Radio KRadio K

The University of Minnesota was broadcasting before most of the country was listening: experiments from 1912, football scores in Morse code by 1915, and on 13 January 1922 the first radio license issued in the state, as WLB — which makes this the oldest licensed non-commercial station in the United States. It became KUOM in 1945. A separate student outfit, WMMR, ran on carrier current into the dormitories from 1948 and gave Garrison Keillor his first shift; the two merged in 1993 and came out as Radio K.

Students pick the music, and the rotation treats independent as a scope rather than a genre. A single morning can run old bluegrass into alt-country, seventies British folk, current shoegaze, a club remix and underground rap, and every new album comes with a staff note on why it made the cut. The AM signal is daytime-only, so three FM translators and the stream carry the rest of the day.