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Posted on 10.01.10 by Matt @ 10:46 pm
Apparently there’s a new breakfast show later this morning. Chris Evans taking over the Radio 2 Breakfast show is the big headline, but what’s fascinating is the knock on it’s going to have to other radio stations and to Radio 2. Firstly it means a change to a third of daytime on Radio 2. The introduction of Evans means a new Drivetime show – Simon Mayo. This means Breakfast, Afternoons, Drivetime and the Late Show now sits with ex-Radio 1 presenters – Evans (1995 to 1997), Wright (1980 to 1995) and Mayo (1986 to 2001), Mark Radcliffe (1991 to 2004) and Stuart Maconie (1995 to 1997). These were some of Radio 1’s star performers and they were on-air not very long ago. A significant chunk of this old Radio 1’s audience (today’s 35 pluses) have already moved across to Radio 2, but there’s a significant number that remain with Radio 1. Radio 1’s line-up change last year was a recognition that the station was starting to trend older and they took the easy decisions to alter the mid-morning/afternoon line-up. What it didn’t do was tackle the main problem – Breakfast. Moyles continues to produce an excellent morning show, the problem is that the show’s seeing declining in listeners under 34 and growth with over 35s. The arrival of Evans will make many of these listeners, a good deal of which listened to him the first time around, reconsider their morning preset. This bodes well for Evans and will help Radio 1 trend younger, but will likely leave Moyles in a precarious position come July. Radio 2 have already played a good game to indicate to existing listeners that this won’t be much of a change. It’s important to remember that Evans has spent more time on Radio 2 Drivetime than any other job he’s ever done and he leaves the show with 6million listeners (compared to Wogan’s 8 million at Breakfast). On top of that I don’t expect the new show to change the music at all, it’s also got continuity with Lynn Bowles and a clever hire, in the seemingly universally liked Moira Stewart. Of course it’s also got Chris Evans too. The show’s also been quite clever in its marketing. Firstly it’s had a very long handover. With an older audience it’s important that people get used to the idea of what’s coming. This has given time for lots of trust earning statements from Wogan, other presenters and from Chris himself. The existing Drivetime show’s also had months of talking about the new Breakfast show. Many of the Drivetime listeners may have other Breakfast choices at the moment, this work will ensure they’ll now have a new one with Chris. Commercial radio always seems to eschew this tactic and surprise listeners (and normally the old presenters) with a brand new line-up one morning – and then wonder why it takes 18 months for them to settle in. As well as this activity, it also gets a BBC TV ad campaign, kicking off after an episode of Eastenders. We’ll skip over whether it’s appropriate that the BBC runs TV spots for the UK’s most popular breakfast show on the UK’s most popular radio station about the most well known change of presenter ever. There’s a view that Evans at Breakfast will mean Radio 2’s listeners become even younger. I’m not sure the station’s going to massively drift – it did its main move in the 90s. The interesting threat for commercial radio is that Evans may extend the average listening of 35 to 44s to Radio 2 as they start to consume a breakfast show that they didn’t used to choose. It also cements an on-going process that’s been happening since the early 90s, when Radio 1 had its ‘big shift’ and in the late 90s when Radio 2 had something similar. Now, for really the first time you have the two BBC mainstream commercial networks side by side – one for under 35s, one for over 35s. Great for the BBC, not so good for commercial operators. The last part of that puzzle will be who Radio 1 picks as the next Breakfast show host or hosts. What is good about Evans at Breakfast is that it continues to mean that UK radio has some of the best talent on the air and keeps everyone on their toes. Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: 4 Comments |
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Posted on 02.12.09 by Matt @ 3:45 pm
That's probably a bit of a harsh headline…. It was interesting to read John Plunkett’s Media Guardian article about Absolute Radio’s streaming hours. The basic gist is – Absolute now beats Radio 1 and Radio 2’s listening figures and doing this puts into question RAJAR’s numbers (John’s assertion rather than Clive at Absolute’s). However, some things that weren’t really mentioned… * Absolute’s numbers combine all of their radio stations (Absolute Radio, Xtreme and Classic Rock) So, in other words, we don’t know how each of the stations break down, how much is actually UK and what the actual weekly reach of the streams are. The weekly – monthly thing is quite interesting as the latter picks up the lighter users who pop in now and again, but not every week. In RAJAR it generally increases reach by another 70%. Now, overall it’s very good that Absolute produce some figures, it’s more than every other commercial radio station does, it would just be handy if we could all work out what they mean! (Clive's responded below in the comments) Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 25.11.09 by Matt @ 1:56 am
