Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

SEATTLE (AP) -- Before dawn on a rainy Friday, John Richards totes a stack of CDs and a paper cup of coffee into the booth at KEXP. On the wall, yellow-headed pins stuck in a world map mark the origin of song requests:

Baltimore. Boston. Baghdad.

The clock hits 6 a.m., and the DJ's catchy, gentle theme song - written for him by local folk singer Damien Jurado - implies what listeners might hear: "I'll take hip-hop, with a side of punk rock, some country western to go ...." Next up, Stone Roses, followed by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

In the past few years, commercial-free KEXP has transcended its meager 4,700-watt signal, embracing and even creating Internet technology to emerge as a national indie music tastemaker. With a very few other like-minded stations, it's enjoying a word-of-mouth popularity boom even as Americans are listening to less conventional radio.

"They're proving, if people would really look, that listeners want compelling music, that they'll buy it, that they'll support it," said Steve Nice, who represents the band Idlewild, which recently played at KEXP. "It's not about some stupid Arbitron rating."

In spring 2004, about 26,000 people listened to KEXP online every week - more than any other Internet radio station in the country, according to Arbitron's now-defunct Internet broadcasting service. This year, that number has jumped to 50,000, with large clusters of listeners in New York, where KEXP broadcasts live twice a year; Chicago; San Francisco; and Washington, D.C. Listeners are giving the nonprofit station a projected $1.7 million this year, nearly $1 million more than they gave in 2003.

As Richards went on the air that rainy morning, Microsoft employee Peter Thompson was listening on the Internet in Redmond, just across Lake Washington from Seattle but beyond KEXP's weak signal. Two thousand miles east, in Columbus, Ohio, Pat Leonard was slipping on headphones at his cubicle. In Rhode Island, Cynthia Reed blasted the station all morning in her work room at the Providence Public Library.

For many listeners, buying music they've discovered on KEXP is like buying organic produce from local farmers. Others need help filling their iPods, but commercial stations play the same bands over and over.