Happy Holidays from America’s Country!!

I am a huge fan of Holiday Music! In the past, we’ve played all Holiday music for the entire month of December. While my family, a few others, and myself have really enjoyed it, it’s not always the best strategy. This year, beginning the day after Thanksgiving, we will begin to slowly add Holiday songs to the normal rotation of Hot Country Hits. As we get closer to Christmas Day, we will have up to 4 or 5 songs per hour. For Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I will be playing 48 hours of Christmas Music and hopefully some long-form specials from our providers.

I want to share my love of the Season without overwhelming you all. Holiday music can sometimes be a very polarizing thing. A lot of people really love it, some folks really don’t like it at all. And yet further, some folks are just kinda OK with it. I hope to strike a good balance and provide the best to everyone.

I will be playing some of the well known classics from Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole that you all know and love along with some of the best from our stable of incredible Country artists like Blake Shelton and Martina McBride. As always, I will ask for and encourage your constant feedback. Please post on Twitter, Facebook, or on this post if things need to be adjusted. “Play More Holiday Music!”, “Don’t play so much Holiday Music!”, etc… I want to know!

Again, we wish all of you Happy Holidays and thanks for listening to America’s Country!

Love ya,
Timmy

I was doing some looking around and realized there are a lot of songs out there about daddy, pop, father, pa, etc… We want to honor them for all they do! This week, you’ll hear a lot of great Father Songs. I’ve tweaked them up so they play much more often. Here’s a quick sampling of what you’ll hear:

• Glen Templeton – That’s My Job (Excellent cover of a classic Conway Twitty song)
• Tim McGraw – My Little Girl
• George Strait – Love Without End, Amen; The Best Day; The Breath You Take
• Reba McEntire – The Greatest Man I Never Knew
• Alan Jackson – Drive (for Daddy Gene)
• Brad Paisley – Anything Like Me; He Didn’t Have To Be
• Bucky Covington – A Father’s Love (The Only Way He Knew How)
• Gary Allen – Tough Little Boys
• Kenny Chesney – There Goes My Life
• Rodney Atkins – He’s Mine; Watching You; Cleaning This Gun
• Trace Adkins – You’re Gonna Miss This
• Lonestar – I’m Already There; My Front Porch Looking In
• Tracy Lawrence – ‘Til I Was A Daddy Too

And so much more!

We all love our Dads and we want to be sure he is recognized and honored! Father’s Day is June 17th and we’ll feature these songs and more through that time!

If you have more ideas for great country music Father songs, please comment!

Thank you and Happy Father’s Day!

-Timmy

I’ll just open by stating the problem: It is costly to run this station. There are 2 major costs involved in operating an internet radio station. One is the bandwidth to serve the station to you. The other is royalties and licensing fees that allow us to legally play the music so the artists and their labels get paid for their work. At the current setup with how many listeners I am allowed My fees total about $70 a month.

Here’s the problem: If I want to make this thing both legal and huge, it costs more and more! I have to pay more for both streaming and for royalties. It’s a really crummy setup. I understand that artists need to be paid. But I also understand they want more exposure so it’s a backwards spiral for us web broadcasters. I’d LOVE to be able to have 1000’s of listeners jammin’ to Hot Country Hits and not have to wade through tons of commercials to hear the music.

I’ve done some research and there are ways to make money by playing commercials. It’s not difficult. I just play them. However, I feel like in order to differentiate myself from all the other country stations on FM and online, I need to not have commercials. I feel like more of you will listen and tell your friends about us if you can tell them there’s no commercials.

Here’s the solution: I need your help. To keep us commercial-free, please donate to us. I have options on our website, our stream launch page and our Facebook page to either make a one-time donation or create a subscription where you pay a set amount monthly. Both options are through PayPal and are flexible. There’s no contracts for the subscription and you can change it any time. Currently, under the Subscription option, you can pick $5, $10 or $20 a month. All the money donated goes directly into the PayPal account where my fees come out of. The money will not go toward any station equipment or upgrades. I will not use the money for anything personal.

Plan B: I start playing commercials. I REALLY don’t want to! I think that would be reason enough to just end the whole project. Why would people listen if I had commercials and was like anything else out there?

I am very happy with the incredible growth we’ve seen in 2011! A lot of you are very loyal listeners who also interact on social media! I was happy to have 2011 be our free year. Now that I know that this concept is viable and successful and that I want to continue, it’s time to get serious.

