The New School’s student-run radio station celebrated its first birthday exactly how you’d expect – and want.

On Sunday, Feb. 25, Lucia Betelu, a fourth-year Sociology major at The New School, and Sylvia Roussis, a third-year Screen Studies major, cheered on The Break Inc.’s set at the Brooklyn Monarch while dancing and headbanging. Throughout the set, Bella Savignano, a fourth-year Design History major at Parsons School of Design, walked around the room, taking photos of audience members and the band. The room was filled with students, parents, and live music lovers, all showing support for WNSM, a New School student-run radio station, which Savignano and Betelu co-founded. 

The celebration consisted of performances from four NYC local bands: Hans Garcia, The Breaks Inc, Heart Rot (a New School student band), and May Queen. The celebration ended with a happy birthday ballad from May Queen, and a birthday cake made by WNSM’s Head of Events Elizabeth Stormont. An after-party was held at 11:00 p.m. and DJed by New School student Avery Murray-Gurney, aka DJ Ezra.

Savignano and Betelu, co-founders of WNSM radio, began the mission to create a music community with a college radio station late in the summer of 2021. With low expectations but filled with excitement, Savignano took on the role of Editor-in-Chief of WNSM’s blog, The Lamb, and Betelu the Radio Director. Now, the two have a fully student-run station and can revel in the station’s accomplishments.

Their idea didn’t come to fruition until the spring semester of 2023 when they hosted their first meeting at Savignano’s apartment. “We thought maybe 10 people would show up, and about 30 people showed up, and my front door broke,” Savignano said. “We were like locked in. I ended up calling the fire department and I had to run out and meet them because I didn’t want to see that we were severely breaking the fire code…it was a real grassroots beginning for us,” she recounted. 

Savignano and Betelu described how they initially sought after purchasing a frequency from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). They discovered that the FCC had no frequencies to give out, and even if they did, The New School would have to purchase an antenna to connect to one. Betelu resorted to texting a music fan group chat, asking if they knew ways to get a college radio station off the ground without having a frequency. The chat directed her to Radio.co, an online platform for broadcasting a radio station online. 

As the club gained stable ground, and discovered the ability to request meeting rooms in the New School buildings to avoid possible fire safety hazards, they began getting more regular listeners. One of these listeners was Melissa Kirsch, the Deputy Editor of Culture and Lifestyle and writer of “The Morning” newsletter at “The New York Times.” 

“[Kirsch] had hyperlinked to our station [on The Morning newsletter] in a sentence about her new obsessions, and how she found a new college radio to be obsessed with,” Savignano said. “One of our unique challenges of being an online station is that we are like so hyper-aware of metrics in a way that a lot of college stations aren’t. One of the only reasons we could tell we actually got the shout-out in the New York Times was watching our listenership base just explode.” 

Savignano and Betelu emphasized that their goal after the fall of 2022 was to create a sense of community at The New School, especially among live music fans. 

“The New School has a pretty severe lack of community, which I feel like people have been trying to change in the recent year and a half. Ever since the [Part-Time Faculty Strike] there was a big push for [New School students] to try and find these spaces,” Betelu said. 

Although the two didn’t have the same taste in music, they connected through their love of live shows and discovering new music. “Music was sort of a driving force in our friendship,” Savignano said. 

Although Savignano and Betelu have found a stable routine for WNSM, they still acknowledge common roadblocks they fear for future WNSM members, one of which is funding. While they do get allotted funding from The New School’s Student Leadership and Involvement, the co-founders acknowledge they still struggle to make ends meet. To get more funding, WNSM has to hold a meeting with The New School’s Student Senate. 

“The Student Senate can turn down any request. So our funding is never guaranteed, which has happened to us before,” Savignano said. “That means our budget is just sort of incredibly finicky and at the whim of someone else, which is quite scary.” 

Additionally, WNSM discussed having difficulties with finding proper club meeting rooms and places to host their 15+ radio shows. Many of their members either host shows from their homes or attempt to find a quiet place on campus in between their courses. “It is somewhat difficult to continue our mission of community. I mean we literally fought for a rat-infested basement closet once, but they couldn’t give it to us because of health code violations,” said Savignano.

Although they continue to face these roadblocks, this doesn’t stop their love of music and exploration. WNSM member and radio host Sylvia Roussis, a third-year Screen Studies major, expressed how WNSM has allowed her to explore new music connections through her show, “Algorythm.”

In Roussis’s show, she chooses a genre or artist that has been her favorite of the week and researches the opening acts of their live shows. “I work my way down the list of opening acts to see how niche I can get, how unheard of it can be, or how unexpected it can be,” Roussis said. 

Through this method, Roussis has found unexpected opening act connections, such as connecting A Tribe Called Quest with Epic Rap Battles of History or connecting Deftones to Megan Thee Stallion. “[WNSM]’s meant so much to me. It’s been a great way, personally, to discover new music and to meet new people and bond over shared interests that in other walks of the world, maybe you didn’t have many people to relate to,” Roussis said. 

WNSM has also connected with musicians and bands from both in and out of the New School. Hans Garcia, a CUNY alum who hails from Astoria, Queens, expressed gratitude for the station’s constant support. Garcia originally discovered WNSM after they aired his music on one of their radio shows. He then created a connection with Stormont and jumped at the opportunity to support WNSM at their 1st anniversary. “[WNSM] has a really big variety of shows. You got shows that are like classical music or like punk music. They’re like really big on pushing local bands. They play us…which I’m fucking appreciative of, but also, it’s a community,” Garcia said.  

Savignano and Betelu continue to stay optimistic about WNSM’s future. They emphasized that they were hands-off when it came to WNSM’s anniversary show, and were grateful for the accomplishments of Stormont and WNSM’s Director of Operations Katherine Hong. 

“We had sort of running joke catchphrase that was ‘WNSM world domination!’ every single time we would accomplish anything,” Savignano said. “So we somewhere deep down have these truly grand hopes and dreams. I think our more realistic take is hoping there’s enough people that it’s still happening 10,15, 20 years from now.”