College rock

College rock is rock music played on student-run university and college campus radio stations located in the United States and Canada in the 1980s and 1990s. The stations' playlists were often created by students who avoided the mainstream rock played on commercial radio stations.

• The return-to-simplicity credo was also the working principle for a scene that would develop on US college campuses in the late 1980s, known as "college rock." As an outgrowth of hardcore, this scene celebrated its lack of affiliation with major labels and corporations, as its music was circulated through small independent labels (or sometimes by the bands themselves), airplay on college radio stations, and live performances at clubs that formed a circuit on the country's most important college towns.
  • John Covach and Andrew Flory in What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and It's History (Sixth Edition). page 461. W.W Norton & Company

• I think [alternative rock becoming mainstream] made it worse [for bands]. It made it such big business. Made it harder to get played on most alternative stations. There was a lot of money to be made and they got a lot more focused and they started narrowing down their playlist to like twenty songs.
  • As quoted from an interview with Lizzy Goodman of Vulture (November 16, 2010) [1]

• Soon after punk hit, intense, speed-driven hardcore bands formed in California and New York and DC, and their fans built an infrastructure — a coast-to-coast network of clubs, mimeographed fanzines, college radio stations, record shops, and small record labels that would make indie possible. Some of them (Camper Van Beethoven, Pixies) sounded like the indie that would come after; some of them (Black Flag) didn’t. But the movement — whether called alternative rock, modern rock, college radio, or whatever — was now grounded.
  • Scott Timberg of Vox (Oct 25, 2017) [2]