KEXP 90.3KEXP 90.3

KEXP started in 1972 as KCMU, a student and volunteer station named after the University of Washington's Communications Building. The university cut its funding in 1981 and listeners took over paying for it, and in 1986 it moved to 90.3 with a transmitter on Capitol Hill. In 2000 it became the first station anywhere to stream uncompressed CD-quality audio; a year later Paul Allen's Experience Music Project came in, the call letters changed to KEXP and Allen rented it a building for a dollar a year.

Programming is DJ-driven with no playlist sitting above the host, built on indie and alternative but treating those as a floor rather than a ceiling. The live in-studio session is the station's signature — bands record a handful of songs on their way through Seattle — and the archive of those performances has become a discovery engine in its own right.