Rüdiger Landgraf, MA, MBA, is Programme Director of Austria‘s only nationwide commercial radio station KRONEHIT. Austria was one of the latest countries to allow nationwide commercial radio. This happened in 2004, when the nationwide KRONEHIT was born. By that time Rüdiger worked at the commercial radio station “88.6” on air in Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland. Since 1991 Rüdiger has worked in commercial radio. He started his radio career at the pirate station “103.3” in Vienna and at ‘shopping radio’ before he changed to 88.6 and KRONEHIT. At KRONEHIT he first became Head of the Editorial Department. As the former Programmer Director Christian Schalt left the radio station in 2007, Rüdiger got the job as Programme Director of KRONEHIT, where he has remained more than ten years later.
Rüdiger is one of the pioneers of commercial radio in Austria, and one of the most knowledgeable insiders of the agile radio market there. He is a lecturer of media management at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, and he currently also consults stations in Slovakia and in Slovenia. Rüdiger is one of the experts when it comes to the future of commercial radio and he attends a lot of conferences concerning that topic. He is no supporter of the digital radio distribution standard DAB+, as it is right now. In his blog he points out that attempts to establish DAB+ in other countries like Norway failed. The Norwegian youth radio station NRK P3 lost about one third of their listeners as they switched from VHF to DAB+. Therefore KRONEHIT, as well as the public radio stations of ORF, are not participating in the pilot scheme of DAB+ in Austria.
