98.8 Kiss FM streams dance, urban pop, Deutschrap and hip-hop live from Berlin, reaching a technical audience of 4.2 million listeners across Berlin and Brandenburg today. Stream it live and free right now on Radio Shuffle, no account or app required.
Named after the station that invented rap radio
Kiss FM Berlin launched in January 1993 from the Wedding district, and according to a history of the station, it deliberately took its name from New York's 98.7 Kiss FM, the American station credited with pioneering rap music on commercial radio. It began on analogue cable at 98.45 MHz before the Berlin-Brandenburg media authority MABB granted it its now-famous 98.8 FM frequency on 28 February 1995, two years into its existence.
From Power Music Radio to hip-hop format
Kiss FM's first era branded itself Power Music Radio, built around DJ shows covering urban and dance music, hosted by names including trance pioneer Paul van Dyk and MTV veteran Ray Cokes. By 1998 the station shifted into a tighter R&B and hip-hop format, before dance music returned as a core part of the sound again from 2008 onward, a station that has rebuilt its own identity more than once rather than freezing a single format in place.
A station that survived its own controversies
Kiss FM's ownership passed through founder Frank Otto, co-founder Costoula Dornbach, and a mid-1990s stake acquired by Europe 1 before Otto bought back full ownership in 2011. The station also faced real regulatory pressure: after controversial on-air content in the early 2000s, Berlin-Brandenburg's media authority renewed its broadcast license for only two years in 2007, specifically requiring Kiss FM to eliminate sexism and misogyny from its programming, a public reckoning that forced a genuinely different approach to how the station spoke to its young audience.
Still built for Berlin's youngest listeners
Kiss FM's core target audience has stayed 14 to 29-year-olds throughout its three decades on air, broadcasting from studios inside Berlin's medienzentrum in the Steglitz shopping center Das Schloss, with coverage now extending to DAB+ at 97.90 MHz alongside its original FM signal. It remains one of the few German stations built explicitly around hip-hop and Deutschrap as a programming backbone rather than a seasonal trend.
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