Радио Май broadcasts contemporary pop hits at 104.5 FM from Pervomaisk, a city in Ukraine's Mykolaiv region that sits where the Southern Bug and Syniukha rivers meet. The station runs a CHR format built around current chart tracks, but it keeps circling back to the 2000s, giving listeners of different ages a reason to stay tuned rather than switch over once their own decade has passed.
A City Assembled From Three Separate Places
Pervomaisk itself has an origin story that mirrors what the station does with its playlist. The city was not founded as one place but stitched together from three older settlements, Olviopol, Bogopol and the river-crossing town of Holty, formed at the point where the two rivers converge, according to its municipal history. It only became a city of regional standing in 1938, decades after those three separate communities had already been merged into a single administrative unit.
Current Hits, With Constant Callbacks
The station's own programming philosophy, described on the streaming directory RadioPotok, centers on Contemporary Hit Radio, meaning the newest Russian and international pop tracks getting airplay right now. What sets it apart from a straight CHR rotation is how often it interrupts that flow with a track from the 2000s, treating those songs less as nostalgia programming and more as part of the regular mix, worth hearing again rather than boxed off into a separate throwback hour.
A Two-River City With a Habit of Merging Things
That same instinct to combine rather than separate shows up again in how Pervomaisk grew. A settlement built from three older towns at a river confluence, later folded into one city, sits at 104.5 on a dial run by a station that treats new hits and old ones as parts of the same broadcast rather than competing formats. Neither the city nor the station picked one era, or one place, and stuck with only that.
Reaching Listeners Where They Already Are
Радио Май keeps an active presence on VKontakte, where listeners can send in song requests directly rather than waiting for a call-in hour, and the station also posts video content through a Rutube channel. For a local FM signal without the marketing budget of a national network, that direct line to its own audience is how it keeps its playlist responsive to what Pervomaisk actually wants to hear next.
A Small Station With a Simple Formula
Радио Май has not tried to reinvent pop radio. It plays what is popular now, refuses to let the 2000s disappear from rotation entirely, and lets its own listeners weigh in on what comes next. In a city built by merging three places into one, a station that merges two decades into a single playlist feels like it belongs exactly where it is.