Shake!FM started in February 2017 as one person's music blog, not a station at all, built by a founder whose parents pointed him toward two very different halves of a career in radio without either of them planning it that way.
A Mother's Record Collection and a Father's Career
Founder Michel Mertens has credited his musical foundation directly to his mother's eclectic listening habits, spanning soul, blues, rock and roll, and Latin sounds, while his father's background in the media industry gave him a working understanding of how broadcasting actually functions (Shake!FM). Mertens combined both influences into a self-described "non-commercial music blog with matching musical stream," a passion project rather than a business, when he launched it out of Hamburg.
Named After a Friend's Old Club, Not a Marketing Meeting
The station almost carried a completely different name. Mertens originally planned to call the project "The Groove" before a friend known as Wobo suggested "Shake!" instead, borrowed from the name of Wobo's own former Hamburg club, a name that captured the dance-first ethos of the project far better (Shake!FM). The FM suffix followed simply because it read as unmistakably radio, even though the whole operation began as a stream with no license of its own.
From Hobby Blog to Regional Broadcast Family
Shake!FM moved from Hamburg to North Rhine-Westphalia in 2018 and turned fully professional on January 1, 2020, once rising operational costs made hobbyist status impossible to sustain (Shake!FM). On April 1, 2024, it joined the broadcast family of Radio Regenbogen, alongside RPR1 and big fm, with business operations handled by Audiotainment Südwest GmbH while Mertens continued overseeing programming himself.
A Regional Network Born From a Delayed Launch
Radio Regenbogen itself, the Mannheim-based network Shake!FM now sits within, had its own rocky start decades earlier. Its planned March 1, 1988 launch was pushed back 13 hours at the last minute by a court order from the Stuttgart administrative court, before the station finally signed on eight days later at 6:00 AM on March 25, 1988 (Wikipedia). The name itself, Regenbogen, German for rainbow, came from an offhand comment by an early station manager after an exhausting naming search of its own.
- Soul, funk, and beat-driven genres, stretching from disco and hip-hop through house, breakbeat, and drum and bass.
- Founded as a solo hobby project, launched in Hamburg in February 2017 by Michel Mertens.
- Professional since 2020, now part of the Radio Regenbogen broadcast family since April 2024.
- Founder-led programming, with Mertens still curating the sound today.
Why It's Worth a Spot in Your Rotation
Shake!FM carries the direct fingerprints of one person's record collection and one friend's throwaway suggestion for a name, now backed by the resources of a real regional broadcast network without losing the founder driving the actual programming. Few stations in a major network can trace such a specific, personal origin story this clearly.
Stream Shake!FM Free on Radio Shuffle
Tune in to Shake!FM on Radio Shuffle, no account, no app, no fee. Press play and hear the soul and funk beats that built it.