On April 22, 1977, a station went on air in Lagos that did not just launch a new Nigerian broadcaster, it introduced FM radio to the whole of Africa for the first time. Metro FM began life as a stereophonic FM and AM signal under the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcasting on 97.6 FM and 1458 AM simultaneously.
Three Names Before Metro
The station did not launch under the name most Lagosians know today. It was first christened NBC2, a direct label tied to its parent, the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, which had itself been established by act of parliament on April 1, 1957. It was then renamed RN2 before finally settling on the Metro identity, a sequence of rebrands that traces the station's movement through Nigeria's shifting broadcasting bureaucracy over its early decades.
A Frequency Change and a Younger Audience
Metro FM's technical footprint shifted too, moving from 97.6 to 97.7 FM in September 2011. Two years later, in 2013, the station rebranded its programming specifically to target listeners aged 18 to 35, a deliberate repositioning for a station whose original 1977 launch audience would, by then, have been well into middle age.
The Weight of Being First
Being the first FM station anywhere on the African continent is not a small claim, and it places Metro FM at the root of a broadcasting technology that eventually spread across dozens of countries and thousands of stations continent-wide. Every FM signal that followed in Nigeria, and arguably across West Africa, owes something to this single 1977 Lagos launch.
Stream Metro FM Lagos Free on Radio Shuffle
Tune in to Metro FM Lagos on Radio Shuffle, no account, no app, no fee. Press play for the station that brought FM radio to Africa for the first time, now programmed for a new generation of Lagos listeners.