Radio

Sound and Vision archives all five public broadcaster radio stations fully. In addition to this, a sample of Dutch commercial radio is taken every year. Twice a year an entire week of radio is recorded, including adverts and leaders.

Something to bear in mind when looking at the graphs on this page, is that they show the number of programmes. However, a programme can vary from an advert or trailer lasting less than a minute, to the week-long recording of the 'Week of Dutch radio'. This means that the proportions may be distorted - for example one radio station may appear to have a much larger share of airtime, when actually it has more but shorter programmes.

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Our radio collection goes back a long way. Sadly, we don't possess the first broadcast on Dutch radio in 1919 - those early broadcasts were not recorded. However, our archive of Dutch radio starts soon after, and we have items from other countries from before that time - our oldest recording is a copy of a transmission made by Thomas Edison, from 1873. For many years, a selection of Dutch radio was made for archival. From 2000 onwards Sound and Vision archived all programmes on Radio 1 and Radio 5, as these stations had the most spoken word programmes. Since 2014 we archive all five public service radio stations. This is clearly visible in the graph.

What sort of content is on the radio? As the chart below shows, it is very diverse, with no single genre dominating. Music programmes and current affairs are well represented. 'Other' includes almost 80 different genres, from 'fundraiser', to 'science fiction', to 'gymnastics'. Note that programmes can have more than one genre, so the sum of the parts adds up to more than the whole. This means that you cannot make hard comparisons of the numbers, but they do give an indication.

Looking at the chart, it may strike you that one very important genre is missing - news. Until 15 years ago, radio news came from the ANP, and was not recorded. Since the NOS took over, the news broadcasts are recorded - but as part of the radio programme containing the news bulletins. The news items are not available separately, and are therefore not registered under the genre 'news'.

The programming is distributed over a wide range of broadcasters. Note that the chart does not take mergers into account, hence that you see KRO-NCRV separately to KRO and NCRV.

We can also look at the distribution over the radio networks. Note: all historical names for the networks have been grouped under their current name. The most programmes come from NPO Radio 1 and NPO Radio 5, the first stations to be archived. Note that the distribution of number of programmes does not equal the distribution of airtime, as programmes differ in length. Calculating airtime is challenging, as not all programmes have a duration noted in their metadata, plus we sometimes have multiple versions of programmes. In the early days of radio, there was only one station, and as such the network was not noted in the metadata, accounting for a large number of the programmes with no network filled in('onbekend').

A large proportion of radio programmes have been digitised. Note that some programmes that fall under 'unknown/no carrier' have not been archived as a complete programme, but have selected segments that have been archived, and even digitised.

Speech recognition transcripts are available for almost half of radio programmes. 'Waiting' indicates programmes that are available in digital form and are waiting to be processed by the speech recogniser.

Finally, we can use the metadata to trace the development of a radio station. Here, we see the changing names of Radio 3 and Radio 5 over their history.