By the mid-1990s, WDR 1 had a problem its own staff could see in the audience figures. The station had a faithful listenership, but that listenership was aging out of the demographics advertisers and public broadcasters most wanted to reach. Commercial competitors had been chipping away at the 14 to 39 age group for years. So WDR did something that German public broadcasters do not do casually: it launched an entirely new station, with a new identity, a fresh CHR format, and a clear remit to win back young listeners in North Rhine-Westphalia. 1LIVE went on air on 1 April 1995, replaced WDR 1 in most of its slots, and within a decade had become one of the most listened-to youth stations in Europe.

1LIVE calls its broadcast area the Sektor, and the Sektor is a serious piece of territory. North Rhine-Westphalia is home to roughly eighteen million people, more than the populations of the Netherlands or Sweden. The station reaches it through a forest of FM transmitters: Cologne on 102.4, Aachen on 106.4, Rhine-Ruhr on 106.7, on through Sauerland, Eifel, Munsterland, Ostwestfalen, Siegen, Kleve. It also broadcasts on DAB+ across the federal state, on satellite, and online. By 2023, more than 2.5 million people were listening to 1LIVE every day, and every second person under thirty in the broadcast area was tuning in at least once a day. For a public station competing with commercial alternatives, those numbers are remarkable.

1LIVE has been relaunched twice. In September 2000 the daytime schedule was stripped of show names and labeled simply by day and hour: Eins Live Donnerstag Achtzehn, One Live Thursday Eighteen. The 2007 relaunch went the other way and put the hosts back at the center, naming weekday shows after the people who hosted them. The evening call-in Der Sektor took over the 6-8 PM slot. Specialist music moved to Plan B and other late-night corners. The visual identity changed too: the pink numeral 1 gave way to a wordmark that played with the letter I and the number 1, and the famous pink rhombus showed up alongside. Sister channel 1LIVE diggi launched in 2004 as a commercial-free electronic, hip-hop and dance-pop stream. A cultural-pop spinoff called 1LIVE Kunst ran from 2006 to 2009 as an internet-only experiment, then quietly disappeared.

The station does not only broadcast. The 1LIVE Krone is one of Germany's most-watched music awards, voted on by listeners and handed out to German artists each December in a televised ceremony. The 1LIVE Konigstreffen is a kings-of-the-station festival; Das erste Mal is a newcomer festival; the radio concerts have brought Green Day, Kings of Leon, The Kooks, and Placebo to small German stages, with tickets handed out only by lottery. On 11 October 2019 1LIVE joined BBC Radio 1, NPO 3FM, RTE 2fm, Studio Brussel, Mouv', RBB Fritz, and Sveriges Radio P3 for a seven-hour simulcast called Europe's Biggest Dance Show, with each country hosting an hour. 1LIVE split the German slot with Berlin's Fritz, half an hour from Cologne and half from Berlin, and the show reached an estimated 18 million listeners across Europe.

The studios sit at WDR's complex in central Cologne, a few blocks from the cathedral and the Rhine. The Rhenish accent leaks into the on-air patter, sometimes deliberately, sometimes because the hosts genuinely cannot help it. The station has produced a generation of German broadcasting talent who started behind a 1LIVE microphone and moved on to television or podcasts or commercial radio. What it has not done is lose its core audience, which is the harder trick. Three decades after WDR took its bet on a youth station, 1LIVE is still the soundtrack to morning commutes from Aachen to Detmold, still throwing concerts that fans win in lotteries, still figuring out, hour by hour, what public broadcasting sounds like to people who could just as easily listen to Spotify.