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No doubt, 2025 will have plenty to say about radio. But first, we’d like to offer our quiet observations on one notable radio station. KEXP FM, the student-run station affiliated with the University of Washington in Seattle, captured our imagination more than a decade ago. KEXP FM had moved into a new WheatNet IP audio networked facility in December of 2015, and at the time, we marveled how different this independent, non-commercial station was from all the others.
KEXP FM was, and still is, known for its influence on the local music scene in Seattle, complete with live, in-studio performance events.
Fast forward ten years to the month, and KEXP FM is still operating from its WheatNet facility in Seattle’s hip lower Queen Anne neighborhood and is still broadcasting local bands live and its DJs are still curating music live in real-time. What you hear on the air comes straight from the heart and soul of the DJ in the studio, or often, from one or both of its live performance stages. Last we heard, KEXP broadcasts from the stage an incredible 500 live performances and video productions a year, all routed and controlled by WheatNet IP. (Read The Things We Do.)
This independent station was the first to host performances and air grunge bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden in the late 1980s. KEXP FM remains an important part of the indie music scene in Seattle, and it also now has a global reach of over 200,000 weekly listeners online and on-air and more than 3 million YouTube subscribers. Even in this age of streaming, bands still drop off CDs at the front desk in hopes of making it to the KEXP stage for an on-air performance.
In 2024, KEXP expanded its on-air footprint to the San Francisco Bay area with the launch of KEXC FM there. Then, in May of 2025, KEXP doubled down on live, unscripted radio with the full integration of the Myriad playout system into its WheatNet IP audio network. Myriad is known as a flexible automation system, and by integrating these functions into WheatNet IP logic, DJs are now able to more easily and quickly cue IDs, music, and other files to fit the mood of the moment. Myriad allows the station to bypass most of the automation and can accommodate manual operation, which KEXP does 24/7 with live DJs and human real-time curation. KEXP is, essentially, doing the opposite of AI generated programming. Indeed, its ad campaign in the bay area featured the slogan “some things are better w/o AI.”
As the industry moves into more AI-driven music selection and automated programming, KEXP is a quiet reminder of what makes radio…radio. We suspect that 2025 will have a lot to say about radio market share, consolidation, and so much more, but for us, stations like KEXP FM tell the full story of radio going forward.
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