“One of the things I’ve learnt from my career is never to play your own new track on your own radio show,” Anja Schneider says. After two decades immersed in party and club culture — from raver to globe trotting DJ, producer, promoter and label boss — when she talks techno, beats and other pieces, people listen.

Not least given she’s also one of Germany’s most experienced and respected electronic music broadcasters.

Before all that, though, there was one night in Tresor around 1993. A time long before DJs became rock stars, when dancers trusted venues absolutely, Schneider can’t tell us who was playing — “that wasn’t really important” — but the ear-to-ear-smile she wears when recounting the experience says everything about how much it meant to her.

A young girl from a small town outside Cologne was soon relocating to Berlin with the sole intention of diving headfirst into a rapidly developing techno scene.

A time when the city living its “poor but sexy” best life, connections were quickly made and friendships formed through late night adventures across an urban landscape littered with empty spaces and opportunities. Meanwhile, early dance radio shows were pivotal in shaping tastes, from random programmes on stations for the British armed forces stationed in Germany after reunification, to cornerstones of the local electronic music community on then-pirate Kiss FM, like Paul Van Dyk and Ellen Allien. Schneider cites both as influential, and by 1994 she’d joined their ranks and begun producing special features.

It’s here she created Love Radio, eventually taking the programme to Radio Berlin Brandenburg’s [RBB] Radio Fritz, having already made the jump from broadcast to events, from early editions as part of the Love Parade to the 50-artists-play-50-hours format it became known for. By which time Schneider had been promoted to Program Manager at the station, in recognition of her insightful journalism and talent as a tastemaker at the forefront of what was happening in the city at the time.

A role that would be cemented at the turn of the millennium with the launch of the seminal show Dance Under The Blue Moon, which continued through to 2017.

“There had been many electronic music radio before that, but I ran this for almost 20 years and it became very important to Berlin’s underground. This was before the internet, before there were so many tourists, so we had the same number of clubs but half as many people to fill them. Dance Under The Blue Moon was relied on to get people into venues, let them now what was going on that weekend,” Schneider recalls.

“Every Saturday I had a guest. At the time, I wasn’t as aware of how useful and big this was, but I still have people telling me they grew up with and were guided by the show.”

Long Play: Building Real Audiences in a Short-Form World

Description: TikTok told us attention spans were dead. Podcasting proved otherwise. In an era of 15-second clips and algorithmic feeds, a growing movement of artists, labels and music media is betting big on long-form - and winning.

As music culture fragments across platforms chasing the next scroll, intimate, unfiltered conversation has quietly become one of the most powerful tools for building the kind of trust, community and longevity that no viral moment can replicate.

Featuring Anja Schneider's perspective from the heart of Berlin's electronic music scene, the House Culture media insight of Matt Rouse, and the content craft of Christabel Heasman-Cossins and Chris Bailey (The Boy In The Corner) - moderated by broadcaster, producer and OpenDAW founder Lex Luca - this panel gets into the craft, strategy and real talk behind making content that actually matters.