In 2009, three friends, Mark Brinda, Tariq Abdus-Sabur, and Colin Ilgen, set up a broadcast studio inside a former brewery on Meserole Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and started what would become Newtown Radio. There was no corporate programming department behind it, just a group of musicians and DJs who wanted a channel that answered to no one but the neighborhood's own creative scene. Nearly two decades later, that freeform spirit is still what defines the station.
Brooklyn's First Rock Radio Station
When it launched, The Brooklyn Rail described Newtown Radio as the borough's first rock radio station, a title that captured how underserved Brooklyn's DIY music community felt at the time. The station filled that gap with round-the-clock programming run by local artists, labels, and blogs rather than syndicated feeds, giving Bushwick's underground scene a dial-up home base years before podcasts and streaming made independent broadcasting common.
A Stage for the Scene, On Air and Off
Newtown Radio built its reputation by staying close to the artists actually playing Brooklyn's clubs and warehouses. A 2011 Northside Festival showcase the station organized at Shea Stadium BK, featuring Laurel Halo, Autre Ne Veut, and Steve Summers, drew a favorable write-up from The New York Times, and by 2015 the station had graduated to curating summer concerts in the Museum of Modern Art's Sculpture Garden alongside MoMA's PopRally program. Shows like Disco Juice, Level Radio, and Let's Talk Hip Hop gave specific corners of the city's music culture, from disco revivalists to hip hop heads, a dedicated weekly slot.
Still Freeform, Still Local
Today the station keeps its schedule packed with genre-hopping shows and leans on a live Discord community to keep listeners talking between sets, a modern extension of the same community-first idea that started it. The lineup ranges across electronic, hip hop, rock, and everything in between, reflecting Brooklyn's habit of refusing to sit still in one genre. For anyone who wants radio that sounds like it is coming from an actual studio full of actual music obsessives rather than a playlist algorithm, Newtown Radio is still doing exactly what it set out to do in that old brewery back in 2009.