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No disrespect to my colleagues and friends at NPR, but it seems you could get a lot of that by dropping NPR and just keeping a membership with APM to get the BBC World Service. The only major downside would be losing access to World Cafe, which is an excellent Triple-A music & interview show out of WXPN/NPR that would be good to have on your lineup (assuming nobody else in town is airing it). But there’s always Undercurrents, an excellent five-hour daily Triple-A show. (IIRC, you don’t have to air all five hours if you don’t want to) And Echoes, too. (although they’d require membership with PRI)

Not that I’m necessarily saying you should have more network music programming at the expense of local programming. But I am saying that if your goal is to have GOOD programming and not all your local stuff is really up to snuff (that’s an entirely different and, I’d imagine, SENSITIVE, conversation) then there are ample sources of quality network shows to fill the gaps.

For this plan to succeed, however, you’d have to take pages out of a lot of the successful Triple-A stations and find ways to make the music programming you deliver be more relevant to your local audience than Spotify or Pandora is. Part of that is live events/concerts; KUSP would have to spend a lot of time and man-hours marketing itself with every popular concert, festival, music show, etc that comes through the town.

But a lot of it is having top-notch local DJ’s that are very much in-tune with what a majority of the local populace cares about, and that your listeners can have a longstanding relationship with. Some of your volunteer crew probably has this to a limited degree now, and by “limited” I mean it’s hard to really do this well if you’re only on the air two or three hours a week. You might want to hire those people full-time to do daily shifts.

FWIW, it’s perfectly okay to have talk segments on a music station, but you do have to careful how you schedule them. You can’t force-feed an audience “talk” at times they want “music”. Depends on the show, too. Some of them just aren’t going to work. If there’s one truism in radio today, it’s that with limited exceptions**, you can’t be all things to all people. You gotta pick one audience big enough to sustain you and then super-serve it.

** Typically meaning really, really big markets where the law of averages guarantees you’ll get enough listeners who like what you’re doing…or really, really tiny markets where you are the only game in town…like middle-of-nowhere Texas or Alaska. Santz Cruz does not meet either of those criteria, fortunately or unfortunately.