Tune the FM dial across the Netherlands at any hour and you will find, somewhere between the gaps, a station that does something improbably specific: it plays Dutch songs by Dutch artists in the Dutch language. This is not an obvious thing for a radio station to do in a country whose pop charts are dominated by American and British acts and whose own singers have to choose, every record, whether to release in Dutch or in English. 100% NL chose Dutch. It exists because someone sued the government, won, and walked away with a national frequency reserved by law for music of Dutch and European soil.
In 2003 the Dutch government redistributed every commercial FM and AM frequency on a zero-base, meaning everyone applied from scratch. The system was a hybrid: bidders submitted business plans, an independent committee compared them, and where the plans were judged equivalent, the highest financial offer won. Some packages came without conditions. Others, the so-called special-stipulations plots, came with cultural strings attached. Plot A9 was one of those. It was earmarked specifically for music from Dutch and European production. RTL Netherlands applied, offering 35% Dutch-language content and an enormous bid of 23 million euros. A small Finnish company called Media Sales applied with 70% Dutch-language content - and a bid of 8,000 euros. The review committee decided the difference between 35% and 70% was not significant. The 23 million euros decided the case. RTL FM went on the air.
Media Sales was led, at the time, by Herbert Visser, who had spent his career as a newsreader at ANP, the Netherlands' national press agency. Visser took the decision to court. Two years of proceedings followed in The Hague before the court ruled in his favor, finding that on a frequency legally reserved for Dutch and European cultural content, doubling the percentage of qualifying music actually was significant. The Finnish-led bid had been wrongly passed over. On 8 July 2006, 100% NL began broadcasting from the boiler house of the Westergasfabriek - a former gasworks in Amsterdam now repurposed as a cultural complex. DJs Eline la Croix and Casper Meijer presented the opening live show with Dutch urban acts like K-Liber 4 Life and The Opposites in the room. The first song the station ever played was The Right Side Won by What Fun. The title was a wink. They had spent two years in court to put it on the air.
The first three years were rough. 100% NL initially profiled itself as a pop, rock, and urban station for a young audience, betting that Dutch-language hip-hop and rock could carry it. The bet failed. In mid-2008 the format was scrapped and most of the presenters were dismissed. The replacement was softer, gentler, and built around nederpop - the broad current of Dutch-language pop music with roots reaching back through Doe Maar and Acda en de Munnik to the smartlap tradition. The station added programs aimed explicitly at women listeners and brought in television personalities such as Daphne Deckers, Myrna Goossen, Tanja Jess, and Elsemiek Hillen as on-air voices. The audience came. In 2009 the station was nominated for a Marconi Award, the Dutch radio industry's highest honor.
What does Dutch radio sound like when it is, by mandate, primarily Dutch? It sounds like Marco Borsato singing about love in the back room of a brown cafe, like Jan Smit's volkspop ballads from the village of Volendam, like Anouk's English-language rock anthems made by a Dutch singer who refused to leave the Netherlands, like the country-tinged voice of Ilse DeLange. It is Bløf's stadium choruses in their native Zeeland-accented Dutch, the Acda en de Munnik cabaret duets, the dance crossovers of Armin van Buuren, the streamlined ballads of Nick & Simon. Mixed in, like ambassadors from the wider world, you still hear Robbie Williams, Phil Collins, UB40 - reminders that Dutch radio has never been hermetically sealed. The station's sister channels split the catalogue further. 100% NL Dance focuses on Dutch electronic music. 100% NL Feest plays party tracks. 100% NL Liefde plays love songs. A television sister channel launched in 2013.
Listening to 100% NL is, in a small way, listening to a verdict. The station is what happens when a court decides that cultural quotas in a license actually mean something - that a number on a piece of paper, 70 percent of Dutch-language content, is more than a tiebreaker for a higher bid. The Westergasfabriek where the station first broadcast was itself a converted industrial space, a former coal-gas plant repurposed for a different kind of energy. The metaphor probably did not occur to anyone in the boiler house at the time of the first broadcast. They were too busy queuing up The Right Side Won. But the broader point stands. In a small, multilingual country where the airwaves had long defaulted to English, a single legal challenge created and protected a permanent home for Dutch music in the Dutch language - and Dutch listeners, when finally offered it consistently, turned out to like it just fine.
100% NL broadcasts from studios in Het Gooi region near Bussum, at approximately 52.29 N, 5.20 E, around 25 km southeast of Amsterdam. The station's transmitters cover the entire Netherlands on FM. Nearest airport is Amsterdam Schiphol (EHAM) to the west; Lelystad (EHLE) lies to the north. The original launch site at the Westergasfabriek is in Amsterdam-West, just north of the Vondelpark. From altitude, look for the densely wooded Gooi area, an unusual patch of forested terrain between Amsterdam and Utrecht.