BLN.FM

» see bln.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

BLN.FM went on air from Berlin in 2009, over the internet rather than over a frequency. The output was a 24-hour stream of electronic music with a web magazine on the same domain, and the whole operation was carried by a registered supporters' association called BLN.FM e.V.

The magazine ran the full ten years. It did what a city listings paper does, with an event calendar and record reviews alongside interviews and features on Berlin nightlife, so the site had a reason to be open all day even with the audio off.

The people writing and presenting had come out of established German media, with experience at Fritz, Radio Eins, KissFM and the Berlin listings magazine [030]. The staffing policy was stated openly in a 2015 interview: when the operation spotted talent it took them on, without caring whether they were students or had worked in the business before.

~ the dossier ~

~ the campus radio money ~

The origin is a budget cut. Berlin had been funding campus radio stations in the city, and when the government stopped, the people behind two earlier projects called 3headz radio and sonett77 decided to put the habit on firmer ground instead of letting it end. The stated goal was journalistic content free of advertising and free of sponsor interference, run as a non-profit, so there was never a sales department whose interests had to be protected.

~ what the rotation was ~

A music desk listened through the week's new releases and built the rotation by time of day. Mornings were disco and deep house. Daytime was electro-pop and tech house. The evening slid into house and minimal with dubstep late, and electro filled the gap in the afternoon. The genre spread took in electronic indie and ambient as well. That is a wider brief than most volunteer stations attempt.

On top of the rotation sat produced shows with named presenters. Schmidtagspause was a talk show with Jessica Schmidt and Cinerama was a film slot with Victor Redman. Fast Rewind and Forward dug up older records and ran interviews. Frischfleisch covered the ground between indietronica and techno. Elsewhere on the schedule sat #diesdasananas and TresenTalk.

~ the electronic music capital ~

The claim BLN.FM made for itself was that it was the only radio station and web magazine for electronic music and culture in what it called, in its own scare quotes, the electronic music capital of Germany. The same 2015 interview argued the thing could not have existed anywhere else in the country, and named other large German cities where it would not have worked.

The stream was as reachable in Turkey as in Kreuzberg. By 2009 the line at home could carry audio all day without anyone thinking about it, and that is the only reason a Berlin station could reach me at all. The other half did not travel at all. The magazine was a calendar of what was happening in Berlin that week, and a calendar is worth nothing to somebody who is not going.

~ seit 2019 geschlossen ~

bln.fm still answers. Over HTTPS it serves a WordPress maintenance page whose heading reads, in German, that they are sorry and have been closed since 2019, with a line underneath thanking you for coming by. Over plain HTTP the same host serves an untouched ISPConfig default index, the one that explains the file may be deleted or overwritten without any difficulty. German Wikipedia agrees on the year and offers no month. For a station financed by an association of supporters rather than by advertising, a maintenance plugin somebody switched on and walked away from is a reasonably accurate account of the ending.

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