20 years mx3!!!

PLAYLISTS – STATS – SUCCESS STORIES – GOODIES scroll down

20 YEARS OF ADVENTURE

Part I: The Genesis

An interregional project that quickly took off…

In 2005, Isabelle Binggeli, Head of Programming at RSR (now RTS, before the radio and TV convergence) and then president of the Inter-Channel Conference of the Third Programmes (CIC3), allocated a budget to the radio stations to launch a project aimed, already back then, at attracting and bringing together young people.

But what could young people from such a diverse Switzerland possibly have in common?

The answer was obvious: music, Switzerland’s true national language.

Originally conceived as a showcase for the great Swiss artists and tracks broadcast by the SRG SSR, the project soon became, under the visionary influence of Electron Libre, an open user-generated content platform for everyone.

After countless discussions about what to call it, the name had to work in all four national languages and appeal to DRS 3, Couleur3, Rete Tre, Radio Rumantsch and Virus, the platform finally opened its modest registration gateway on August 30, 2006, backed by major promotion across all five stations.

Within the first two days, nearly 1,000 artists had already signed up, despite repeated server outages caused by overwhelming demand.

When the platform officially opened to the public on September 15, more than 3,000 bands proudly displayed their profiles. Playlists were being created, messages exchanged, and success was immediate. The platform fulfilled a clear need: the desire to be seen, to exist, and above all, to be heard.

At the beginning, mx3 looked like this… and it was even translated into Russian! ;)))

Part II: A platform built for discovery that ultimately inspired regions to exchange

Being on mx3 meant one thing: being discoverable by radio.

Artists uploaded songs, their best photos, and sometimes even videos, hoping that a station would spot them.

We expected radio stations to discover outstanding new artists they didn’t yet know, and that is still true today.

What we never anticipated, however, was that artists already receiving airplay in their own region would suddenly be discovered and broadcast by stations in other language regions as well.

That is exactly what happened with Kid Chocolat’s The Secret of the Zombies. Already supported by Couleur3, the track spread across all the other stations within just a few weeks.

The Secret of the Zombies was uploaded on August 30, 2006, the very first day registrations opened, and became a national treasure in a matter of weeks.

By early 2007, the platform had already surpassed 4,000 registered bands.

Back then, CDs still ruled the world. We released our first compilation featuring 15 tracks, three selected by each station, and we had great fun with the artwork…

mx3 Compilation #1, released on September 15, 2007.

One of those 1,000 CDs landed on the desk of a music editor at SRF 3, leading to the discovery of Valeska. The Swiss artist, then living in Hamburg, sang that she wanted to be “as cool as Berlin”. She later performed at Montreux for mx3 and eventually became one half of the internationally acclaimed duo BOY.

Less than six months after launch, mx3 already celebrated its 10,000th uploaded song.

Within only a few months, mx3 had become Switzerland’s leading music website.

The platform won two awards at the Best of Swiss Web 2007, followed by another distinction at Prix Europa 2008.

It was the dawn of Web 2.0. You no longer had to be a webmaster to publish online. Anyone could upload their own audio and video content. In that optimistic and somewhat naive digital gold rush, everybody was experimenting with new ideas, creating flashy interfaces, often built in Flash technology, the gold standard of the era.

We created the mxCube, a compact representation of a band’s information inside a virtual cube with infinitely rotating faces. Looking back, it anticipated the scrolling and swiping interactions that would later become second nature on smartphones.

Then, in 2008, with the launch of Apple’s App Store, we released Switzerland’s first music app. It remained among the most downloaded apps for a long time. Bands embraced it and could even share it as their own official fan app.

But we weren’t stopping there. We simply couldn’t.

A new version of the site arrived in 2008, along with a major innovation made possible by the internet: a completely new way for listeners to interact with radio.

In 2008, mx3 and DRS Virus launched mx3 Linear, allowing anyone to become the live DJ on Virus during nighttime hours. The concept later expanded to a 24/7 service on Backstage Radio and remains alive today on Radio4TNG.

Part III: Startup Mode

Proud of its many innovations and buoyed by impressive usage figures, SRG SSR proposed that Dominik Born and Samuel Vuillermoz spin off the project into an independent company: mxlab AG, a joint venture owned by Telvetia AG (SRG SSR), SUISA and Swissperform.

Thus began a new adventure in the world of private enterprise.

