WMCN 91.7 FMWMCN 91.7 FM

Macalester's station began as WBOM, went quiet between 1955 and 1961, and came back as KMAC on 550 AM from a vacant classroom in the campus center, playing mostly folk and jazz to dormitories wired through the walls. In 1978 the students won FCC approval to build an FM studio, paid for by the college's Community Council and sympathetic campus groups while the administration contributed nothing, and WMCN 91.7 signed on at ten at night on 6 October 1979 with a Switch Hitter's Ball, three local bands playing live from the union.

Sixty DJs filled the first schedule with progressive rock, new wave, jazz and country-rock, and the arrangement has not changed: students and community members take an hour each, nobody hands them a playlist, and the genres drift with whoever is enrolled. That has often meant shoegaze and indie, with the station's writers following Twin Cities bands from venue to venue.