A quick post – no, really. Just got back from the Student Radio Awards, a really lovely night. Well organised by the SRA Exec and well supported by the BBC and Global Radio. It's not easy to put on an event for 700 people at the Indigo2 but they all did a wonderful job. It's 11 years, ugh, since my first awards and i've gone from being a new station member to winner to organiser to industry bod to judging helper. Tonight was a good reminder why I take part, and that it's somewhat of a booster. It's nice to be in a positive environment where people are striving for success and to be better. And it's good that there's a cermony to reward that. I'm also pleased that it's quite a collaborative effort. Helen, Chris and a bit of me arranged over 70 judges to trawl through the nearly 500 entrants – and they were all really pleased to be involved. In fact we couldn't cope with all of those who wanted to be a judge. Especially as judges don't do it for status – as there is none (!) they do it because they want to – and I think that's the best reason of all. There were lots of lovely moments tonight, I thought one of the best was Zoe Ball talking about and then presenting the Kevin Greening award for creativity. I knew Kevin a little and he ended up reflecting what much of the awards are about in his own personality – nice, charming, fun and creative. It was nice that he still has a presence in some awards that really reflect his values. It was also great to talk/talk at the students. Passionate people who, in some tough radio times, we need to think more about to ensure that we have an industry that has a vibrant future. Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: 2 Comments |
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Posted on 15.11.09 by Matt @ 6:49 pm
Regular readers will no doubt be aware that i’m an advocate for digital radio and particularly radio delivered over DAB. I spent a long time being involved with it at GWR and GCap (now Global), I worked closely with the DRDB on it, some of our current clients have stations on it, I own some DAB multiplexes licences and even a radio station, Fun Kids, that broadcasts on it. I guess this means, perhaps, I have a bit of an interest in it being a success. And personally I do think it’s a success. 10 million radios out there, 20% of the UK listening to radio through DAB each week and it accounting for 13% of all radio listening (that’s over double the listening through the internet and digital television combined). DAB's reach and hours is bigger than Radio 4's reach and hours. This week we’re likely to see more arguments over digital radio from the people who potentially have the most to gain – the existing radio industry. The arguments are all about switching off analogue radio. There’s two camps, those who think there is value in an up-front process to get to a point to migrate the majority of stations from analogue to digital and those who think analogue should remain. To be honest, I couldn’t particularly care less about analogue switch off. Firstly, it’s not really an analogue switch off, it’s just saying that most of the bigger stations will no longer be on AM and FM from 2015. The main reason these new rules have been suggested is to save these stations money by stopping them having to pay the costs of broadcasting on both analogue and digital. By removing these stations within a similar time period it provides a level playing field and a co-ordinated approach for listeners. This planned analogue to digital transition works for most existing UK radio stations. There are some issues for stations (and listeners) outside current and planned digital coverage areas but nothing is particularly insurmountable. The good thing about the proposed DAB organisation Digital Radio UK is that it becomes a well-supported vehicle by industry and government to be able to fix these problems. It’s something that Digital UK has achieved for TV switchover and they faced a different, but much larger set of problems. My radio station, Fun Kids, has no analogue licence. The station’s privately funded by its parent company and is well on the way to being a profitable part of the business. It chooses to broadcast on DAB Digital Radio because that’s where the majority of our listeners are – and they’re how the station makes it money. I don’t always have a lot of sympathy for the analogue operators. They get a piece of government analogue spectrum – originally awarded by promising some ‘public good’. They argue (as I believe is right) that the value of this spectrum is declining so they have to provide less ‘public good’. As an added incentive to ‘support’ digital radio these licences have enjoyed free rollovers – maintaining their radio monopolies. As we move towards a re-planning of digital radio they are likely to get another incentive form supporting digital radio, probably again around having their licences extended to ‘switch-over’ and reducing ‘public good’ commitments. We, on the other hand, produce a radio station full of ‘public good’ on DAB, which we pay carriage for and, amusingly to people who won these licences basically by being existing analogue operators. We get no ‘incentives’ to another part of our business to do this, there are no roll-overs for us. We don’t particularly moan about this or make stinging declarations to the Government. We just get on with trying to grow our radio station and make it successful. We like being on DAB. I think what’s interesting is that some of the existing analogue operators think that they hold the key to the future ‘success’ of digital radio. They’re wrong. Listeners don’t really care about platforms, they care about ease of use and accessing the content they want to hear. For 10m people, DAB does that for them. Analogue radio’s a good technology and for most people it does a good job of delivering their favourite station. But this is mainly driven by habit. The only analogue radio in our house is the one in the bathroom. It does a perfect job of delivering me Radio 1 in the shower. That’s its only function. However across my total radio listening analogue either fails, or doesn’t do a very good job of delivering me stations like NME Radio, Fun Kids or even Five Live. Pirate activity ruins some of my analogue listening in the office and it won’t let me see the pretty RadioDNS pictures that I see on my Sensia. When someone buys a radio now, there’s a pretty good chance it will be a DAB one. It’s actually quite hard to buy a radio that’s not a digital one now. People will, however, mostly listen to what they already listened to. Radio 4 doesn’t suddenly get rubbish because you can listen to The Hits after all. Total listening to Radio 4 may drop a little though as people replace certain elements with speech from BBC Radio 7 or LBC, now they can more easily get it. This changing listener behaviour will not be changed by Global Radio and GMG suddenly supporting digital radio a bit more. The job they can do is to use their size to tell more people about and accelerate the take up. Oddly the main beneficiary of them supporting DAB will be their own companies and stations. Getting to the point they’re happy to switch off analogue, quicker, would save them money (from having to fund dual transmission) and if there would more people listening to their portfolio of stations for longer, and less to the BBC they would make more money from advertising. If they stay on analogue, DAB’s growth will still continue, and their reach and hours will decline. If they replicate their analogue station on digital, their reach will remain, but their average hours will drop. If they enhance their station through a move from AM to DAB, increasing their broadcast areas or by offering multiple channels and choice they will grow their audiences and grow their total hours. What does not exist, partly because of the size and growth of DAB, but also with stations on digital television and the internet, is any hope of a return to a comfy analogue monopoly. The train has left and it’s speeding away. There are lots of people that this is good news for. Firstly, the BBC. They’ve created some new radio stations, including BBC7, 1Xtra and 6Music. These stations are generally cheaper than their existing ones and it helps them reach new audiences. They cross-promote them heavily on their other platforms. It’s helping them grow reach and making sure that if listeners flick around they’ll at least be informed about other stations in their portfolio. Secondly, new entrants. Stations like Planet Rock, NME, Jazz and us with Fun Kids. On analogue radio there wouldn’t be licences available to us, or they would be too expensive to buy. Digital allows us to reach a large number of people on a platform that’s used to consume loads of radio – perfect. We can also take hours from all of the existing stations too. Now, I don’t want to dismiss the concerns of certain stations, but without sounding too American, they’ve got to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. They also have to realise that the ‘radio industry’ does not just include people with analogue licences. Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: 8 Comments |
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Posted on 29.10.09 by Matt @ 7:00 am
There must have been some celebrating last night. 95.8 Capital FM has often, since its launch in 1973, been the figurehead for commercial radio. It was, just, the second commercial station in London and its historic success and sound has been coveted and emulated by many. It was also the first to face the challenge of new stations moving into its market and the faded glory of having heritage status. It’s difficult to remain number one when a selection of stations are taking bites out of you. The first time round Richard Park was in charge, he'd started to see a couple of quarters of decline before leaving Leicester Square in 2001. The massive explosion of stations at that time, a resurgent BBC and some dubious programming choices saw Capital’s figure cliff over the next few years and then hit rock bottom at the beginning of 2006. Since then they’ve plateaued and have started to see slow growth. Today, they celebrate something that they lost for the first time in Q3 2003, when Heart stole their crown – being the number one commercial station in London. Suddenly the ‘London’s Number 1 Hit Music Station’ tagline is actually correct. However, it’s a very tight race and Capital has only just nudged ahead. I also think it’s the lowest ever share figure in London to grab the top spot. Indeed, if you have a look at the share chart below these are not great numbers with Capital at a lower share than even the last quarter. Getting back to number one is a real success for Capital. The station sounds better than it has for a long time, it’s doing what CHR needs to do – play a small number of hits, have a good selection of presenters with a personality and have all the big events. However with such a tight race it’s going to be hard for them to keep that number one spot.
Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: 2 Comments |
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Posted on 26.10.09 by Matt @ 1:17 pm
The nature of my day job means that i’m quite often in the midst of radio politics, a decent chunk of which is to do with DAB. It can be quite tiring and it often distracts from the good things that flow out of it. Just with one of our DAB-related projects, Fun Kids – it’s lovely to see the volume of emails we get from listeners (and their Mums) and how closely they follow and support what we do. But then, that’s the danger with the political side of things. I guess we get caught up in the metadata of radio without thinking much about the product that’s all related to. Therefore it's nice to do things that concentrate on the product, listeners and how to be better at things. That’s part of the reason i’m involved with the Radio Academy’s Radio at the Edge conference. The event is on Monday 9th November and is just £199. I say ‘just’ because it’s probably the best value of any of the radio conferences that you’ll see advertised. Anyway… we've worked really hard to cover the topics and bring people from the companies that are defining how listeners come into contact with 'audio' in the digital space and we’ve tried to work on sessions that will help you generate £££s and cut your costs. There's sessions on mobile, programming radio stations, how to visualise what your station does and how music streaming services like Spotify are building a new audio model. Plus Tony Blackburn will tell some jokes he’s told before, but also talk about how he, as a presenter, is using new technologies to benefit himself and/or the radio stations he works for. Maybe there’s an interesting question in that… So, who should go? Well, I think anyone who works in radio should. It is inconceivable, that digital (whether that’s DAB, the internet or mobile) won’t affect the job you do and it might help you out if you’re the person in your building who actually knows something about it all. And… if you're trying to get into the industry (or move within it) meeting the other delegates who’s budgets are probably the only part of a radio station’s that are growing, might be a good idea too. Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: None |
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Posted on 17.09.09 by Matt @ 6:35 pm
A new radio was announced by the lovely people at Pure today – the Pure Sensia. It's a rugby ball of a radio with some great features. It can handle DAB, FM and Streaming (through The Lounge). It will also play music across your home wi-fi. The interesting thing about it is it's designed to be a very tactile device – from both the form factor but also how you navigate. It takes inspiration from the iPhone/Touch and allows elements to be selected and scrolled in a now familiar way. It also shares with Apple an app store. They'll be providing an SDK to allow people to write applications that will sit on the unix-powered device alongside weather, twitter and facebook apps that Pure have written themselves. The radio side also has another innovation – RadioVis. RadioVis allows radio stations (FM, DAB or internet) to associate their programmes with slides. The radio, using RadioDNS, looks up where it should get these slides from and then connects over the internet to fetch and display them on a QVGA screen. This is a good thing. It's good because it allows radio stations to control their own brand and deliver images in a simple way. It also allows them to deliver these things once, in one format. There will be many devices released that support RadioDNS over the coming months – and they'll all take the same RadioVis picture feed. It looks great. It's the kind of thing that you expect to have. We all carry devices with us that have screens that provide information and entertainment, the fact that radio traditionally doesn't have this content will seem more and more odd. The images that a station provides whether online, in an iPhone app or through RadioVIS is important. It helps define who you are what kind of station you are. And I don't mean a 'rock station'. It shows whether you're the kind of radio station that cares enough about its listeners to provide information about who's on, what you're playing, what's coming up, pictures of guests – that sort of thing. Our firm, Folder Media, now provides a RadioViS service for many of our client radio stations including Jazz FM and NME Radio as well as our own station, Fun Kids. We've also been helping out a couple of other stations to get their pictures up and running as well. In fact, we're providing a third of the stations currently broadcasting RadioVIS – other stations broadcasting pictures are Global's Capital, Classic, XFM, Heart, Galaxy and LBC and the three stations from Absolute. It's been fun, and stressful, finding out how it all works, but we're now working on providing a range of tools and services to make it even more relevant to listeners. As I said before, it's what listeners are going to expect us to deliver. Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 13.09.09 by Matt @ 7:43 pm