Dominik and Samuel already had several products to offer media organizations looking to establish themselves online, and they still had plenty of ideas waiting to be brought to life.

“Just two years old and already flying on its own wings,” proclaimed the press release in February 2009.

Among those ideas was Music Kombat, developed first for DRS Virus and later for the Finnish broadcaster Yle X. It was a radio battle to the death between two songs. Listeners could vote on the station’s website by clicking for their favorite sumo wrestler to slap the opponent. The song attracting the most votes and participants would win airtime.

(The name eventually caused some minor issues with Warner Brothers, so we renamed it Music Fight…)

Then there was mx3.fm, launched in 2010, an early concept of on-demand personalized radio.

2009 also saw the birth of VxM. Following the success of mx3, SSR music stations and Musikwelle wanted a dedicated platform for folk and traditional music. Bayerischer Rundfunk would later follow with its own Volksmusik platform.

mx3 also took Swiss artists Tim and Puma Mimi, Round Table Knights, and Larytta to the legendary European electronic music festival Sónar Barcelona 2010.

That same year, together with SRF, mx3 launched the 8×15 format: eight bands performing for fifteen minutes each, not a second longer, in concert venues across Switzerland. More than eighteen sessions would be recorded between November 2010 and December 2019 throughout German-speaking Switzerland and beyond.

mx3 was building bridges across Europe while helping Swiss artists gain international visibility.

In 2011, Dominik left for new horizons but remained within the SRG SSR family, joining tpc, SRF’s production and technology provider in Zurich.

At the same time, SRF Zwei wanted bands to upload their music videos for inclusion in Roboclip Musicnight (today’s SRF Selection Musik). In 2012, mx3 therefore expanded into video and seized the opportunity to launch the first advertising campaign entirely created by the mx3 community itself.

The TV campaign eventually chosen had been created by two students from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts: Jela Hasler (27) and Caroline Schöbi (22).

Part IV: Bye Bye Flash – Long Live HTML5!

The web is, by definition, never finished. Everything changes, and adaptation is essential.

With the rise of HTML5 as the new standard, mx3 retired both its mobile app and its Flash player. This led to a major redesign in 2014 and a significant amount of development work, much of it challenging and sometimes frustrating.

The platform temporarily lost features that would take months, and in some cases years, to rebuild within a completely new technological framework.

The new mx3 design launched in 2014 for the HTML5 era.

In 2015, several radio programs began withdrawing from VxM, the folk music platform. Combined with the organizational changes following Dominik’s departure in 2011, this marked the beginning of serious financial difficulties.

VxM eventually found a new home within mx3 and became volksmusik.mx3.ch, benefiting from the platform’s “multi-tenant” architecture. This approach enabled economies of scale and allowed mx3 not only to host but also to create multiple music platforms, including one for Bayerischer Rundfunk.

Part V: Back to Mama!

After leaving Bollwerk 11 in Bern and spending a year in offices on Giacomettistrasse in Ostermundigen, mxlab AG was liquidated in early 2017.

The mx3 team, consisting of Matt, Dimiter and Samuel, returned to the “big family” and was reintegrated into SRF’s Music Department at Brunnenhofstrasse.

No problem. Time to get motivated again.

Driven by SRF and together with Couleur3, Rete Tre, RTR and SRF 3 + Virus, we launched the “mx3 All for One” initiative.

Each month, one linguistic region proposed three songs to the other regions. One track was selected and added to daily rotation on all four national networks, creating massive exposure and substantial royalty income for the artist.

A milestone was reached in 2018 with the spectacular success of Geneva-based artist Danitsa. One of the year’s “All for One” artists, her song Captain surpassed 50,000 streams on mx3 in barely a month, becoming the first audio track to reach such numbers and setting a record that stood unmatched for years.

Despite its small team, and thanks to its enormous heart, mx3 continued innovating through connected projects such as:

mx3.tv
Swiss Music Selfie
mx3 Tour de Suisse
Radio Ad Sucks
Sonic

Many of these were born during SRG SSR Hackdays or RadioDays Europe events.

Part VI: A Little Sister

In 2018, the cultural stations SRF 2 Kultur, Espace 2, Rete Due and RTR asked mx3 to create a sister platform dedicated to contemporary classical and experimental music: neo.mx3. After a year of development, the platform officially launched during the Fête de la Musique in Geneva in June 2019.

