WAMU Upgrades Its Bluegrass Programming

The Grass Is Bluer on the Other Side - washingtonpost.com

Big changes are coming at WAMU - and its streaming bluegrass programming.

"We've been searching for a way to do right by bluegrass," says Caryn Mathes, general manager of the station, which has steadily whittled away at its once-dominant musical programming over the past two decades. "We believe in HD Radio, and it allows us to give bluegrass lovers not just one shelf in a very big store that specializes in something else, but their own store."

[. . .]For six years now, WAMU has offered bluegrasscountry.org, an all-bluegrass service on the Internet, but "we often repeat programs, and by Wednesday afternoon, listeners realize they heard the same program on Monday morning," Mathes says. The new WAMU bluegrass service will include eight to 10 hours a day of live, hosted programs with longtime DJs Ray Davis, Katy Daley and Lee Michael Demsey offering commentary on the music, as well as news, traffic and weather.

About 50,000 listeners a month tune into the online bluegrass stream, and many of them are from outside the Washington area. The new programming will also be available online, and WAMU expects most of the audience to listen on the Internet rather than on digital radios, at least at first.

I've always found WAMU to be a great source for streaming music. Hey, even DC traffic reports sound better with bluegrass.

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