands" and already had a requirement that a local band must be played at least once every hour. In late 1985, Chris Knab, who co-founded 415 Records and was a former owner of Aquarius Records in San Francisco, sold his interest in 415 Records and became KCMU's station manager. The next year, Rolling Stone featured KCMU and other college stations in an article hailing them as growing "taste makers". Jonathan Poneman—who hosted a music show known as Audioasis—and Bruce Pavitt met at KCMU, leading to the foundation of record label Sub Pop. In a 2011 retrospective on grunge in Billboard, Poneman noted that his "big break" was being a DJ at KCMU. The role of KCMU—and format competitor KJET—in popularizing bands was further enhanced because of Seattle's liquor regulation regime, which stunted the live events business. KCMU increased its power in 1987 when it moved frequencies from 90.5 to 90.3 MHz and relocated its transmitter to a tower site in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, using 400 watts.
At this time, a series of influential figures with ties to bands were passing through the UW. Mark Arm lived in Terry Hall for a time, going on to front Green River and Mudhoney. Kim Thayil had moved to Seattle to follow Pavitt; he won a prize on KCMU, was invited to be a full-time DJ, and not only graduated from the UW with a degree in philosophy but got his band Soundgarden exposure on KCMU, the first station to play them. Music director Henschel created a two-cassette compilation of songs by local groups, titled "Bands That Will Make You Money", and sent it to record labels; that led to Soundgarden getting signed to A&M Records. Charles R. Cross, editor of music magazine The Rocket, noted, "It's no exaggeration to say that virtually every volunteer who had an air shift in the late '80s ended up getting a job in the music industry or playing some role in the Seattle scene." Soundgarden was not the only group that KCMU was breaking on the radio: in 1988, Kurt Cobain, looking for airplay for his band Nirvana, knocked on KCMU's door and handed the station a copy of his first single, "Love Buzz"; they did not play it until Cobain called from a gas station pay phone to request it. That same year, KCMU again became the only alternative music station in the Seattle market when KJET dropped the format.
While KCMU was becoming renowned in the grunge scene, its musical offerings were more varied. Under Henschel, the format was broadened to take in blues and African music, among other genres. The Sunday night Rap Attack was the first radio program in Seattle to play such artists as Ice-T, Eazy-E, and N.W.A. By the late 1990s, the program had changed names to Street Sounds, with hosts including DJ Nasty-Nes and Marcus "Kutfather" Tufono; it remains on KEXP's schedule .
By 1992, ten years after becoming listener-supported, KCMU's budget had grown from $20,000 to $180,000. As well as the two technical improvements in the 1980s, it had added more paid staffers and listeners.
Strife and change in the '90s (1992–2001) In November 1992, seeking to professionalize the station's sound, KCMU management made the decision to dismiss nine volunteer disc jockeys to add two syndicated radio programs to the lineup: World Cafe from WXPN in Philadelphia and Monitoradio, produced by The Christian Science Monitor. The decision caused an outcry and led KCMU supporters to organize as Censorship Undermines Radio Station Ethics, abbreviated CURSE. Protests centered around the changes and their near-unilateral implementation. Management further inflamed tensions after firing one volunteer reporter, Dick Burton, who discussed the controversy in a newscast; station manager Knab stated that Burton had violated a station policy barring on-air criticism of KCMU and then suspended the station's volunteer news staff. In response, the news staff presented their resignations; one DJ, Riz Rollins, resigned; and CURSE encouraged listeners to withhold donations. It circulated flyers reading "KCMU Is Dying", with Poneman arguing that Knab and other paid staff wanted to turn KCMU into a "baby NPR, middle-of-the-road, vaguely alternative, soft-rock radio station". Several labels, including Sub Pop, Capitol Records, and C/Z Records, withheld record service to the station. The dispute reached the front page of Billboard, which called KCMU "one of the most influential commercial-free stations in the country". Knab later defended his decisions as stemming from a desire by university leadership to grow the station.
The fight between KCMU management and CURSE, which led to KCMU discontinuing broadcasting between 1 and 6 a.m., made its way to the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in January 1993. Three listeners and 11 staffers who claimed they were fired without warning argued in federal court that their First Amendment rights to free speech were being violated by KCMU, owned by the University of Washington, a state agency; they sued Knab and university director of broadcast services Wayne Roth. By the time of the lawsuit, 22 volunteers had left the station within two months.