Most radio stations that lose their FM frequency and go through two bankruptcies quietly disappear. WILD FM did both and kept broadcasting anyway, which makes the stream running today less a hit-music station in the ordinary sense and more a small operation that has simply refused to switch off.
A Regional Hit Station Built From Scratch
WILD FM was founded in 2004 by Dave Leusink and Koen van Tijn, going on air on 4 February 2005 as "Het nieuwe Hit Muziek station" on FM frequencies covering Amsterdam, Haarlem, Alkmaar and Almere. Within a year it had become the most-listened-to regional station in its target demographic, and by July 2007 it rebranded as Wild FM Hitradio under the slogan "De meeste hits."
A Genre Pivot That Signaled Change
By March 2023 the station dropped "Hitradio" from its name and pivoted toward dance music as its primary format, a shift regional commercial stations in the Netherlands have often made under financial pressure to chase a more specific, loyal audience rather than compete head-on for a general hit-radio crowd.
Losing the Frequencies That Built It
The bigger blow came in 2024. Urban station Glxy Radio took over WILD FM's FM frequencies in Noord-Holland and Flevoland on 3 June 2024, ending two decades of terrestrial broadcasting. WILD FM continued on DAB+ and the internet for another year, but by May 2025 even the DAB+ signal was gone, leaving online streaming as the only way to hear it.
A Second Bankruptcy, and Still Streaming
WILD FM Hitradio B.V. had already survived one bankruptcy in 2013, rescued by an investor buyout at the time. It was not so lucky the second time: on 21 April 2026, the Amsterdam court declared the company bankrupt again, a filing initiated by music rights organisation Sena over hundreds of thousands of euros in unpaid rights fees and tax debt, which the trustee attributed to a structural decline in advertising income since the COVID-19 period. Despite the bankruptcy, the WILD FM stream kept running online, continuing under the umbrella of the Amsterdam Dance Foundation.
What is left today is essentially the internet-only survivor of a 20-year-old FM brand, still playing the dance, pop, rock and urban mix that carried it through two decades of Dutch commercial radio, minus the transmitter, the frequency licence, and the company that originally built it around them.