WLOY Co-Founds International Local Music Exchange

September 23rd, 2020 by The Professor

Every college radio station wants to help their local music scene. We all do our best to engage it, bring it to our studios and campuses and even put bands on live for others to enjoy. But what we haven’t really had the power to do until now is share those bands with other stations. WLOY, KBVR and KCSU have joined forces with the College Radio Foundation to launch the International Local Music Exchange on October 2nd as a feature of World College Radio Day! As part of the kickoff, more than a dozen college stations around the world are producing and sharing 1 hour shows highlighting the best of their local music scenes. That means that you can hear great Baltimore artists on stations from Oregon to Sweden! World College Radio Day has more than 600 participating stations around the world and we hope to add all of them to the list of stations sharing their local scenes in the next few months.

Our goal is to turn this into a weekly show airing on stations globally as well as a podcast highlighting different cities every week. For our launch on October 2nd, all of the participating stations are able to download any of the shows created and run them in their broadcasts even if they did not initially produce one. This is about extending the reach of college radio and supporting local music on a global scale. Commercial media is extraordinarily limited and algorithm services lack human curation. Both of these mean a massive number of talented artists don’t get the attention and support they deserve. The International Local Music Exchange is about to change everything.