This is how Dalet helped turn a local FM station into a global radio station

Immediate access to a huge music library and integration of playout with metadata and musical background, together with a greater social presence, have allowed KEXP, a local station in Seattle (United States), to make the leap to a global audience.

KEXP, a local station in Seattle (Washington, USA) very popular for broadcasting the most modern independent music, has used Dalet technology to increase its online audience, broadcast video and integrate the social audience into its communication offering.

Kevin Cole, senior programming director at KEXP, comments: "We support music groups not supported by commercial media. Our mission is to bring passionate and intelligent music to our audience by helping fans discover and explore the best new music across all musical genres."

To kick off this project, the station's extensive catalog of LPs and CDs was cataloged and preserved, as well as the integration of archived content with multimedia produced internally and acquired from third-party sources on a daily basis. An increase in the production of multimedia content was also addressed by streamlining workflows and encouraging collaboration between all users.

At the same time, the expansion to new digital consumption models was addressed via publication on social media, as well as the launch of a platform to manually reproduce this content on air.

The valley has laid the foundation for this small radio station to grow its online presence and expand its brand internationally. Its platform provides KEXP with end-to-end production and distribution from music and program recording to broadcast and from FM broadcast to social media distribution.

Much of KEXP's programming is based on alternative rock, although it also broadcasts other particular musical genres such as blues, hip hop, punk, electronica and alternative country. In this case, the station trusts its announcers to program the best music unlike other stations where music programming is centralized according to commercial interests.

Along with its 40 DJ-announcers, one of the great assets that KEXP plays with are live studio performances, hosting more than 500 groups and soloists throughout the year. Since the musical selection by DJs is so organic, the technology to be implemented had to allow any song to be aired by simply dragging it to the playlist. The KEXP team, after studying other options in the market and speaking with other broadcasters that had already been using asset management, opted for Dalet technology.

Jamie Alls, director of engineering at KEXP, points out that “Dalet listened and customized their system for us so that the radio playout was integrated with our digital library.”

Cheryl Waters, DJ and host The Midday Show at KEXP, he emphasizes that "at any moment I can hear a thread within a song that is connected to another. With the touch of a few buttons, I can call it up from our library telling a story just by doing a search without having to run through the aisles with CDs. Our format is our most valuable asset, and Dalet makes it even more powerful, ultimately benefiting our listeners."

At any given time, KEXP has a couple hundred new albums in rotation. The station uploads details including comments, rankings and artist information to Dalet, playing new music and artist discovery offering this information to the DJ-announcer.

The KEXP library contains about 40,000 CDs but with limited resources, even ingesting 200 CDs a week, the full digitization process will take some time. "The goal with Dalet is to have every new piece of music digitized, indexed and made available to our DJs. That's a big win for us in terms of curation," says Alls. Playlist information is automatically populated into KEXP's digital library, freeing DJs to source more creative content instead of requiring them to manually write to each track between songs.

KEXP also wanted integration with the open source MusicBrainz metadata library to curate its assets and add new weekly releases and digitized music from the library. Dalet's technology is based on an open API so it is able to link MusicBrainz metadata directly into the MAM in KEXP.

Previously, KEXP had attempted to add metadata about each DJ's playlists and artist information to its existing database, but the two sets of metadata proved incompatible. “There were a lot of duplicates, the metadata was very dirty, and it turns out that it's very difficult to maintain a clean entire library of music metadata,” says Alls. “We also don't have the resources to maintain it continuously.” Thanks to the Dalet API integration with MusicBrainz, KEXP can associate rich metadata to all glossary terms for artist, band and album. In this way KEXP is building a large single library for all pre-recorded records and locally produced material.

Dalet Solutions

Dalet Galaxy allows KEXP to import media including more than 500 live music recordings each year by curating the content with metadata from the artist's comprehensive glossary. Thanks to the Galaxy, the DJ can carry out the broadcast based on content in the KEXP content management system (CMS) and social media with automated distribution to multiple platforms.

Dalet Brio allows ingesting video content of a live presentation from multiple camera angles. Dalet OneCut MultiMedia Editor and Xtend allow, together with Adobe Premiere, simple editing including metadata. Meanwhile, Dalet WebSpace licenses allow KEXP DJs to select the content they want to release on air from either of the two radio studios. Automated rules upload content to KEXP's CMS, while Galaxy users can easily upload content to social media via Dalet's social media dashboard.

Now, KEXP can better leverage social media platforms based on trends and analysis of talent and programming to produce audience-driven playlists.

Internationalization

Coinciding with all this change, the station has renewed its web presence engaging the audience with accurate information, the correct story told and the video of the performance. The website is completed with podcasts, in-studio and remote content, and video-on-demand content, including live sessions archived in the studio.

Ethan Raup, general manager of broadcast services at KEXP, assures that "the Dalet platform allows us to bring all this material together, providing a much richer experience to our audience. For example, it gives us the ability to produce themed shows, which we do on a regular basis and deal with emerging themes. These are the things that connect us with a growing audience in a way that other stations cannot do, Dalet was the only company capable of providing the platform that our DJs needed to be able to do all this."

KEXP has thus increased its online presence both inside and outside the United States, with less technical staff and much more content, offering its audience more than 65,000 streams and 101,000 weekly podcasts.