La Más Buena 104.3 FM broadcasts from Mazatlán, on Mexico's Pacific coast in the state of Sinaloa, playing banda, grupera, and the wider family of regional Mexican music that this stretch of coastline practically invented. Tune in on Radio Shuffle and the tuba-driven brass, accordion runs, and singalong grupera hooks arrive instantly, free, with no account needed.
A frequency that has worn a dozen names
The signal at 104.3 FM has one of the more tangled identities in Sinaloa radio. It first went on air back on November 5, 1959 as XENX-AM, a low-numbered AM concession broadcasting on 1270 kHz before later settling on 1290. Over the following decades the station cycled through an unusual string of formats and names, from the regional Mexican sounds of "La Poderosa N-X" to the Spanish pop of "Fiesta Latina" and even a stint as the pop-leaning "90x Radio Extrema", according to station records compiled on Wikipedia.
In 2004, the national broadcaster ABC Radio took over and rebranded the station as "Radio Mujer," a talk format aimed at women listeners. The station made the jump from AM to FM in 2011, keeping its XHENX-FM call letters. Grupo Siete then ran it as "La Jefa," another regional Mexican brand, starting in 2018, before handing it back in February 2022, when the frequency picked up the "La Más Buena" name it carries on most listening directories today.
Owned by the network that swallowed ABC Radio
The station's current operator, Radio Cañón, is the broadcasting arm of NTR Medios de Comunicación, a media group based in Zacatecas. NTR acquired ABC Radio's entire radio and television division in 2021 from Organización Editorial Mexicana, a deal that folded roughly twenty stations, including this one, under the Radio Cañón brand and gave the group a potential reach across a huge swath of the Mexican radio dial, as deRadios reported on the acquisition. La Más Buena now sits alongside a sister Radio Cañón signal in Mazatlán, XHVOX-FM at 98.7, itself a station with roots stretching back to 1939.
Why Mazatlán is banda's hometown
The genre this station leans on did not travel far to find its audience. Banda music took shape in Sinaloa in the late nineteenth century, when villages across the state absorbed the brass band traditions that German and French immigrants had brought to Mexico and reworked them with tubas, trombones, clarinets, and drums into something entirely their own, as detailed in a history from Mazatlán's Centro Histórico. By the early twentieth century the sound had moved down from the highlands into port cities like Mazatlán, where it found a permanent home in plazas, cantinas, and seaside festivals.
Mazatlán's claim on the genre is not incidental. Banda El Recodo, one of the most celebrated bands in the history of Mexican music, was founded in the city in 1938 by Cruz Lizárraga, at a time when banda groups were still dismissed outside Sinaloa as village brass bands. Eight decades and countless lineup changes later, the group helped carry banda into mainstream commercial success both in Mexico and among Mexican communities across the United States, and the city that produced them has never stopped treating banda as, in the words of the local tourism board, a way of life rather than just a music genre.
Listen free on Radio Shuffle
La Más Buena streams around the clock, and Radio Shuffle picks up the signal live with no app download, login, or subscription required. Press play and let a banda horn line or a grupera ballad from Sinaloa's coast fill the room, exactly as it sounds to listeners in Mazatlán right now.