The Magazine of The University of Montana

Has Digital Killed The Radio Star?

College station strives to stay relevant as music consumption changes

By Jacob Baynham | Photos by Todd Goodrich

KBGA Program Director Ashley Barber became known for his 2 to 6 a.m. graveyard show on the station.

It’s two minutes to nine and three degrees outside on a wintry morning in March. Bleary-eyed students trickle across the Oval, carrying coffee to their morning classes. Campus is quiet.

But inside a small studio in the University Center, a handful of students have been awake for hours. It’s show time. Lindsay Alvestad, a senior in broadcast journalism, has headphones on her ears, a sheet of paper in her hand, and a microphone in her face.

Knuckles rap on the glass pane that separates the music studio from the news. “One and a half,” says the disc jockey on the other side.

“Guys, get your scripts read,” Alvestad shouts to two student volunteers outside the studio. “We’ve got a minute and a half.”

Emily Creasia, a freshman from Helena, scans her script again. Next to her, Jake Stevenson, a sophomore from Boston, reads his sports news for the fifth time.

“Ten seconds,” Alvestad yells.

The red “On Air” light illuminates outside the studio. Alvestad leans into the soundboard and rolls the catchy music of the newscast introduction. “Good morning, Missoula,” she says. “I’m Lindsay Alvestad and these are our top headlines ...”

Haywood Brown, or H-Rap, is KBGA’s longest-serving DJ. He often dances to his music while shaking a tambourine.

Welcome to KBGA college radio at The University of Montana, riding Missoula’s airwaves at 89.9 megahertz FM. It’s the only station in town where a random tune-in is just as likely to spill bubblegum pop from your speakers as it is Elvis Costello, punk rock, or the choral arrangements of Eric Whitacre.

KBGA was founded by students in 1996. It operates out of two studios and two offices in the UC. A tower on Waterworks Hill, just north of caampus, transmits the 1,000-watt station for a radius of 30 miles—the mountains stop the signal from going any farther. The station is managed by nine part-time staff, and the news is gathered by nine part-time reporters. All the employees are students. One hundred thirty unpaid DJs work shifts around the clock to ensure that the music is always spinning. Thirty volunteer newscasters read the news twice a day, Monday through Friday.

For all of these efforts, KBGA has been named Best Radio Station in town by the Missoula Independent’s reader poll seven times in twelve years.

“What’s remarkable about this operation is that it runs seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, all year, all through the holidays, without a single full-time employee,” says Terry Conrad, a KBGA staff adviser since 1997.

Conrad knows a little bit about the challenges of starting a radio station and keeping it on the air. In 1973, he helped found Missoula’s Montana Public Radio station, KUFM. Conrad meets with the students once a week after his jazz show on KUFM. He offers advice when asked, but mainly he just listens. If a problem arises that he’s seen before, he’ll share his experience.

“I’m sort of the keeper of the history,” he says. “If they want to do something that’s been done before, I can tell them how it went.”

KBGA Music Director Ben Weiss listens to about 100 CDs each week to decide what gets played.

Conrad is retired now, and most of the bands and even the genres that KBGA plays are not from his generation. But he still tunes into the station himself from time to time—especially when he’s exercising. “I find it compatible with my elliptical machine at home,” he says. “It’s good music. Good music is good music no matter when it comes from.”

Sometimes it’s all the advice he can give the staff just to remind them that they are still students, and that all the hours they put into the station shouldn’t detract them from their studies. For them, “it’s really a labor of love,” Conrad says.

Love is certainly Ashley Barber’s motivation. Standing in KBGA’s poster-plastered main office, he says, “It isn’t really about the money here; we just all love college radio.”

Barber works between thirty and thirty-five hours a week at the station but gets paid for only twenty, at close to minimum wage. It doesn’t seem to faze him. “I love the people that I work with. I love to be a part of people’s lives in choosing what they listen to,” he says. “Music is related to mood.” Barber loves putting people in a good mood.

Like most KBGA staff members, Barber first got involved with the station as a volunteer DJ. He held a graveyard show on Saturdays from 2 to 6 a.m. What music did he select for the Friday night revelers who were a large part of his audience? Classical.

“You’d think people would want to hear death metal on their way home from the bars, but it was surprisingly popular,” Barber says. He called it “DJ Crash’s Feng Shui Music Show,” because he thought it might help restore order in people’s minds after a long night.

That was three years ago. Barber is now KBGA’s program director. A sophomore studying digital filmmaking, He wears a fashionable T-shirt and has studs in both of his earlobes. Surrounding him are shelves upon shelves of CDs. Crates of vinyl records sit on the studio counters, all part of KBGA’s total library of roughly 14,000 albums. Estimating a conservative forty minutes per album, that’s enough music to play continuously for 385 days without repeating a song. And that’s not even counting the music DJs bring in from their own collections.

It’s this diversity of content that keeps listeners tuned in and wins respect among competitors. One station often contending for Best Radio Station awards is Missoula’s 103.3 The Trail. The Trail is a much bigger station than KBGA—it’s owned by Simmons Media Group, which operates thirty-one stations in eight states—but nevertheless gives its college counterpart props where props are due. “We view (KBGA) more as a friend” than a competitor, says Trail DJ Tracy Lopez, who launched her own radio career at the UM station. “We enjoy those music lovers out there who donate their time to run a radio station the way they do.”

