Fabulous! Classical Radio May Return to St. Louis by Summer

There’s great news from Sarah Bryan Miller in St. Louis, who has done such a great job of keeping us informed at stltoday.com.

The Radio Arts Foundation-St. Louis, which provided considerable financial support to the old “Classic99,” KFUO-FM, hopes to be on the air with a new FM station in early June, pending FCC approvals.  The proposed analog station will be audible “in the Highway 40-I-44 corridor,” said station manager Jim Connett.

The Centene Foundation gave $200,000 to begin the process and has committed $1 million more; further fundraising will begin in earnest this month. The total cost of the project is expected to be $5 million to $6 million over two years, including operating expenses.

Connett said the fledgling station is shooting for at least $2 million before June. “It’s a fast ramp-up from nothing to on-air,” he said, “but as committed as this community is, when they consider what we have lost and what we will gain, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

The same info is posted here by Carl Marcucci and on Radio-info.com by Tom Taylor.  There’s another article here.

If successful, the new station gets a chance to start with a clean slate, a huge sigh of relief from St. Louis residents who’ve been without their classical fix for too long, and the always-enthusiastic support of Music Director David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony.

Musically, Connett promised that RAF-STL will be an improvement over the old “Top 100” model of endlessly cycling the same well-known works. “We had to raise quite a bit of money with advertising” on KFUO, to help pay for the religious programming on the synod’s KFUO-AM. “We had to play the Arbitron game, to attract listeners and make it advertiser-friendly.”

As a nonprofit, however, RAF can broadcast only 72 minutes of advertising per day. Arts organizations and other nonprofits will get first crack at that time, said Connett, who said rates would be “affordable.” There also will be opportunities for supporters to underwrite programming.

That means, he said, that “we’re going to have everything — chamber music, vocal music, choirs, opera, symphonic, jazz” and what he called “cultural programming.”