Cugir is not a town most people outside Romania could place on a map, but it has a global footprint few small towns can claim: its factory has been manufacturing metal goods since 1799 and firearms for most of the last century. Radio Energy Cugir broadcasts into that same town on 87.9 FM, and its job has nothing to do with any of that industrial history. Its motto, "Cu noi, sunetul are sens," with us, sound makes sense, points instead toward decades of pop, rock, and Romanian folk music aimed squarely at the people who live there.
A Factory Town With a 225-Year Head Start
Cugir's industrial identity goes back further than almost any other in Transylvania. Steel workshops were established there in 1799 under the Austrian Empire to process the region's iron deposits, making it one of the first metallurgical operations in Transylvania, according to a history of the Cugir Arms Factory. The plant shifted into weapons manufacturing in the twentieth century, producing Romania's first domestically made machine gun in the interwar years and, later, Kalashnikov-pattern rifles under state ownership, work that continues today under the ROMARM national defense company. It's an unusual backdrop for a small-town FM station, a place whose name is more likely to appear in a firearms catalog than a tourist guide.
A Station Built for the Town, Not the Factory
Radio Energy Cugir has nothing to do with any of that. Run by SC Alex Media Production, the station covers Cugir and the wider Alba county area on FM while also streaming online to reach former residents living abroad, part of a broader pattern among small Romanian local stations that have found their diaspora audience matters as much as their over-the-air one. The programming leans into that role directly, mixing decades of pop, rock, and dance hits with dedicated slots for muzică populară and muzică românească, the folk and popular Romanian styles that don't get airtime on the country's larger national networks.
A Local Media Ecosystem in Miniature
The station's own site lists partnerships with a handful of local outfits, including a Cugir robotics team and a local photo print center, the kind of small-scale civic ties that define genuinely local radio rather than a syndicated feed with a local jingle bolted on. It's a contrast worth noting against Bucharest's Radio Guerrilla, launched in 2004 and now one of Romania's most-listened national stations. Where Guerrilla built a national market share out of Bucharest, Radio Energy Cugir has stayed rooted in one Alba county town, betting that a resident's actual neighborhood matters more than national reach.
Sound That Makes Sense Locally
Cugir's factory has shipped its products across the world for over two centuries. Its radio station has no interest in following that model. Radio Energy Cugir exists to give one Transylvanian town, and the people from it now living elsewhere, a signal that still sounds like home.