Thank you for all your help and support!

-Timmy

This day and age, everyone wants things RIGHT NOW! Even on the web, people have shortcuts and favorites so they can get where they want to go with as few clicks as possible. We want that for you too! Previously, we’ve had some interesting ways to listen, but none have been automatic and have required some effort and plenty of clicks. Now, you can click on one play button and through the magic of the innernetz, America’s Country will start playing!

The best thing here is that you don’t even need to install a player! If your browser supports Flash, our new player will just launch when the page is loaded! It also will show you album art and recently played song titles. We also have our traditional links if your setup doesn’t support Flash, but like before, you’ll need to use a player like Winamp or iTunes to listen.

Here’s the only drawback: the Flash player will only play our High Quality 128 kb/s MP3 stream. That means, if your on a mobile device or have a slower internet connection, you may not get the best results and hear skipping or not even have the stream start. We’re willing to bet that most of you already can play a HQ stream (since I know most of you listen on that stream already!) and this will just make life easier for you!

Coming soon we hope to have additional Flash players for our lower bandwidth stream and our AAC stream. Meanwhile, enjoy our new instant-gratification enabled Flash player! As before, just click on that nifty graphical play button on the right and a new page will load that will auto-launch the Flash player! EASY!!

If you run into any problems, please contact us at studio@kxrtonline.com or comment here or on Facebook!

Enjoy!
-Timmy

You all have an assignment this week. As you’re listening, please write down two lists for me. List 1 will be called “Missing Songs”. List 2 will be called “Garbage Songs”.

For List 1, you’ll record songs that you would like us to add to our playlists. This is NOT for requesting songs that we do play. This is NOT to ask us to play certain songs more frequently. These are songs that you’ve NEVER heard on our station and would like to have us add.

For List 2, you’ll list the songs you do hear that we should get rid of entirely. Please let us know these songs that offend you or make you want to mute or turn off the station. This is NOT to tell us to play a song less because you may be ok with it but are getting tired of it. This is for songs you think we should get rid of ENTIRELY.

Once you have your lists after a couple hours or days of listening, please email them to studio@kxrtonline.com. This will be a huge help with how we make our station sound.

Thank you for your help!

-Timmy

If you catch us playing two songs in a row by Brad Paisley and are the first person to comment on our Facebook page with the two song titles, YOU WIN a free copy of This Is Country Music!!

It’s that easy! Just be watching our Facebook and listening to America’s Country for the Double Play Give-Away and WIN!

We have 10 copies to give away, thanks to Sony and Arista Records! We’re giving them away all week long!

Thanks for playing and thanks for listening to America’s Country!

In the past few weeks, Nashville’s been pumping out a lot of great new music! We’re excited to add new music and aren’t too picky like some Country stations out there. I listen and if it sounds Hot, I’ll roll it!

Husband and wife duo, Thompson Square, released their third single called I Got You and it’s gonna fly up the charts! This team sound so good together and the songs they sing are so real-life and true, it’s hard not to enjoy each one. Their first single, Let’s Fight, and their recent #1, Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not, all fit that bill perfectly! We’re excited to hear each new track from Thompson Square!

The new trio of super-star progeny, Stealing Angels, have released their new song, Paper Heart. It’s a moving song that really touches on some tough emotional challenges. We had a lot of fun with their last song, He Better Be Dead, and hope they get some chart traction with this beautiful tune.

From his upcoming fourth album, Rodney Atkins has another hit on his hands with Take A Back Road. Following on the heels of his Top 5 single, Farmer’s Daughter, Rodney hopes for a #1 with this new single.

Sunny Sweeney follows up From A Table Away with her 2nd release, Staying’s Worse Than Leaving. Response has been very good with this song and we hope Sunny will have great success with this new track!

We already have these songs in our regular rotation and invite you to comment on these songs and others! You can request your favorites by Text or phone call at 801-788-4916. You can also post your requests on our Facebook page, HERE.

Thank you for listening to America’s Country!

-Timmy

Welcome to our new website! This one was a long in the works and it’s finally here! We moved from the super-reliable and excellent wordpress.com servers to our own self-hosted wp.org site. We love WordPress and it’s flexibility, security and speed. With the launch of our new format back on New Year’s we’ve been able to look at more opportunities with advertising and contests. WordPress.com does allow a lot of flexibility, however, they do not allow any advertising. It quickly became necessary to look at other solutions.

