I am very much looking forward to the New Year! 2017 is going to be a fantastic year for America’s Country! We’re still working our way back to where we were before we were forced to pull the plug almost a year ago. It’s been a slow climb but I’m more than happy to keep pushing and pushing. Due to some major differences in the financial aspects of how we are able to be on the air, we have to be a little more creative. I am proud to say we have some interesting changes coming in 2017.
Internet radio is not “regular” or terrestrial radio. Yes, we can certainly do the same things and play the same songs as regular radio stations do, but why? In choosing music we play on America’s Country, I’ve always retained my love for the great hits of the 90s and early 2000s. We play today’s biggest hits, newcomers, and some tunes you may never hear anywhere else. I also play songs that were hot in the past months or year that radio has stopped playing. Some examples are Burning House by Cam and Better Than You Left Me by Mickey Guyton. I play these tunes because they are just great songs and sound good. I also play a bunch of 90s hits that are just fantastic to hear again and again. Shania Twain, The Tractors, and of course, George Strait and Garth Brooks are always amazing to hear.
The Plan
What I will be doing over the next weeks and months is gradually shifting our musical focus away from today’s Top 40 hits and more towards this great library of hits from the 90s and early 2000s. America’s Country will still play these Hot Country Hits and continue to break new songs when they sound good and fit in with the sound of America’s Country. I love Country Music and I know you do too.
I am very excited for these changes and will absolutely keep my hand to the pulse to make sure these changes are good changes. The New Year is going to be amazing and I can’t wait!
We asked and you guys answered! Over the past several weeks, we’ve had a poll posted asking for your opinion on the amount of 90’s Country we play. Overwhelmingly, you responded that we should play more. I’m particularly fond of Country music of the 90’s as that is when I both gained a love for radio and the music itself. When I hear those songs, I instantly feel like I’m back in those early days of my life and in that transformational period in the history and evolution of what Country music is today. We’ve long held the tradition of playing an hour of 90’s Country at noon everyday for our 90’s @ Noon feature. A full hour of commercial-free 90’s hits that “takes you back without making you feel too old”. We had great response and many requests as well as our listener stats always make a big jump during that hour. We knew we were doing it right!
Now, for the past couple weeks, we’ve added another full hour of commercial-free 90’s Country and named it The 90’s Drive @ 5. Now every afternoon at 5pm Mountain, we give you another chance to think back to those wonderfully light and free days of a decade that brought us the World Wide Web and Garth Brooks. Be sure you set this time aside each weekday to listen to The 90’s Drive @ 5!
Beginning Monday, March 5th at 12pm Mountain Time, we will debut our newest feature, The 90’s @ Noon!
We will play the biggest and best country music from a time when most of us really started listening to folks like Garth and Vince and Shania and Wynonna.
It will be all by request, so please submit your requests and dedications NOW to our brand new email address: the90s@kxrtonline.com
As always, we will present this commercial free and in our fun and upbeat way!
Thank you for listening to America’s Country and making us the most listened to Country Music station on the Internet!
We just launched our new Friday music theme! The Nuclear 90’s were a decade of two US presidents, a dot com explosion and fall-out, a Desert Storm, and some incredible music! The Nuclear 90’s were a lifestyle of 20-year old millionaires and some great prosperity through something called New Media, or the Internet. As the last decade of the 20th Century, the Nuclear 90’s ushered us into a postmodern society lush with opportunity and promise.
The Nuclear 90’s were also riddled with many wars and conflicts across the globe. Starting with the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq attacked Kuwait. During the 90’s through 2003, Iraq was cut off from most of the world. Other wars happened in Chechnya, the Yugoslav regions, and Kosovo. 1994 brought the Rwandan Genocide.
Stateside, we had the LA Riots in 1992 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. We also saw David Koresh’s Branch Davidian standoff and siege in Waco, TX in Spring of 1993.
Technology boomed in the Nuclear 90’s! Apple launched the iMac. Intel released the first Pentium processor. The first CD-RW drives are introduced. In 1991, the first public release of a plan to create a World Wide Web was announced. Pagers are popular at first and cell phones explode into the market. Microsoft acquires Hotmail and releases Windows 95 and later, Windows 98 to enormous response and success. Mac OS X is released soon before the Y2K scare puts the entire world on alert of a technological crash. In the UK, Dolly the sheep became the world’s first cloned animal. We saw the launch in 1990 of the Hubble space telescope which has enabled us to photograph far distant objects in space. The GPS system was also brought to the public for navigation and location use. The Nuclear 90’s were an incredible decade!
President George Herbert Walker Bush took office as the 41st US President in 1989 after serving as Ronald Reagan’s Vice President from 1981 to 1989. He was party to the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Soviet Union. He had a record high approval rating of 89% until his promise of “no new taxes” had to be broken due to economic recession. He would never regain his high ratings and was defeated in 1992 by Bill Clinton.
President William Jefferson Clinton took office in 1992 as the 42nd US President. He saw the end of the Cold War during his first term and due to the US having the longest period of peacetime economic expansion, he was re-elected for a second term. His presidency wasn’t perfect. You may recall one Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. He was impeached for perjury and was later acquitted by the Senate.
Musically, the US saw a big shift from guitar-driven rock into a more rhythmic or dance-oriented style. We saw the Seattle music scene, or Grunge, start to wildly expand into contemporary music. We saw the continuation of teen-pop with boy and girl bands gain huge popularity. Hip Hop, Rap and R&B surged with huge hits and a lot of radio support. MTV had pretty much gone away from music by the Nuclear 90’s and music videos declined in importance. We also saw a massive uprising in the acceptance and availability of Country music.
We wanted to capture the feel of the decade with a musical portrait that envelopes all things that the Nuclear 90’s gave us. Each Friday you’ll hear the biggest radio hits of the 90’s! From Vanilla Ice and Backstreet Boys to Britney Spears to Natalie Imbruglia to Metallica to Boyz II Men to Warrant to Phil Collins to Candyman to Alice in Chains and on and on and on. We will also be able to guarantee a huge variety as we will not repeat any songs for the entire day.
The Nuclear 90’s were a decade of transition. Politically and musically, we were shaking off the dust of the 80’s and preparing for the new enterprise of mass technology of the next millennium. We hope we help you remember those great years by sending your minds backwards to the Nuclear 90’s!
I’ve mentioned here and there about setting up special days for your listening enjoyment. Starting this coming Wednesday, we will start this new venture with Boot Scootin’ Wednesdays! We’ll start off slow and build up to having three musically themed days per week. We’ll have an all 80’s Day, an all Alternative day and an all Country day. In a few weeks, it should look like this:
Another Manic Monday – All 80’s
Boot Scootin’ Wednesdays – All Country
Freaky Fridays – All Alternative
I’m excited to launch Boot Scootin’ Wednesdays this week! Look for the rest in the coming weeks!
Starting March 6th at 8am (Mountain), we will debut the newest show to air on KXRT: The DJ Mike Show! The DJ Mike Show is two hours of the best of the 80’s and 90’s pop, rock and new wave music. It’s commercial-free and is just growing in syndication. It’s currently on 4 stations, including AM/FM and internet!
We are very excited to have this show on our station and I think it fits in perfectly with our music selection. For your convenience, we will also replay it at 8pm on Saturdays that the Timmy LIVE! Show is not on.
Watch here for updates and further info on the DJ Mike Show!
We (and you) Love the 90’s!!
