Start FM - History

History

There is little practice of the establishing university radio stations in Lithuania. Vilnius University radio Start FM – which started broadcasting on 12 September 2005 across Vilnius on 94.2FM and worldwide via the Internet on 24 January 2006 – might be considered the first successful university radio station in Lithuania. Same year in October Kaunas University of Technology opened its academic web-radio station Gaudeamus.

The station had no commercial support, was funded by the university administration and run on students' initiative. It had 32 shows at the outset, its collective consisted of more than 40 people – all of which were members of the academic community of the universities in Vilnius, it had an attainability of 100,000 listeners (with 2000 listeners per day, 10% of which were Internet users).

In March 2006, the broadcasts were stopped due to the lack of motivation of the staff and lack of the vision. The radio was left with one staff member only. These changes helped to focus the effort and the station was relaunched as non-commercial/independent station. On January 3, 2007 the first – after the changeover – live broadcasting Skraidantis Radijas (The Flying Radio) was launched, followed by heavy metal music show Audronaša and other shows. Since March 2007, a team of 5 people is working on the radio. The main goal is to organize the Lithuanian alternative music scene. Great support was found in the members of Vilnius Hardcore and Ferrum.lt communities, independent labels and artists and individual radio listeners.

Other objective of the radio Start FM is to develop constant and effective contacts with the academic community of the Vilnius University. Start FM cooperates with Student Government of Vilnius University, newspaper Studentų era, Institute of Journalism, student housing agency, which donates the premises for the studio.

Start FM was nominated for the "Special award of the year 2006" in the yearly Lithuanian Alternative Music Awards.