Radio Day in the Philippines Date in the current year: May 8, 2024

The history of radio in the Philippines dates back to the early 1920s. According to archival documents, the first radio broadcast in the country was made in 1922 by Mrs. Redgrave, an American woman who used a 5 W transmitter for a test broadcast from Nichols Field. This test could be the first radio broadcast in the Asian region.

The first radio station in the Philippines was KZKZ, founded by former American soldier Henry Herman Sr. that same year. In 1924, he sold the station to the newly founded Radio Corporation of the Philippines. The next year, the Radio Corporation of the Philippines merged with the Far Eastern Radio Corporation, and KZKZ was shut down due to the merger.

Several other radio stations were established over the next few years, but all of them have ceased operations since then. The first Philippine radio station that is still in operation is DZRB, on-air as Radyo Pilipinas Uno or RP1 News. It was established as KZSO by the Insular Government of the Philippine Islands on March 8, 1933. The station subsequently changed its call sign to KZFM and then to DZFM.

Following the recognition of Philippine independence in 1946, the ownership of DZFM was turned over to the government of the Philippines, resulting in the creation of the Philippine Broadcasting Service (PBS). The PBS was the second broadcasting organization in the newly independent Philippines after the Manila Broadcasting Company (currently known as the MBC Media Group), established three months earlier.

During martial law, proclaimed by Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1978, the Bureau of Broadcasts took over DZFM and renamed the station DRI Radio 1 / MPI Radio 1. Like all media outlets, it operated under heavy censorship. After the downfall of Marcos’s regime in 1986, the PBS was reinstated, and DZFM returned to its ownership. The station’s current call sign is DZRB.

Today, the number of radio stations in the Philippines is estimated at between 1,200 and 1,500, broadcasting mostly in the AM and FM bands. AM radio stations primarily broadcast news, talks, public service announcements, community radio, and religious programming, while the majority of music radio stations broadcast in the FM band. Most radio stations in the Philippines are commercial, although there are some government owned, non-profit, and religious broadcasters.

Radio broadcasting in the Philippines is regulated by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), a government agency under the Department of Information and Communications Technology that licenses broadcasters and assigns them unique four-letter call signs in the DW-DZ diapason. Most FM stations and some AM stations use brand names and slogans in addition to their call signs to identify themselves, but many AM stations still use their call signs as their primary identifiers.