Q92 Time Capsule

What is this?

This recording contains 11 days of unedited, mostly continuous audio from the online stream of Q92 (KKGQ 92.3 FM), which was a local, commercial radio station in Wichita, Kansas, starting in the morning of March 7, 2017. Q92 played a hot adult contemporary format -- in other words, pop music, with a mix of current hits and throwbacks going as far back as the 80s.

How did this come about?

I didn't actually mean to record this much. I only wanted to record a segment of the morning show on March 7, 2017. (I'm now unsure of which morning show segment I actually wanted to capture.) I had recorded brief segments from Q92 before, and I had a script for recording from Q92's online stream on my server. Crucially, the script was resilient to dropped connections. This time, I left the script running by mistake, and didn't realize my mistake until about 11 days later.

Why does this recording matter to me?

This recording comes from a period in my life when I was a big fan of this radio station. Actually, it's more complicated than that; I was also perhaps one of their biggest critics, in that I was routinely pointing out technical problems or nit-picks with their broadcasting. But I was only critical because I wanted them to do better. Q92 was owned by Envision, a Wichita non-profit serving blind and visually impaired people, including me (a little; to be clear, I have no affiliation with this organization). Now, I doubt that it was a good idea for Envision to buy an FM radio station in 2014; arguably, commercial FM radio was already dead and had been for a while. Still, right or wrong, I became emotionally attached to this station during the first few months of 2017.

As it happens, this accidental time capsule was created near the end of an era for Q92. Early in April, Envision sold the station to a regional radio conglomerate. The new owner quickly dropped the morning show from the station. Less than 6 months later, the station switched genres, to country. Coincidentally, these events overlap with a period of dramatic change in my career and life. By the time Q92 switched formats, I had moved to the Seattle area to work for Microsoft. So this recording comes near the end of an era for me as well. (As an aside, I moved back to Wichita in November 2020.)

The history of Q92 is covered in more detail on Wikipedia.

Interesting things in this recording

As you might expect, this recording consists largely of repeated plays of songs that were popular in the spring of 2017, plus older songs (throwbacks). But there are more interesting things to be found:

The morning show, including the segment I originally intended to record. Remember, the new station owner was quick to cut this.
More generally, a mix of live and voice-tracked announcers: I know for sure that the morning show was live, and the weekday afternoon show with Ayala was live at least some of the time as well. I believe the rest of the announcers were voice-tracked; most of them were local, but I believe at least one was an out-of-state contractor. So, yes, even this independent, local station did some of the things that made latter-day commercial radio bad.
Station IDs and other in-house productions: As an independent, truly local station, Q92 had its own production team, so these productions might be more interesting than what you would hear on a typical station owned by a national conglomerate. I especially liked the spots that were played on St. Patrick's day, about 10 days into the recording.
Local commercials
Alternate mixes of songs: For example, I know that this recording contains a somewhat extended mix of "Don't Let Me Down" by the Chainsmokers and a dance remix of "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic. I always wondered how Q92 ended up getting these mixes rather than the primary ones.
Advertisements for Envision, the station's owner: I felt that some of these were quite cringe-worthy even at the time. They were all read by the same person, over the same music bed (if I remember correctly), and played at the bottom of the hour.

I really ought to go through the whole recording at some point and make a "highlight reel" of these things. If anyone else wants to take on that task, let me know.