Who plays the music when nobody is around to play the music? As a listener of KBRP LP 96.1, you may have noticed that throughout the day, often between shows, a music mix plays on the radio. Sometimes it’s more curated, with reggae mix by Meg at 1:00 pm on Mondays, other times it’s a random collection of songs. But who is Meg, and how does she help the Bisbee Radio Station run?

According to former volunteer, Chris Sawyer, “When I started at the station in late 2007/early 2008, Meg was up & running with about 13,000 tracks in the library… I became the Meg authority (mostly through a lot of trial and error) when John & Jill moved to Costa Rica around spring 2008.” He noted “My goal was for Meg to play a wide range of music without repeats and to establish categories that were big and varied enough to sustain their own scheduling blocks.” From 2010 to 2020, over 75,000 tracks were uploaded into Meg, also known as MegaSeg. MegaSeg is a software used to generate playlists and broadcast at scheduled times. In other words, Meg is KBRP's sole computer DJ.

I was only three years old when I first started going to the station with my mom in 2008, who was a volunteer at the time. Myself and a few other kids spent a lot of time in the radio station at Central School Project and grew accustomed to its inner-workings. To us, Meg was not just a piece of software, but a DJ that was especially forgiving. When Meg was on, the red “On Air” sign flicked off and we could enter the recording room and stare at all the technology the station had to offer. While Meg has only gotten more varied and advanced with time, I remember singing my heart out to “Cherry Bomb” by the Runaways, which played at least weekly by Meg in its earlier stages. It is amazing to see how far Meg has come in the last decade, who those kids grew up to be, and how they have stayed involved with the Bisbee Radio Station.

Ember Gulden, Summer intern at KBRP