New air in Vilnius

As the radio market in Vilnius matures, Peter J. Mladineo sat down with a handful of pioneers who are spicing up the dial with more variety and, at the same time, changing the way the business works.

As Western Europe scrabbles and scratches in the new soil of Euroland, a few entrepreneurs are trying to make Vilnius into a veritable radioland. Within the last year Vilnius has seen its first Russian-language station, its first all-jazz station, and its first dance station commence broadcasts.

These new occupants of Vilnius airwaves are not sprawling giants like M-1 or Lithuanian National Radio. They do not have huge broadcast ranges or budgets, and are not going to grab dominant market shares for themselves, at least not yet. But they are demonstrating new and innovative ways to open and operate a radio station on a shoestring, and cut down on all the talk. But as far as the maturation of Vilnius radioland goes, there is still a long way to go, suggested Jonas Varnas, director of the Vilnius Radio Studio. "The Vilnius radio market is only forming, under rather complicated conditions," said Varnas.

He knows as well as anyone the difficulties in getting a small radio station off the ground. Varnas started broadcasting in Vilnius in 1990, at a time when no local radio programs were broadcast. "We started the broadcast twice a week," he said. "After a few months the programs were being broadcast every workday. Because of our intervention there were demands made of the content and the quality of the programs." Vilnius Radio Studio, the Lithuanian-language station, broadcasts every weekday morning with pop music and Vilnius information on 96.8 FM, a frequency it shares with Radio 7 and Nostalgie, the Russian-language stations. It started broadcasting on Nov. 7, 1997, the same day as its Russian counterparts.

Radio 7 is the first Russian-language radio station in Lithuania. A mix of pan-Slavic eclecticism with a distinctly Lithuanian flavor, Radio 7 uses a recipe of DJs, news breaks, games, jokes, and music, to cook up its own programs in Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian. It also offers Vilnius perhaps the largest repertoire of international sounds outside of the Russian sphere, including Armenian, French, English, Polish, Yiddish, Greek, and Latin American music. One of Radio 7's most popular imports is a taped broadcast of Britain's "Big Ben from London" show, in Russian.

Vitalij Asovskij, director of the statation explained that Radio 7 plays "everything that might be interesting for Russians, Belarusians, and other ethnic minorities except politics."

Asovskij, who is also chairman of the board of the Russian Culture Center, added that roughly 80 percent of its format is music - Russian music, mostly, with a spattering of British, American, Italian, Latin American, and other sounds as well.

"Russian music at the moment is popular in Lithuania," said Asovskij. "A lot of Lithuanians listen to Radio 7."

The need for a Russian-language radio station in Vilnius was perceived long before November 1997, but the idea of funding it was another story. Cable radio programs broadcast by the Russian Culture Center for about a year during the mid-'90s demonstrated a need for Russian music, but did not survive.

Radio 7's helping hand came from a Confidence-Building Measures Program for minorities arranged by Alfredo Micco, a representative of the Council of Europe.

"It was considered a rather small sum for the creation of a radio station but we decided to start and succeed," said Asovskij.

Someday, Asovskij hopes to increase Radio 7's air time to 24 hours a day and perhaps expand its range around Vilnius to 80 kilometers and bring it to other cities in Lithuania, but his more idealistic pursuit is to increase Lithuania's appreciation for its own cultural diversity.

"We would like to make the lives of non-Lithuanians here more comfortable," he said.

Perhaps proof of the wisdom of Radio 7's plan is that another Russian-language station, Russian Radio, from Moscow (101 FM), began broadcasting a retranslation of its shows in Vilnius in January.

Virtual radio

One way a fledgling station can get around financial woes is to not have any employees. Darius Uzkuraitis has accomplished this - virtually.

The program director of Laisvoji Banga, the classic rock station, Uzkuraitis is heading up its new sister dance/pop station, Labas FM, offering Vilnius its first dose of techno, house, acid jazz, and other contemporary dance sounds worshipped by the young.

Uzkuraitis reported proudly, Labas technically has no DJs on the payroll. At least human DJs, that is. The star of the show here will always be a computer - a virtual DJ that plays the music, stores the music, times the music, and orders the music.

"At this moment, we use only a hard-drive disk," said Uzkuraitis. "In the future we'll use free voices. But DJs will only be used for information purposes only."

At 99.7 on the dial, Labas FM began broadcasting on Dec. 4 and has a broadcasting range of 30 kilometers around Vilnius. It is owned by the Tempstar Holding Company, which also owns Lasvoji Banga, at 104.7 FM, and Love, 98.7 FM, in Tallinn. Tempstar originally purchased Labas and Lasvoji Banga's frequencies together and are now hoping that Labas FM will remove what they feel was a void in the Vilnius market.

"Acid jazz has been here in Vilnius since 1992," Uzkuraitis said. "Many DJs from France were playing that kind of music in night clubs, but there are no dance stations in Vilnius, Kaunas, or Klaipeda. I'm not a fan of techno music, but if other people like it, why not play it?"

Jazzing it up

A year earlier, Spiritus Movens, Vilnius' first all-jazz station, took to the airwaves. Its founder and director, Stanislovas Kairys, feels similarly impelled not to clutter his slice of the airwaves with orators.

"Our listeners can be divided into two categories," he said. "The larger part is jazz fans. The smaller part is people who don't want or can't listen to these talk shows. They like pure music.

"Vilnius commercial stations don't talk to adult people," he said. "It's a bad example of the so-called American style. The adult Lithuanian tends to be an introvert rather than an extrovert, so that a great amount of youngsters' talk irritates the adult listener."

Like Labas FM, Kairys accomplishes the talkless radio with a 200-CD disc-changer. "To change discs I must go in once a week," said Kairys. "But to arrange the playlist I go in every other day."

This creates quite a lot of mental toil for Kairys, who must keep track of 250 jazz cuts per day in his head. "We are planning to get a hard-disk and to arrange some kind of a virtual studio," he said.

Kairys claimed that his station nets 4.8 percent of the radio listeners in Vilnius. That's not a bad draw for a jazz station. "The nearest jazz station is in Warsaw and they have about 3 percent of the listeners in that region," he said. "That means that we have not less than 20,000 listeners in Vilnius alone, that's not counting the surrounding areas."

But what matters most to Kairys is jazz. He sees a direct correlation between Vilnius' love for jazz and the quality of its music schools. "We have a good enough school," he said. "We have many young musicians who are interested not in pop music, but jazz."

Spiritus Movens came about after a short stint at Radiocentras. Kairys teamed up with a friend who had a small transmitter and license.

"After some talks, we decided to start a jazz program. But it was clear to us that such a station would not be successful commercially, so we found some private funds that allowed us to exist.

"And this year we are alive thanks to our sponsors as well as private persons and some funds. But the fact that we are still on the air after a year is a little victory for us."

And, perhaps, a victory for jazzy little Vilnius too.