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Yle runs two Swedish-language radio channels for Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. X3M is the younger half of that pair — Vega takes the grown-up audience. It went on air on 1 October 1997 from Yle's Böle campus in Helsinki and was streaming online within a year, one of the first Finnish stations anywhere to manage it. In 2007, with licence income falling, Yle put the channel on the list of things it could cut, and the listeners objected loudly enough that the plan was dropped.

The weekday grid runs in four long blocks — X3M Morgon, Dag, Eftermiddag and Kväll — the same voices talking between records for hours at a stretch, with Ryggradslös fielding listeners' questions at night. X3M Metall breaks the pattern late on, putting international heavy metal veterans beside Finnish underground bands that the daytime hours would never touch.