KUSF and college radio

College radio stations—once considered little more than laboratories for students who had chosen broadcasting as an avocation—came to play an important gatekeeping role in the development of rock music beginning in the 1970s, in the aftermath of free-form FM rock radio and on the eve of the punk revolution. With a bent toward alternative rock, college stations gave artists like the Police, U2, R.E.M., and Elvis Costello their initial radio airplay and provided outlets for...