For the launch, interactive kiosks were installed at the RTS stand near the Museum of Art and History. Visitors could try the playful NeoFace application asking:

“Do I look like someone who listens to contemporary music?”

The answer, of course, came through a selfie.

2019 was also the year when mx3 opened its vast music database, containing more than 200,000 tracks, including approximately 10% video content, to private and community radio stations interested in promoting Swiss music.

What started with around ten stations grew steadily. Seven years later, the network had expanded to more than forty affiliated broadcasters, with over 15,000 Swiss tracks regularly receiving airplay.

Part VII: A National Platform in Motion

In June 2022, to position mx3 at the center of SRG SSR’s intercultural and interregional initiatives, responsibility for the platform moved to the national Offer and Development division and the Audience and Innovation team.

This allowed the recruitment of additional specialists to modernize mx3 and adapt it to the contemporary web.

The goal was ambitious:

A completely renewed version of mx3, ready for its eighteenth anniversary on September 15, 2024.

This included a full platform refactoring and the complete modernization of Play Festas, RTR’s archive platform preserving hundreds of hours of recordings from music festivals, choirs and traditional cultural events in Graubünden.

Between 2022 and 2025, the project benefited from the talent and dedication of:

Miri
Ahmed
Martin
Philippe
Raphaël (design)
Florian (social media)

It was an intense period filled with excitement, pressure and countless lines of code. Dimiter even returned to lend a hand.

After a quiet launch in August, both mx3 and Play Festas emerged from their cocoons, were warmly received by users, and only required the inevitable bug fixes along the way.

Today’s mx3 is therefore Version 4.

Play Festas offers a vibrant selection of cultural treasures from RTR’s audio archives.

At the same time, we also launched a video series produced collaboratively by all four linguistic regions for Musiktag, which takes place every September, around the same time as mx3’s anniversary.

Season 1: 2024
Season 2: 2025

The concept: Swiss bands covering iconic Swiss songs.

Part VIII: International Perspectives

The model and ecosystem created by mx3, its collaborative philosophy, respect for regional editorial independence, technology and know-how have naturally brought it closer to its counterparts across Europe’s public service media landscape.

As early as 2008, when Dominik and I proudly presented the results of what had originally been intended as a six-week experiment, we already dreamed of building a network of broadcasters dedicated to supporting emerging local music talent and creating an unprecedented music exchange hub.

That dream began to become reality in 2026 at the Eurosonic Festival.

The engine is finally running.

Through the European Emerging Music Exchange (EEME) and the platform europe.fm, the first foundations are now in place for what could one day become a truly international, shared music ecosystem.

We are incredibly proud to have helped create a movement bringing together:

BBC Introducing
FM4
Val 202
Bayern 2
Rete Tre
P3
Radio Wave
Rás 2
Radio 100,7
RTS Couleur3
Raadio 2
mx3

Twelve radio stations from eleven countries, united around one mission: supporting emerging music.

The next gathering takes place in Hamburg during the Reeperbahn Festival, where exciting new selections from across Europe will soon be shared with audiences on our respective airwaves.

Part IX: Conclusion – A Shared Project and a Team Achievement Twenty Years in the Making

NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT YOU.

From the very beginning, MX3 has always been a collective endeavor.

I could never say:

“I created mx3 on my own.”

What I can say is:

“I co-created mx3 together with Dominik Born, Daniel Schneider, Robert Ruckstuhl, Jachen Prevost, Mark Chouadra, Raphaël Briner, Marc Göring, Philippe Jayet, Sébastien Hugues, Julien Duseyau, Matt Zschokke, Dimiter Petrov, Stephanie Eger, Onesia, Joséphine… and many others I am surely forgetting.”

And of course Louiza, whose magnificent illustrations have accompanied us for twenty years.

But mx3 is also the result of every radio editor, producer and music programmer who believed in and supported the platform over the years.

And above all, it belongs to the Swiss artists who have filled it with life and made it part of Switzerland’s living musical heritage.

If I deserve any credit at all, perhaps it is simply for holding on when it mattered most.

Thank you all for this extraordinary adventure. And the story is still being written.

Samuel

Rear-View Mirror

mx3 is one year younger than YouTube.

It is the same age as Spotify.

And it is older than SoundCloud.

(With all our admiration and respect for our friends at Soundpark.at, launched back in 2001!)

Guys: enormous, amazing, wahnsinnig!

AGING IS LASTING! 🚀🎶🇨🇭🇪🇺