‘KUSF-in-Exile’ now streaming online with help from WFMU

As supporters of KUSF continue to raise funds to challenge the University of San Francisco’s sale of its transmitter, the campus station’s DJs who were forced off the air in January have found a way to start broadcasting again.

During a benefit concert for the Save KUSF movement’s legal fees Saturday night at The Uptown Night Club in Oakland, DJ Brian “The 6th Degree” Springer announced that famed New York City noncommercial station WFMU is donating some of its bandwidth to support an online streaming version of KUSF-in-Exile. Springer said the stream should already be up and running and initially will air archived KUSF shows but soon will transition to a live format. True to his word, a link on the KUSF Archives site appears to be working.

For those of you who have missed out on the all the local radio intrigue, here is the backstory: KUSF operated as a freeform community station for 34 years, giving airtime to everything from local bands to a gay Catholic ministry (as Springer put it during his plea at Saturday’s concert, “Where else are you going to hear people talking about God and dick for half an hour?”).

On Jan. 18, the university announced it was selling the station to a classical music network owned by University of Southern California for $3.75 million. It was all part of a game of musical chairs for the Bay Area’s airwaves that involved classical station KDFC becoming a noncommercial station and moving to KUSF’s frequency (90.3), leaving Entercom Communications free to start broadcasting a classic rock format on KDFC’s old frequency (102.1). When the music stopped, it was KUSF’s DJs left without a chair.

The sale (and the way it was carried out, with security guards ordering everyone out of the station in the middle of a show) left the staff, volunteers and listeners with feelings ranging from hurt to outrage. They’ve channeled that into a petition filed with the Federal Communications Commission to block the sale.

I could go on and on about how all of this is the fault of Congress and their dum-dum Telecommunications Act of 1996, which has allowed for unprecedented consolidation in the radio industry and jacked up the price of FM transmitters to the point that it’s no longer commercially viable to have a station that airs anything but Beyoncé—as if we needed more proof at this point that maybe, just maybe, sometimes government regulation really does serve the public interest better than the free market. San Francisco should consider itself fortunate that it managed to hold on to an outlet for classical music, but it’s a damn shame that it had to come at the expense of the city’s only truly unique station.

Click here for photos from the Save KUSF show at The Uptown.