Outside the typical east Berlin Altbau apartment building on the Brunnenstrasse in Mitte,  I see the the recognisable radio station logo and am promptly buzzed in.  The door opens and like Alice through the looking glass, I am transported from ubiquitous residential hallway into into the heart and soul of renowned Berlin radio station Motor FM.  As I enter, shabbily chic young hipsters in converse trainers, messy haircuts and with the most lassez faire of demeanours float around me.  Everything about this notorious station encapsulates the spirit of Berlin -  from it’s humble beginnings and forum supporting the best of the city’s music and alternative culture scene to it’s DIY and two fingers up at the establishment  attitude.

I am warmly greeted by Mona Rübsamen (CEO and founder of Motor FM and Motor Entertainment).  Considering the rock n roll notoriety of her station, she is surprisingly open and friendly, punctuating almost every statement with her infectious laugh.   We sit down and talk about Berlin twenty years ago, her passion for music and above all her baby Motor FM, the radio station that has over the last 5 years evolved into the voice of the cities alternative youth culture.

So how did you end up in Berlin?

It’s a bit of an adventurous story. I moved to Berlin in 1990, so I’ve been a Berliner for nearly 20 years now. Which is long time, I’ve spent here pretty much half of my life here.

After studying I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. So I made a deal with my parents that I would do an internship first for 2 years and then I would be free to go to Berlin.  When I finally got to Berlin, university life was wonderful but clubbing and night life was much more interesting at the time.

I had the opportunity and took this detour and moved to Berlin to find out about myself and discover where my talents lay but most importantly meeting people and that is something that still holds true to me even today.

Was this due to Berlin itself or club culture at the time?

I think it’s due to Berlin as well as the club culture. It’s the opportunities that this city offers you.  It’s a place where you can try out different things and express yourself. The city allows and can support the need to take it easy for a while and just discover things, without this innate survival pressure you get in most big metropolises.

It was a period where the club scene in Berlin was starting to explode with the advent of such legendary clubs like Tresor opening. Back then a new youth culture was emerging, it was not mainstream at all, and it was a new underground subculture that was developing. Coming from the country, I had not experienced anything like that in my life and I went crazy for two years, which was very necessary.

So after all this craziness, how did you end up at MTV?

Through my night life friends I got connected to MTV UK through a friend of mine who was a journalist as a Berlin correspondent. One day she called me up and needed help and said:

‘I know you haven’t ever done this before, but I have an interview I have to do today and I’m sick, can you do it?’

The job consisted working behind the scenes, putting together news reports from Berlin and Germany for the UK. That was the time when MTV still had money, it was the good old golden media times.

Then MTV decided to launch MTV Germany and they asked me to be part of the launch team. Me and my team had to pioneer a music channel orientated around German taste but at the same time improvise quite a big deal.

I had a good time working for MTV at the time, as i was working for a big international corporation with all the benefits, but being away from the main offices in London, I still had my freedom and Berlin lifestyle. Also the variety of topics from music, fashion, cultural life, art exhibitions, was a framework where I started to establish all the contacts that eventually helped me when I decided to embark on setting up the radio station years down the line.

What made you to leave MTV at the height of your success?

When I left MTV in the year 2000, I was completely unhappy with the direction the station as taking. I mean this was a music channel that I really loved and helped build in Germany. I was sad as it wasn’t a platform anymore for discovering new and interesting music. Seeing that it became increasingly difficult to work for MTV or any music channel in Germany in fact, was depressing.

Did the fun of the earlier days suddenly disappear?

Yes. They started to focus on all these American shows,  because they began to be subjected to  ratings pressure, so in turn everyone was so nervous and the fun just wasn’t there anymore. It got tiresome to constantly have to explain to, NY and London, why Germany was so difficult and such a different market from all the other regions, but it was and still is.

I find it fascinating that you moved from a medium that reached a wider and more immediate public (TV), to I guess what would today be seen as more antiquated medium (Radio).  What made you transition from TV into radio?

Funny enough I never really thought I would work in radio actually, as it seemed like a secondary medium. The transition began when I left MTV and met my now business partner Markus Kühn, who used to work for Universal. We decided to team up together and found our own entertainment agency (M2M) Mission to Mars, combining music, media and brands. We knew that digital media would only continue to progress upwards and that there was a climate of real change focusing on clubs, TV,  Internet and radio in Germany.

In the light of the changing media landscape we  looked abroad to see what worked outside of Germany. How were  other countries doing things? We found that in the States for example, there was the  interesting combination of word of mouth (fan energy), street guerilla (street promotion) online marketing and college radio.

After our agency got the first first three branches of our new model of Entertainment marketing up an running, we turned our attention to radio. It seemed strange to us that there wasn’t any college radio scene in Germany, it just didn’t seem possible.

So you set up Motor FM with the intention of being the first college/alternative radio station in Germany?

Yeah, we wanted to have an alternative radio station that played new music. I kept on asking myself it’s a totally obvious thing to do in Germany, why is no one doing it?  What we didn’t know at the time was that unlike TV,  Radio was a very federally controlled enterprise and there was no one radio station broadcasting all over Germany.

