I’m really liking the quality of music recently on KXT.
Yeah, I also noticed they gave up on that. It was neat hearing Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Sting say “91.7 KXT, the Republic of Music,” before a song of theirs would come on.I haven’t heard “The Republic of Music” being used as a positioning statement for a while. It seems like they’re now using, “NPR Music for North Texas”. It also doesn’t appear that there was a change in the music when this happened.
As for the music, they’re still the same wide mix of indie, soul, classic rock, local bands, and Americana they’ve been since their inception. I say KTCU is a better version of KXT. KXT gets stuck on the same artists from time to time and they don’t dig as deep as KTCU. Both are great assets to the local music scene, though.
KXT absolutely blows all the commercial stations out of the water, as far as playlist length. I think KXT has 88.1 beat as well. I’ve thought of KXT as a “college lite” station, like 94.5 the Edge was when it first started in the very early 90’s. Basically, not as adventurous as a true college station, but still has a good pulse on the up and coming and plays the occasional deep cut. I say KXT surprises me about once or twice an hour as opposed to say KTCU, which surprises me about half of its playlist.Let's face it, KXT has more variety than let's say Alt 103.7 and maybe Indie 88.1
Above all, what impresses me most about KXT and KTCU is their ability to play local artists.
They did. It was Sunday nights 8-9. Hosted by Mark Schectman of the Edge and the Ticket. Mark gave up a decent gig at the Ticket to move over to 103.7. I knew it wouldn’t work out. Anyways, it was a good local show, but it was on at the same time as KXT’s specialty show, so I’d have to split time and I’d rather give KXT the ratings. Also Alt’s Local Show shared a lot of the same artists as KXT.IIRC, Alt once did a local show at one point (so did The Edge and Eagle(?) during their times) but ended up cancelling it due to Audacy wanting to cookie-cut their alternative stations to sound more-pop and add talk shows from LA. That was a disaster.