This blog has been a little neglected recently. It’s been around, in different forms, for a number of years, but it probably really hit its stride from the end of 2007 for about a year. This coincided with leaving GCap (now Global) and having more time to write. Not working for a big radio group also allowed me to talk a bit more openly about radio, and generally be a bit more interesting. This last year at Folder Media and through our acquisition of Fun Kids i’ve been much busier. I’ve also been more involved with radio industry things that if you’re in, you can’t really talk about. For example, it’s hard to do a post about the industry’s co-ordinated response to Digital Britain when you’re part of it. The blog’s also become a bit tumbleweed-y because of Twitter. Twitter offers a quick way to get an opinion out, try and be funny or release some information. Pre-twitter they’d be things that you might talk about in a blog post, but now when tweeted, there seems less impetus to write them up. I’m therefore trying to do a few more regular posts. My last one – Commercial Radio Bleating – has been my best performing posts in ages. It wasn’t at all designed to be, but looking back, it did, inadvertently do a number of things that makes something ‘go viral’. Therefore I thought it might be interesting to talk a little about how that happened and come up with some tips that might get your content (whether it’s personal, your radio station’s or something else) more views. 1. It was written with passion. Nicky’s tweet really did annoy me. It covered a topic that meant something to me, and something I felt that I could write about. 2. (I hope) it was informative. It added something to the conversation – there are new ‘facts’, it tries to be fair-minded, but there’s a strong argument in there too. Also, whilst a fair argument it leaves open many things that you could disagree with. 3. It speaks directly to the audience. My blog audience is very very specific. Generally it’s people who work in, want to work in, or follow radio. To many of them it strikes at the core of their radio world – being ‘BBC’ or being ‘commercial’. It’s very easy for most of the readers to have an opinion about it. 4. It was posted on a Tuesday evening at 8.34pm. Again, nothing intentional, but I think this meant it entered an interesting cycle. When I publish a new post three things happen. Firstly, it publishes it to mattdeegan.com on the front page. This means anyone coming to the site will see it. However – this is far less important than it used to be. Generally, not many people bookmark a load of homepages that they cycle through them when they have five minutes. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s not as if there are people madly refreshing to see if i’ve written something new. Indeed, because i’ve been posting much less recently, my just-stopping-by traffic has dropped quite a lot. The second thing that happens is that it updates my RSS feed. This means that people who subscribe to the site using an RSS Reader will see the post the next time that they log in. Around 300 people subscribe to my RSS feed and I imagine that over half them will probably see it within 24 hours. This, in itself gives the post a decent amount of momentum. Also, people who use RSS Readers tend to be a little more in the opinion-former category, so they’re probably more ‘important’ in spreading an idea than regular website visitors (no, offence if you’re doing just that, but you’re clearly a muggle of the internet). That is a joke. Thirdly – when I post, my twitter feed gets automagically updated, so a tweet appears saying “New Blog Post: Commercial Radio Bleating (http://dee.gs/pcd)”. There’s a plugin that does this and you can choose how to lay it out. I think it’s important for this to be really simple alerting someone that there’s a blog post, including the title, and then having a short link to it. It needs to stand out in someone’s news feed and encourage them to click it. I think the title really helps here. Normally, titles on the internet should be very simple and descriptive, because generally we should all be writing for Google. In other words writing in such a way that someone searching for something is more likely to click through. With ‘Commercial Radio Bleating’ – it doesn’t really do that – however, for twitter followers it becomes, just like an old school headline – something intriguing. Is it saying something good about commercial radio? Is it something bad? Either way it’s more likely to encourage people to click through and read. Twitter was in fact the biggest referrer to the post. Which leads me on to… 5. Spreadability. Twitter does an awesome job of quickly getting a message around. As mentioned before, before Twitter i’d have to have waited 24 hours for the feed reader types to get to it to start to build any buzz. With it dropping at 8.30 it meant that many people are at home, have more time, and are probably catching up with their twitter messages. They’ve got the time to see it, and to read the post. They’ve also got the time to retweet it to others. In the next 12 hours, 12 people retweeted it, many adding an endorsement about it too. This spreads it much further than my own twitter network (554) – if I add up the total number of followers that these people had, it was 5,677. Now some of these are likely to be duplicates, or bots, but with relatively few people passing it on, a lot of others can become aware of the post quite quickly. The third biggest referer to the site was Facebook – a few people linked to the post – and there was quite a bit of discussion around some of the links – this will be flagged up in other people’s newsfeeds and once again spreads the message. 