WBKM calls itself "Burlington's Kinda Music," a Vermont internet station built around one idea, connecting people to music, and a rotating library the station says runs past 100,000 songs so nothing gets played into the ground. Its name still carries a strange geographic footnote though: WBKM 107.1, tied on paper to Dannemora, New York, a small Adirondack town more than an hour from the Burlington studio that actually runs it.
Eight Years Online Before an FM Signal Existed
WBKM.org started life purely as a webcast, run out of Burlington by Eric Koval and Tony Gallucci, and had been streaming for eight years before it ever touched a terrestrial frequency. That changed in March 2016, when the operators struck a deal with Randy Michaels' Radioactive LLC to bring the station's programming to 107.1 FM, then licensed to Dannemora, New York, according to RadioInsight's coverage of the launch. The frequency itself renamed from WNMR to WBKM to match.
A Frequency With a Long, Restless History
That 107.1 signal had already changed hands and call letters constantly before WBKM ever arrived, cycling through WDYC, WELX and WNMR since its 2005 construction permit, per Wikipedia's history of the frequency. WBKM's tenure did not last long either. By September 2017, the frequency had moved on again, through WWWF and later WPLA, before settling in July 2020 as WWFK, "107.1 Frank-FM," a classic rock simulcast now owned by Jeff Shapiro's Great Eastern Radio.
Gold-Based AAA in a College-Radio-Adjacent City
During its year and a half on Dannemora's airwaves, WBKM ran a gold-based adult album alternative library built around Vermont favorites like Phish and Grace Potter, the kind of regionally rooted programming that fits Burlington's identity as a small city with an outsized independent music scene. That local focus, more than the frequency it briefly borrowed, is what defined the station's format from the start.
The Webcast Outlasted the License
WBKM.org never depended on the Dannemora signal to exist, and it did not disappear when that signal moved on to other call letters. The station kept streaming as an internet-only outfit, still running the same kind of specialty programming its FM stint briefly carried, including a Thursday night showcase called The Sounds of Burlington, a Sunday jazz block, and weekday shows helmed by Mike Luoma. Its current schedule, still branded around "connecting people to music," reads like the same station that made the jump to FM in 2016, just without the frequency that once carried its name into upstate New York.
A Name That Outlived Its Signal
Few stations keep a call sign attached to a place they no longer broadcast from, but WBKM's identity was never really about Dannemora. It was a Burlington project first, and an FM experiment second, one that ran its course in under two years while the underlying webcast just kept going, proof that the station's real home was always the stream rather than the tower.