Golden West Broadcasting built its business on farm country, starting with a single Manitoba station in 1957 and slowly adding signals across the prairies for decades afterward. CKFI-FM, known on air as Magic 97.1, is one of the newer additions to that lineup, and its own history traces a clear line back to the company's founding mission.
Born From a Prairie Broadcasting Company
Golden West traces its roots to Southern Manitoba Broadcasting, which launched CFAM in Altona, Manitoba on March 13, 1957, with just 1,000 watts and eleven employees under the slogan "Your Farm and Good Music Station," according to the company's own history page. As the company expanded into Saskatchewan and Alberta through the 1960s and 70s, it renamed itself Golden West Broadcasting Ltd. in 1974 to match its wider footprint. That same year it acquired its first Swift Current stations, CKSW and CJSN, starting a presence in the city that would eventually grow to four separate signals.
A Frequency Approved in 2005
CKFI-FM itself is the newest of those Swift Current stations. The CRTC licensed Golden West to operate a new FM station at 97.1 MHz in Swift Current on February 3, 2005, authorizing an effective radiated power of 100,000 watts, according to records kept by the History of Canadian Broadcasting. It signed on later that same year as a Contemporary Rock outlet built around Prairie artists, operating under the standard requirement that at least 40 percent of its music come from Canadian musicians.
From Rock to Magic
The station eventually rebranded as Magic 97, moving toward the hot adult contemporary format it carries today, sharing studio space with sister stations CKSW-AM and CIMG-FM. The stations moved together into the top floor of the Innovation Credit Union Building in November 2016, giving Golden West's Swift Current operation a single modern home for all of its signals.
Part of a Larger Community Mission
Golden West describes its purpose today simply as existing "to make our communities better," a mission reflected in projects like the company's 2014 effort to design and build a complete AM/FM transmitter and tower site from scratch in nearby Estevan, Saskatchewan. Magic 97.1 fits into that same pattern: a hot AC station built less around chasing a single demographic and more around giving one more prairie city its own steady, locally invested signal.