Lounge FM's easy-listening format traces back to a founder whose career path is anything but easy listening: a night club DJ from Luhansk who moved to Kyiv, built a radio station's entire sound from scratch, and later became one of Ukraine's most recognized travel documentarians.
Built by a Nightclub DJ
According to Wikipedia's profile of Anton Ptushkin, he worked as a DJ and art director at a nightclub in Luhansk before relocating to Kyiv in 2012. There, he became the founder and program director behind two radio channels, Lounge FM and Radio Piatnytsia. Per Ukrainian Wikipedia's history of the station, Lounge FM launched at midnight on January 18, 2013, with Ptushkin personally shaping its Easy Listening format, built around lounge, chillout, downtempo, nu-disco, and soulful house, and assembling its entire music library, under the tagline "Your everyday vacation."
From Radio Booth to Global Travel Documentarian
Ptushkin left Ukrainian Media Holding, the company behind Lounge FM, in February 2015 to pursue other projects, and his path afterward took him far from radio. He went on to host the television travel series Oryol i Reshka and later built the YouTube channel Anton Somewhere, visiting 68 countries as a vlogger and documentarian, including a 2025 Antarctic expedition documentary. In 2020 he was named an Honored Journalist of Ukraine, a long way from his early nights behind the decks in Luhansk.
Surviving a Frequency Shift and a War
The station Ptushkin built has kept evolving without him. Lounge FM moved from 99.4 FM to 106.0 FM in December 2019, and its FM broadcast in Kyiv went off the air on August 1, 2022 amid financial pressures during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Online streaming, including the LoungeFM Acoustic, ChillOut, and Terrace channels, has continued since, with the brand later changing hands to expand its digital operations.
Why It's Worth Tuning In
Lounge FM offers a genuinely mellow escape built on a real founding story, a station shaped by a DJ who went on to document the world, still streaming the easy-listening sound he built in a Kyiv studio back in 2013.