One thing that keeps Barber putting in the hours is the support he feels from the Missoula community. The seven Best Radio Station plaques hanging from the walls are testament to that. But the community’s backing goes further. This February the KBGA staff exceeded their fundraising goal of $10,000 in their annual Radio-thon for the second year in a row.

Until 2003, the station was funded entirely through student fees. But when the budget started falling short, KBGA began enlisting public support in a campaign drive similar to that of Montana Public Radio. The $12 annual student fee, the Radio-thon, the underwriting of local businesses, and a handful of concerts every year give KBGA an annual operating budget of $179,000—usually just enough to cover costs.

Money isn’t the only obstacle KBGA tackles every year to survive. The station also has the daunting task of staying relevant to its listeners as music consumption goes through its most dramatic changes since the invention of the gramophone. People are no longer confined to the radio when seeking new tunes. Music lovers now can listen to the hottest new hits on Web sites such as MySpace, download them on iTunes, stream them on Pandora.com, or even have them sent to their mobile phones.

“In this day and age, people aren’t as likely to listen to the radio as in the past,” Barber admits. “But it’s not like they’ve stopped making radios.”

He points to the continued success of KBGA’s Radio-thon as indication that the station’s audience is broad and supportive, despite the new music gizmos. But Barber and his colleagues want to make the station more accessible to everyone by streaming it on their Web site so that people with or without radios can tune in anywhere in the world.

He drives this point home by stepping outside the music studio and closing the door. “We’re five feet away from the studio,” he says, “and yet if we don’t have a radio, we can’t hear anything.” That’s not good enough for Barber. Not in the twenty-first century.

The KBGA staff is looking for the resources to create a new Web site that offers listeners, including alumni and parents of students, the capability of “tuning in” to a live feed of the station. People would then be able to listen to it across campus or across the globe, with just the click of a mouse. Most major radio stations these days have this capability.

“

That’s what I love about this station, You can bring your own music. You can play old or new or in-between.

— Haywood Brown

”

KBGA streamed music on its Web site several years ago, although only a couple dozen people could listen at one time. The station was forced to remove the function when music licensing companies started lobbying Congress to pass new legislation that would make streaming prohibitively expensive. The legislation has since been mired in appeals by radio stations around the country and is unlikely to pass.

KBGA’s outgoing general manager, Timothy Donahue, estimates it would cost $8,000 to establish a new Web site with streaming capability. It may seem small, but it’s a hard sum to squeeze into an annual budget that is already stretched.

“It’s a process that takes awhile,” Donahue says, “because we have to be fiscally sound before we take a leap like that.”

The station is preparing for that jump by digitizing its musical library. Employees are donating their free time to this effort, individually copying 14,000 CDs onto the office server. It takes a lot of time.

“After two months, we probably have about 5 percent of the library digitized,” says Music Director Ben Weiss, who recently was elected to replace Donahue as general manager. The pile of CDs on Weiss’ desk—albums sent by record labels and promotion companies hoping to get their artists airtime—is not speeding up the process. It’s Weiss’ job to listen to each of them—about 100 per week—to determine what gets a place on the shelf and what gets tossed. A cardboard box full of discards sits behind him.

“I’m overwhelmed with music here,” says Weiss. “Not that I’m complaining.” Seventy percent of what he listens to ends up in the toss box. To be fair, he plays each CD for at least two minutes before making a decision, though he says “sometimes I know in ten seconds.”

“It’s difficult, though,” Weiss says, “because even if it’s garbage, it’s someone’s art.”

One recent afternoon, the fingers of Haywood Brown, a tall sixty-two-year-old retired welder from South Carolina, hovered over a shelf of CDs that had made Weiss’ cut. Brown was picking out some tunes for his Saturday morning show.

Brown—or H-Rap, as he’s known on Missoula’s airwaves—is the nephew of the late blues legend Nappy Brown and is KBGA’s longest-serving DJ. He’s been hosting a soul and funk show since 2000, and is one of the station’s most distinctive voices. On the taped promotion for his show, Brown says he’s “the man that puts more dip in your hip, more glide in your stride. I separate the music from the wax.”

With his flared jeans, collared red velvet jacket, and boxy disco shades, Brown looks like he just stepped out of a club in the late ’60s, “back when love was free,” as he says. He came to Montana with his wife in 1997. “Missoula,” he proclaimed at the time. “That sounds like a soul name.”

When Brown first started as a DJ, he was nervous in the studio. But it didn’t take him long to find his groove. “I thought, ‘I gotta have some flavor,’” he remembers. “I gotta have some action. I gotta have some romance. I gotta be kind of suave.” To perfect his radio voice, he started reciting tongue-twisters during his part-time job as a school bus driver.

Brown enjoys the freedom at KBGA, which allows him to play whatever music he chooses. “That’s what I love about this station,” he says. “You can bring your own music. You can play old or new or in-between.”

After nine years in the studio, Brown’s passion for radio runs undiminished—a zeal he shares with his colleagues at KBGA. “It’d take a ball and chain to pull me from this place,” he says. “Anything that you love, if you love it, you’ll get up for it, go to bed for it, and you’ll think how you can do it better.”

About the Author

Jacob Baynham graduated from the UM School of Journalism in 2007. He spent the following year freelancing in Asia—from Hong Kong to Afghanistan—publishing his stories and photos in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Toronto Star, the San Antonio Express-News, and Newsweek. He is currently a news editor with University Relations.