FIP (originally France Inter Paris) is a French radio network founded in 1971. It is part of the Radio France group.
Concept
The concept behind FIP has scarcely changed since its founding: commercial-free music interrupted only briefly for traffic updates, short news bulletins, and occasional announcements about forthcoming cultural events. Currently, live broadcasts, from Paris, are from 7 am to 11 pm. During off-hours, a computer replays music programming from previous days.
All music programming is hand-picked by a small team of curators, who are each responsible for a three-hour block. They abide by a few rules, most notably paying close attention to how tracks follow each other, across genres and styles, and especially making sure that a song is never played twice in a 48-hour window. FIP broadcasts around 16,000 artists and 44,000 different songs every year; 85% of its programming comes from independent labels.[1]
The short news bulletin at 10 minutes before the hour was conceived so that listeners interested in hearing more details could tune in to France Inter (or other stations) at the top of the hour; this was removed in June 2020,[2] citing the saturation of news in the media ecosystem. Likewise, traffic updates, relevant to Paris, had been removed in 2008.
Music broadcasts
The programming features all types of music genres including chanson, classical, film music, jazz, pop rock, world music and blues, but with careful attention paid to smooth and unobtrusive transition from one song to the other (for example, the rock and roll song Roll Over Beethoven can be preceded by a short sonata of Beethoven). FIP is one of the few stations in the world to transmit this type of programming around the clock. All of the songs are hand-picked by expert programmers. Some famous ones include Patrick Tandin, Julien Delli Fiori and Alexandre Marcellin. The first programmer was Anne Marie Leblond. Currently there are seven programmers: Armand Pirrone, Luc Frelon, Patrick Derlon, Christian Charles, René Hardiagon, Jean-Yves Bonnardel and Alexandre Desurmont.
