104.6 RTL Rock Hits streams greatest rock hits from the 60s through the 90s, pulling artists like ABBA, Queen, Eurythmics, Billy Idol, Depeche Mode, and Britney Spears into a single rotation. It is a webradio spinoff of 104.6 RTL, one of Berlin's biggest commercial stations, built specifically for listeners who want the station's classic-rock leaning without its regular hot adult contemporary format and morning show chatter.
A Berlin station modeled on Los Angeles radio
104.6 RTL launched on September 9, 1991, broadcasting from studios on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin-Charlottenburg, and it took an unusually direct approach to finding its format: it modeled itself on 102.7 KISS FM in Los Angeles, reportedly copying that station's studio construction and borrowing numerous program elements outright, according to a history of the station on Wikipedia. The gamble paid off. By the 2023 German Media Analysis, the main station reached roughly 217,000 listeners daily and 128,000 in an average broadcasting hour, making it one of the most-listened-to programs in Berlin and Brandenburg.
One morning host for three decades
The flagship station's identity has long been anchored by "Arno and the Morning Crew," hosted by Arno Müller since the show's beginning. Müller doubles as the station's Director of Programming, giving the same person creative control over both the on-air voice listeners hear every morning and the broader format decisions, including the kind of genre-specific webradio spinoffs that eventually produced Rock Hits.
A free festival that outgrew the studio
104.6 RTL's reach extends well past its transmitter. Since 1997, the station has organized "Stars for Free," an annual open-air concert at the Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide that has grown into one of the largest free festivals in Germany, pulling international acts into a single stage built and promoted by a commercial radio brand rather than a dedicated concert promoter. Rock Hits inherits that same appetite for spectacle in a narrower form, a continuous rotation built entirely around decades of arena and stadium staples, without the news updates, contests, or DJ banter that fill the main frequency.