Every membership drive we hold is another opportunity — or challenge — to take everything Radio Milwaukee does and has done in its 17 years of existence, roll it up into a 12-day ball, and serve it up to you on the air and online.
Piece of cake, right?
For the on-air portion you’ll hear on 88Nine throughout the Fall Drive, we decided to focus primarily on our role as a music-discovery engine. As you can imagine, we’ve dumped a lot of fuel into the tank during the past 17 years — nearly 50,000 songs, if you can believe it. Figuring out how to package those was a two-step process:
- Immediately dismiss the idea of playing all 50,000 songs because we only have roughly 280 hours of on-air time during the drive.
- Determine the most effective time-honored approach to music marathons: chronological or alphabetical.
The headline pretty much gave it away, but just to make things official, today we launched “The Alphabetical Evolution of 88Nine.” We’ll spare you the gory details about how a person goes about constructing a playlist of this magnitude and just say our programming team (in particular Jordan Lee) spent many a bleary-eyed morning/afternoon/evening/night in front of a computer screen, plucking tracks from our massive library.
In the end, what you’ll hear during the Fall Drive from Sept. 30 through Oct. 11 are the top-played songs from 88Nine’s 17 years as your music-discovery go-to. From “A-Punk” by Vampire Weekend to “Zebra” by Beach House, we started quite the journey today, and we hope you’ll join us on the road in the days ahead.
We’re also going way beyond A to Z during Fall Drive in an effort to earn your support. You’ll hear plenty about this on the air, but we’ve got a completely refreshed line of Radio Milwaukee gear to check out on our membership page, as well as TWO noontime Studio Milwaukee Sessions that’ll be open to the public: Yard Act this Friday, Oct. 4, and Nada Surf next Friday, Oct. 11.
You’re officially invited to get in on any and all of the cool stuff we have planned for the Fall Drive, and hope you’ll consider becoming a member today.
