SKAANES RADIO MERCUR. Swedens first commercial radio station born in 1958.

In the years 1958 - 1966, Sweden and Denmark saw the birth of commercial radio stations which shook the foundations of the state radio monopoly of those two countries. Both Sweden and Denmark had laws that gave a state radio monopoly to Sveriges Radio and Danmarks Radio respectively. The lawmakers never assumed that programs could be beamed to the Swedish and Danish listeners from outside the jurisdiction of Sweden or Denmark Therefore, it was possible to send programs in Swedish and Danish from ships that were registered in a foreign country and anchored outside the international three mile border. The governments of Sweden and Denmark did not consider these radio stations legal, but neither could they call them illegal. There was just no law that covered this area. So the term " RADIO PIRATES " was born. This page will tell you about the off shore radio stations that forced the monopolies to change their entire format and introduce new frequencies devoted only to music. Up until then, the Danish and Swedish listeners had less than an hour of modern music, less than 30 minutes of " pop " music. The daily "Grammofontimma" , Record Hour, was presented without a DJ and each record played was published daily in the newspapers! It took three years for the legislature to adopt the first laws, commonly called the " Pirate Radio Laws " that would choke the pirate radios. It was a slow process and not until 1966 was the last law introduced that finally and definitely stopped the last surviving radio station, Radio Syd.

My interest in the " offshore " radio stations has primarily focused on the first Swedish commercial radio station, SKAANES RADIO MERCUR. I will briefly describe all the pirate radio stations that were active in Sweden and Denmark from 1958 to 1966.

Each page allows you to listen to samples of the broadcasts from that period. The quality of the sound may not be all that great, but remember, the recordings are 35 - 40 years old. Some are copy from original tapes, others are most likely a copy of several generations from the original tapes. Some are " live " recordings from home radios.

Due to the limited space available, most recordings are presented in REAL AUDIO format. In order to listen to most of the sound files, you need to have installed Real Audio. If you don't have it installed already, do so now at http://www.real.com/products/player/index.html/. The recordings you can listen to are both unique and a piece of radio history. The commercial radio stations that challenged the state monopoly from 1958 to 1966 were pioneers and fought against state censorship of what people could listen to. The issues were freedom of speech and freedom of the air waves. Who knows what we might have to listen to, even today, if the monopoly had not been challenged?