Hit-Pirates? Radio Luxembourg and Europe n°1 as transnational actors of commercial entertainment in the long 1960s

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This project aims at studying the most important players in the field of French commercial radio broadcasting - Radio Luxembourg and Europe nr. 1 - in a transnational and entangled perspective. Due to their transborder transmission activities, both stations were privileged transnational actors in the European radio landscape. As such, they are highly relevant objects of study for the research project as they touch on several tensions adressed in the main proposal. From a political and institutional perspective, both stations occupied a specific position within the European broadcasting landscape as they challanged the public service broadcasting model which dominated the European continent in the long sixties. In fact, both their succesful model of finance as well as their programme philosophy seriously undermined the monopoly of public service broadcasting institutions in France and Germany and in fact inaugurated the emergence of the so-called dual broadcasting model in Europe. Despite the fact that this dual system existed in Great Britain since the start of Independent Television in 1955, the so-called stations périphériques established a duality of both private and public radio services in the French speaking broadcasting space. This tension created a specific dynamic of negotiating the identity of radio by several actors: the state, the private industry, cultural institutions and the audience. Based on a social constructivist theory of mediated reality, the project aims at focussing more specifically on the role and importance of the listeners. As users and consumers of the commerical radio products and services, they played an important role in the co-construction of a new radio infrastructure in Europe.It is this specific role of the medium radio in the mass media ensemble of the long 1960s which makes this study so important for the general project. As the long sixties were characterised by the establishment of television as the most porminently advertised new medium of the time, radio had to defend its place in the ensemble - and did so very succesfully. Indeed, radio managed to develop new formats, new technologies such as FM or mobile recording devices were introduced, and thanks to the transistor and car radio, a new culture of mobile listening emerged. Hit-Pirates does therefore not only offer new insights for a transnational media history, but can inform other disciplines such as popular music or sound studies which are currently high on the agenda of cultural studies.