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The music journalist Ruben Jonas Schnell put ByteFM on air on 11 January 2008, and it has never run an advertising spot. It is paid for instead by a listeners' association, Freunde von ByteFM, at sixty euros a year, and the model held: a Grimme Online Award followed in 2009, along with Hamburg's HANS prize for music medium of the year. Since 2022 it has also held FM frequencies in Hamburg and Berlin. It spent most of its life inside Hamburg's Medienbunker and has now outgrown the place.

Close to a hundred music journalists, musicians and fans present the programmes, with another twenty on editorial and technical staff, and every record is chosen by hand. The written side matters as much: album reviews, interviews, and portraits of labels, scenes and artists. The range takes in krautrock, shoegaze, dream pop, synth-pop, techno, folk, chanson and Afrobeat.