Setting up a radio station was also an extremely troublesome affair. Just finding the necessary professionals was no easy task.
Regional radio stations had existed in Bulgaria for a long time, but their audience coverage was too small to form an industry, and there were very few people working in the field.
Due to technological limitations, even Bulgaria's largest radio station still could not achieve complete coverage of Sofia alone.
The earliest radio programs were current-affairs news—or, rather, people reading newspapers aloud—or storytelling.
With such a small market, advertising revenue was extremely limited. These small stations had spent seven or eight years developing without showing much improvement. Without sufficient profits, their budgets for producing programs were naturally very limited as well.
Either they took on government legal-education programs, which required no spending at all and even earned them government subsidies.
Or they made fun of international events, played music and advertisements—anyway, they had no real competitors, and the public did not demand much from their programs.
Profit? How could pioneers of an industry talk about profit? Wasn't entrepreneurship all about passion?
And so, batch after batch of small radio stations became pioneers, then became martyrs.
This was an inevitable trend in the development of the capitalist world. In the bloodiest early years of twentieth-century capital, if an emerging industry could not turn a profit quickly and its founder was not enormously wealthy, then it was practically impossible for it to grow.
If they were targeted by a financial conglomerate and accepted its terms, they could at least go from founder to employee and get a sum of money.
But if they dared refuse, they were in for it! If they met someone who played by the rules, at worst it would be business competition. If they ran into someone ruthless,