SWR1 Rheinland-Pfalz exists because of a merger most listeners never think about while humming along to the radio. On August 30, 1998, Südwestfunk and Süddeutscher Rundfunk combined into Südwestrundfunk, and the old regional program SWF1 split in two, becoming SWR1 Baden-Württemberg on one side and SWR1 Rheinland-Pfalz on the other, produced out of studios in Mainz ever since.
The station built its identity around listeners aged 40 to 55 and roughly five decades of mainstream pop and rock, with a heavy lean toward the 1980s and 1990s, all under the slightly cheeky slogan "Eins gehört gehört," a pun that plays on the German word gehört meaning both "belongs" and "is heard." But the event that defines the station every year is the Hitparade, an annual countdown running since 2006 in which listeners vote on their five favorite songs from the entire SWR1 catalogue, condensed into a marathon broadcast of over 1,000 tracks.
The 2025 edition took 73 hours, 46 minutes and 25 seconds to count down, and the result barely moved: Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody held the top spot yet again, with Disturbed's cover of The Sound of Silence at number two and Journey's Don't Stop Believin' bumping Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven down to fourth. Every year the countdown wraps into a week of live broadcasting from a temporary glass studio set up on a public square, this year in Frankenthal, letting listeners watch their favorite songs get counted down in person while the presenters work in full view of the crowd.
For a station built on nostalgia and shared taste, that public glass studio says as much about SWR1 Rheinland-Pfalz as the countdown itself: a regional broadcaster that treats listeners voting on old favorites as an event worth stepping outside for.