As mentioned, WordPress is excellent and a lot of major companies, including some of the largest radio corporations run all their station’s sites from WordPress. It’s a great platform. Here are some of the features this new platform allows:

• advertising (we will not advertise on the air but we feel like we could make things better for you if we were able to bring in some money somehow)
• featured article slider
• mobile site compatibility
• faster load-times
• more themes and layouts
• polls
• so much more we’re just learning about

We hope you will explore the site and let us know what you like or don’t. We’ll be happy to make any adjustments for you!

-Timmy

Yes, more changes! Based on some feedback, I’ve decided to change what the Weekly Top 10 is. Because the ACC Top 20 and my show follow each other, there’s potential for a lot of song repetition. We do use different charts and data resources, but when it gets into the top 10, there just isn’t much difference. I’ve come up with a new concept for the Weekly Top 10 that I think you’ll be excited about.

Starting this weekend, the Weekly Top 10 will no longer be the current top 10 chart. We will feature a  Top 10 chart from that week in a previous year. For example, this weekend, we will feature the Top 10 from March 9th, 1996. I will post that chart on the normal WTT page and leave the #1 song as a surprise. I will also try to gather information from that year and get some artist quotes to throw in. We will still have Extras and Double-Shots to keep things fun! The years will be from 1990 to 2010.

This should be a lot of fun! I’m looking forward to bringing this historic look at Country Music’s charts from the past two decades! If you have any ideas or suggestions about this, please comment here or on Facebook!

-Timmy

As you might have heard or read on Facebook, starting January 1st at midnight, KXRT will begin playing a Hot Country music format and be called America’s Country! Due to the increasing popularity and success of Country music radio, TV and other media, we felt it was our best opportunity to make this change. We’ve been playing a lot of Country music as it was this past year and we feel this is a natural evolution. Research also shows that while the Internet allows for more flexibility and creativity, the same standards hold true: people that like Country music will typically not like Rock or R&B and likewise, people who like Rock or R&B will generally not like Country. We feel like with hot artists such as Taylor Swift, Lady Antebellum, Kenny Chesney and Rascal Flatts, there’s a lot of fans out there that will be charged up about a commercial-free, upbeat, Hot Country Internet station.

We will design our playlists with the hot, new Country hits that are topping the charts as the main focus. We will also reach back to the last two decades of big Country hits ad mix them in for variety and fun. You’ll hear Jason Aldean along with Clint Black and Lady A along with Garth Brooks. It will be a lot of fun to listen to for hours while you’re at work or at home. We will keep the tempo hot and not bog you down with a lot of slow, sappy ballads! It will be energetic, upbeat and fun!

We are very excited and charged up about this new direction. 2011 will be a landmark year for KXRT. America’s Country also lends itself to being patriotic. You’ll hear specials on National Holidays like Veteran’s Day, Patriot Day and more. We will continue to broadcast our Country-related weekend programming. We love Stephen Keogh’s ACC Top 20 and I will resume producing the Weekly Top 10. The Timmy LIVE! Show, as previously posted about, will return in some fashion probably in late Q1 2011. I still need to recreate it to match our new format. We will also keep our Sunday LDS music programming.

All of our links and websites will remain the same. This main webpage, the Facebook Page, the Twitters and our email and phone number will all remain as they currently are. The name KXRT will still be referred to but in a more limited fashion. We love the call letters KXRT, but we want to give center stage to our new moniker, America’s Country.

Our plan for the last few days of 2010 will be to keep playing 100% Christmas Music while we tweak and adjust as well as load our server with all the hot, new Country to be ready for our launch on New Year’s! Please be patient as we will be doing a lot of work on things and the stream may go down or have other trouble during this time. We will also be adjusting the sound and you might hear some widely varying sound levels and quality. We’ll try to keep things sounding good, but we wanted to better inform you so you know what you can expect.

Your input and ideas are always welcome! Please contact us through our many ways, email: studio@kxrtonline.com, Phone: 801-788-4916, Facebook comment, Website comment, Tweet: twitter.com/KXRT, any number of ways to reach us. We look forward to hearing from you!

Enjoy the rest of 2010 and we hope to have you listening just after you celebrate the New Year to help us celebrate the launch of America’s Country!

-Timmy