Most radio stations have their golden years, but as RAM FM was only on the air for 18 months, I will say that we had our golden "months".
Without much advertising, and most of it going by word of mouth, RAM's popularity spread fast at the end of 2007. A lot of places I went into (flower shops, bakeries etc) were playing RAM FM in the background. I even became a semi-celeb at my barbers, who always had RAM FM on when I came to have a haircut (whether he changed the station when I went, I don't know!).
At the station we could see it by the amount of people who were calling in and e-mailing us. When I changed the Breakfast Show's engineer (Francis) when he went on holiday, I saw there were over 100 calls coming in. Even The Afternoon Show - not one of the most popular spots on daytime radio, was getting close to 50 calls during our Lunchbreak competition between 12.00-13.00.
The word was spreading, and our audience was growing by the day. Then in March of 2008, the station had an advertising campaign that cost between $400,000-$500,000 ( figures taken from the press). All of sudden you could see Bob Marley, The Beatles, Madonna and Kylie Minogue made out of stamps (not the ones you put on letters). "Passports" were distributed in Tel Aviv, and huge posters were hung in Tel Aviv and Ramallah. There was a really nice sign on the Ayalon Freeway going through Tel Aviv. All these brought us new listeners.
The fact we had no advertising brought us listeners from Radius 100 which broadcasts in the Sharon area just outside of Tel Aviv, and has an intolerable amount of commercials every hour.
RAM FM celebrated it's first birthday on Feb 21st 2008 by cancelling all of its regular programmes, and just had dedications all day. During the Afteroon show we had hundreds of phonecalls, and Arda and I had to get help to answer the phones, we just couldn't keep up!
The golden months of February and March was followed by Black April - April 7th, the day the music died in our Jerusalem studios .........
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