Garth Brooks Buying Spot on Nashville Radio Dial to Create a New Country Station, With a Promise to Give Female Artists a More Prominent Shot

Garth Brooks has announced his Sevens Network, LLC company is set to purchase a Nashville radio spot currently held by Lightning 100, at WRLT-FM/100.1 on the FM dial, to establish a new country station that will offer a mixture of younger and historically established artists.

When the sale goes through, Lighting 100, a respected adult-alternative station that has impacted Nashville for decades with an eclectic assort ment of music, won’t go away. It will move to another spot on the dial held by a different company, theoretically creating a win-win for fans of both indie-rock and country.

Brooks is saying that the emphasis will be on serving locals rather than being a “reporting” station that contributes to the industry charts. And he adds that female artists, who are unquestionably underserved in the heavily male-dominated country format, will get special emphasis on the new station.

“This is an opportunity to bring the entire family of country music together in one spot… the legends, the greats and the future greats,” Brooks said in a statement. “Nashville is being called ‘The Newest City in America,’ and we want to bring a new kind of communication, combining terrestrial and digital radio, built to grow with this city… Our job is NOT to compete with the local channels in Nashville, but to PROMOTE what they have going on. We are NOT a reporter,” he added, apparently meaning not a station that will be reporting airplay of current hits to the trades; “we are a SERVICE to Music City and its businesses.”

A further statement on Brooks’ website read: “That vision includes making sure the women who helped build country music are heard alongside the women leading it today. Female artists have historically received significantly less country radio airplay than their male counterparts. By featuring female artists from the 1960s through today’s stars, FM-100 has an opportunity to showcase generations of voices together.”

Said Brooks about the gender imbalance he intends for the station to address: “We NEED both sides telling the story of country music.” That includes spotlighting female artists going back to the ’60s as well as active in the present day.

The sale by Tuned in Broadcasting to Brooks’ company still has to be approved by the FCC. Assuming it goes through, Lightning 100 will move over to Cromwell Media’s 106.3 FM and 102.5 FM HD3 frequencies with its triple-A format intact. Until then, Lightning 100 will continue to broadcast from the 100.1 spot on the dial.

According to the post on Brooks’ site, “The idea began in 2025, when Brooks saw a social media post from Nashville’s beloved independent radio station, Lightning 100. The post said, ‘Save Our Station.’ He didn’t know it then, but the plea for funds was from the COVID era, about six years ago. ‘I thought the post was current,’ Brooks said. ‘I was looking for a station for this idea I had about an information station for Nashville locals, visitors, and tourists.'”

Said Brooks, “A country artist buying an indie-rock station made no sense.” But, the announcement further explains, “Brooks could buy Lightning 100’s spot on the FM dial for his new FM-100, while Lightning 100 could move nearby on the dial and keep doing what it’s always done — uplift indie rock. ‘This way, the owner gets help in funding. The station lives on, while the new FM-100 finds a home in the middle of the FM dial,’ he explained.”

Brooks also noted that he has been chagrined by how pre-recorded national programming has left Nashville residents unaware of what was happening during local emergencies, and he sees his new station as a place where locals can find live information in real time from actual humans, increasingly a rarity in any city’s programming.

He’s not just focused on locals and visiting tourists — ““The dream is to be a 24-hour GLOBAL station,” he said, “to bring country music to places on the planet it has yet to go” — but at the outset he wants to super-serve Nashvillians. “This will be a joy and an honor to play a small role in being of service to Music City,” he said.