97Five streams smooth, mostly instrumental easy listening music built on one of Minnesota's longest-running beautiful music formats. It plays free on Radio Shuffle, no account or download required.
Fifty Years on the Same Frequency
97Five carries forward the format of KNXR, a Rochester, Minnesota station that signed on December 24, 1965 broadcasting beautiful music from studios inside the Rochester Holiday Inn, according to Wikipedia. Its playlist leaned heavily on instrumental cover versions along with Broadway and Hollywood show tunes, and even as soft vocals were gradually worked in over the decades, the station stayed largely instrumental all the way through January 2015, a run of exactly fifty years on the same gentle format. RadioInsight described KNXR by that point as one of the few remaining beautiful music holdouts left on American radio, and the station had built a genuinely devoted following, regularly showing up in Minneapolis-St. Paul ratings despite broadcasting from a much smaller market.
The Frequency Moved On, the Format Didn't Have To
That fifty-year run ended on the business side in January 2015, when owner Thomas H. Jones sold the station to Hometown Broadcasting. KNXR went silent for a few weeks and returned on February 24, 2015 as a Hot Adult Contemporary station branded 97.5 Pulse FM, a sharp break from the beautiful music sound that had defined the frequency since 1965. The station changed hands again the following year and ultimately became Minnesota 97.5, a classic hits outlet still on the FM dial under that branding today.
Rather than let the format simply disappear, Jones kept the old easy listening library streaming online at 97five.net, giving the beautiful music sound a continued life independent of the frequency it had occupied for half a century. That online stream is what still plays today, a format that quietly outlasted the very FM signal it was built on.
Press Play
From a 1965 hotel studio to a classic hits station with a totally different sound on the same dial, Rochester's easy listening era kept going anyway, just not where you'd expect to find it. Stream 97Five free on Radio Shuffle and hear the format that wouldn't quit.