Petőfi Rádió streams current Hungarian and international hits live from Budapest, part of Hungary's public broadcasting family and named after the country's most celebrated poet. Press play on Radio Shuffle and it streams instantly, free, with no account or app download required.
A name borrowed from a national icon
The station traces back to 1932 under the plain technical name Budapest II, running test broadcasts that summer before settling into regular programming in the mid-1930s, according to Wikipedia's account of its history. It only became Petőfi Rádió on February 1, 1949, taking the name of Sándor Petőfi, the 19th-century poet and revolutionary figure whose verses are still memorized in Hungarian schools today. Naming a government-run music channel after the poet who helped spark the 1848 revolution says something about how central Petőfi's legacy remains to Hungarian national identity.
Reinvented as "Just Music" in 2007
The station underwent a major reform in the summer of 2007, rebranding as MR2-Petőfi Rádió under the slogan "Nagyon zene," meaning "Just Music," a shift aimed squarely at younger listeners with hourly news updates and a format built almost entirely around music rather than talk. That repositioning triggered a genuine regulatory fight: in January 2008, Hungary's media regulator ORTT ruled that the reformed station no longer met the legal requirements for public service broadcasting, a dispute that Magyar Rádió contested through the courts in the years that followed.
From MR2 to simply Petőfi
The MR2 label faded out gradually after 2011, when the creation of the public media fund MTVA reorganized Hungary's state broadcasting, and the station settled into its current, simpler identity as Petőfi Rádió under the Duna Média umbrella. The station has kept evolving since, including a 2021 editorial shakeup reported by Telex, which described the move as part of an ongoing effort to retune Hungarian pop culture programming for a new generation of listeners.
Listen free on Radio Shuffle
Petőfi Rádió streams Hungary's current hits under a name carried from one of the country's most important literary figures. Stream it free on Radio Shuffle, anywhere, any time, with no sign-up required.