Cable-only radio in the early 1990s was a strange business. You had the format, the DJs, the playlists, but you didn't have the car. People listen to pop radio while driving, while cooking, while pretending to work. They don't listen to it through their television set's audio jack. Radio 538 lobbied, complained, and finally ran a public petition. It collected 320,000 signatures, a figure that in a country of fifteen million is roughly two percent of the entire population telling their government they wanted a particular radio station. In 1995 the licence finally came, in pieces: a patchwork of regional FM frequencies stitched together to cover the country, which was less than ideal but more than cable. A proper nationwide frequency on 102 MHz didn't come until 2003, and 538 paid 57 million euros for it.

The format was simple and ruthlessly contemporary. Pop, dance, R&B, and rock, mostly tracking the Dutch Top 40 chart that the station had inherited from Veronica's old presenters. Mornings and drive-times were the talk-heavy hours; the rest of the day was hits. The first lineup of DJs - Rick van Velthuysen, Wessel van Diepen, Erik de Zwart, Michael Pilarczyk, Will Luikinga, Corné Klijn - were veterans of the same Hilversum scene that had once made Veronica famous. They knew exactly which records would land. By April and May of 2004, only twelve years after launch, 538 briefly overtook Sky Radio to become the most-listened-to station in the country. It has won the Marconi Award for best Dutch radio station three times: 2002, 2004, and 2009.

Bussum was the start; the long-term home was always going to be Hilversum, the small town twenty kilometres south-east of Amsterdam that holds an almost unreasonable share of the Dutch broadcasting industry. The station spent the late 1990s in a studio complex near Hilversum's town hall, and on 1 December 2012 the whole 538 Group moved into a 4,400 square-metre space in the former NCRV building on Bergweg 70 - a Protestant broadcasting headquarters from a much older era of Dutch radio, refitted for a station that talks about Ibiza and dance festivals on the weekend.

For a station selling the cheerful illusion of being a constant in listeners' lives, 538 has changed hands a lot. Lex Harding kept the controlling stake until December 2003, when he sold most of his shares to the American private-equity firm Advent International. In May 2005 the Dutch media mogul John de Mol bought it outright for Talpa. In June 2007 he sold it on to RTL Nederland. On 1 January 2012 Talpa took it back. Through all of that, the on-air sound stayed the same: the same jingles, the same morning hosts, the same chart countdowns. In 2018 the station finally dropped the Dutch Top 40 from its main rotation and replaced it with the in-house 538TOP50, compiled from streaming data and member votes. The Top 40, like the wavelength, moved on to another home.

What 538 does better than its competitors is the public spectacle. Until 2011 the station ran an annual Queen's Day - then King's Day - party on Amsterdam's Museumplein that drew about 300,000 people, until the city decided crowds that size were not safe in that space. The party moved, first away, then back, eventually settling on the Chasséveld in Breda from 2014. The 538 Jingle Ball debuted in the Ziggo Dome on 22 December 2012 to mark the station's twentieth birthday. The 538 Oranjeplein still takes over the Museumplein when the Dutch national football team is playing a tournament. The petition-signers from 1995 are now in their forties, and a generation later, they have raised children who grew up with this station as the default sound of being Dutch in a car.