At first we thought fair enough, we will just wait till a free frequency becomes available and submit our application for it, done right? Wrong. The whole process of getting and keeping a frequency was very political.  Every Bundes regions federal board has to take a consensus when considering a new private station and those stations who already have frequencies don’t want another competitor crowding the airwaves, as they would then have to share the revenues.

It wasn’t as easy as we had originally thought; in the beginning we didn’t really have high expectations for the station, but thought we’d try our luck and see what happened.  In  2004 we got an event frequency for a limited time of three months. The idea was for us to play cool music, local artists and show the federal board that it is actually a feasible concept.

I guess such a venture wouldn’t have worked anywhere else in Germany apart from in Berlin?

Not as easily for sure, and that is why Berlin was a good springboard for us. In these three months we did a lot of PR work to create a big wave and buzz around the station. Then suddenly a  permanent frequency did become available and we handed in our application and managed to get the frequency. This was the first time in German history something like that was done. I was completely overjoyed, even though it was a shared frequency and we only broadcast in the evening. At any rate it developed in stages and it was only two and half years ago that we actually got our own frequency.

It was a real labour of love then?

It’s a total labour of love. Five years of work and time went into it. Markus and I started out in Kreuzberg in a nice industrial building with seven or eight different companies all sharing rooms, like V2 records. As we suddenly got the frequency and had to start broadcasting immediately,  it was such short notice we didn’t even have time to set anything up, so we asked V2 records if we could use their bookkeeping room. I mean it was 18m2 room and we stuffed everything in and somehow got it to work.

Radio is not complicated, to get everything going within that short time span we bought a computer, got broadcasting software and everyone bought their music from home, we did some jingles, and I did 20 interviews in 3 days – it was a hands on improvised thing.

The public radio stations didn’t take us seriously at all, we were total underdogs, we didn’t broadcast the news, there was no editorial, it was just about the music. But all the local musicians loved us cause we played their music, and a wave of word of mouth started to spread amongst the young creative scene in Berlin.

Was there pressure to conform to conventional radio traditions once you had more widespread success?

When we moved to to the big frequency the media board in Berlin then had a higher level of expectation from us. They said that at this point we had Germany’s oldest and biggest frequency , and it’s all fine with the music choice and that we supported local artists, but they expected more editorial coverage.

With that of course came the financial pressure, from just playing music to having news and sounding a bit more like a grown up radio station was a big step for us.

It’s like the media board was your dad!

Exactly. In the end our fun project turned into a real job, which is not a bad thing, but it’s just really busy everyday.

How are you surviving as a private radio station with the digitalisation of the music and so many people in the industry suffering as result of online competition?

The public media in Germany generates 7 billion euros per year and in contrast the private radio stations live off classic advertising. This means that they are reliant on ratings, and have to get the ratings up to get the advertising to be worth more. In order to do that they have to find out what people want to hear, so it becomes very research driven radio, and that is why a lot of they only have 300 songs that get played over and over again.

We consciously stepped away from that and pitched ourselves as a living and sounding music magazine, appealing to music lovers and we are more credible. Our target group are fewer but these people are more valuable. They are more loyal, they use new media, they travel, they spend, they go out and more importantly they are trend setters and taste makers.  We tried to position Motor FM not just as a pure radio station but as a lifestyle medium that combines radio events and online promotion, which is the new way of doing media actually.

This means that whatever we do on radio we refer our listeners to find our more on our website.  If you like a song, artist or want to know more about an event then check out more info or download the song off www.motorfm.de/.  We differentiate ourselves from the pure online radio stations, because we’re physically here and part of the city.

Digitalisation is really nothing to be afraid of and  it is something you can positively embrace.

How do you generate the the majority of your money to keep the station going?

Through brand collaborations, with Sony Erricson or Puma.

In a way you are giving urban credibility to a lot of these big  brands and in turn profiting from them through your collaboration?

Exactly. A lot of these premium brands  like to associate themselves with music and youth culture, they are looking for some media interaction.  As advertising in TV and print is going down these days and everyone agrees that online is the new future.  In this climate radio is pretty stable, which is good for us.

We benefit from Berlin being the capital city, as all the big brands are drawn here and there are a lot of openings and events like Fashion week. So these brands are looking for a medium to support their activities, and that is where we come in and try to do it in a credible and creative way.

Through this I think people realise we are not just about music, but also net culture and city life.

Living and breathing the city.  You must be proud that you are giving a voice to this city to some extent?

Yeah. I mean Berlin has a lot of economic problems, but we are very proud of our creative industries and I hope we are a platform for that.  I mean we really turned down some very good offers from bigger companies and corporations to buy shares or buy us out, and even though could have been financially viable for us,  we refused.

In that case where do you see yourself taking the station in the future?

I would love to make it financially stable so all the people who helped to build it can really live well off it and have families. I mean our team is all relatively young, but eventually they are a going to grow up and have families they need to support, and it would make me very happy if Motor FM could grow up with and further financially for all people who started it all off.

I also hope that the station continues to develop into a strong and identifiable part of Berlin.  Whatever happens, this is my baby, and I would definitely not like to sell it at any point in the future.

Though I do hope I can take a more hands off approach in running Motor FM in a about 2 to 3 years time, and find other people to take over the more operational side of the business for me. I’ve been running this station now for over 5 years, but I do have other passions that motivate me that I would like to pursue in the next 20 years.