Constituents of a hit parade: Questioning democracy and listener participation in P4 i P1’s Det elektriske barometer

Due to their historically inaccessible nature, public service broadcasters’ media archives have lent themselves primarily to internal reflection while historical contex- tualisation of the cultural heritage in these archives has been broadcasters’ preroga- tive. In this study, digitised material from the Danish youth radio programme P4 i P1’s Det elektriske barometer forms the basis for an experiment into how access to digital archives can inform humanities scholarship. We argue that one important implication of the new digital archives is that they enable approaches independent of broadcasters’ own narratives since they offer the possibility for autonomous study of large quantities of material. e character of listener participation in Det elektriske barometer, which had the slogan ‘the listener-determined hit parade’, is approached from a micro-, meso-, and macro-level employing Carpentier’s concept of participa- tion (2011b), to explore how different approaches to digital archives can provide new answers to media’s self-presentation.