6. Other blog posts. I was also lucky that a few people included links to the post in other articles, James C also very generously wrote a whole post about it and as he’s a radio blog A-Lister, he became the second biggest referer. There you go James – you’re bigger than Facebook, but not yet bigger than Twitter. When people include a link to you it doesn’t have to be an endorsement – but it does give you social (media) capital as it says to that person’s readers that you’re worth reading too. Out of all the links the one that surprised me the most was Phil Riley mentioning it on his Orion Staff Intranet Blog. 7. Back to timing. A big chunk of this referral activity happened at night and then in the morning, which meant the number of readers was increasing through the morning. Also – another thing happens in the morning – my email subscribers get an email of the post. There’s a little box on the right hand side that allows you to subscribe to the post via email – it’s all handled automatically, but the timing is set so that it arrives in people’s inboxes early. 8. Verbal buzz. Once the idea has spread to enough people, and quickly enough, it becomes something that people can talk about. Now, this might be in the comments in the blog, or it might be person to person. I went to the Radio Academy event on Wednesday evening – about 24hours after posting – and I was quite embarrassed how many people had read it, or said “I heard you wrote something interesting”. Wednesday was then capped off when Nicky Campbell, the tweeter which kicked it all off, re-tweeted the link and responded to the point raised. Overall it was an interesting 24 hours – and that was all it really took for all of this to happen. What was hugely important was having a number of distribution channels that would get the post out quickly. Though when I say ‘distribution’, i’m really talking about ‘people’. They’re the ones that can give it more momentum and then get it to more people. Having networks that support what you do – and giving visitors multiple opportunities to consume your content on their own terms is important. So for me, people can get to what I write through the web, email, RSS and twitter. But most importantly it needs to be content that makes people want to consume and spread. I wrote what I thought was a much more interesting post about getting rid of BBC1 – no one was particularly interested and it got no traction. There’s probably a number of reasons for that, but maybe it’s just that radio people don’t really care that much about TV… Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 08.09.09 by Matt @ 8:34 pm
I saw this tweet and had mixed feelings. The whole issue has me a bit torn. I'm not a big fan of commercial radio slagging off the BBC. The beeb makes excellent radio programmes. They're made by passionate people and funded the tune of £460m a year. It combines this quality with an amazing distribution network (national analogue coverage, DAB coverage, digital television, streaming and listen again) and strong marketing on television, radio, outdoor and online. This results in high listening figures and strong audience appreciation. As it should. Commercial radio, on the other hand… geez where to begin. All 250+ stations in the commercial radio network, generated, last year, in total, £515m in revenue. For this money it has to run interruptions to its programmes – adverts, sponsorships etc. It also has to maintain over 100 more buildings than the BBC. It has to spend a great deal of money generating this revenue – sales people etc. It also has to make a profit (or at the least not make a loss). At the same time commercial radio has no national FM pop network. Indeed it only has one national FM network at all – a classical music service – Classic FM. It takes on the BBC's pop networks – Radio 1 and Radio 2 – in each local market. Due to the regulatory structure it has to field around 200 individual competitors to Moyles and Wogan in TSAs that range from 50k people to 10m. Listeners make no distinction between how stations are funded (why should they care) they just want to listen to what suits them best. The vast majority of commercial radio stations currently lose money. If you own one of these local radio stations is it any wonder that you look at the BBC with envy? Don't you think, if you could, you might try and remove one of the many clubs that beats you into the ground? An easy response is "They knew what they were getting into when they bid for the licence". Partly. There's a recession on you know, that has somewhat affected how well stations do. Even the good ones. Plus the BBC's stations can (and do) change quite significantly. When people won their licences, mostly around ten years ago, Radio 2 did something different. It was a radio station that attracted an older audience. It now adds younger listeners faster than any demographic. It is, without question, a younger sounding radio station than it was ten years ago. I'm sure a number of commercial radio business plans did not predict that the Radio 2 tanks would be so far on their lawn that the shed's looking threatened. I'm not denying that Radio 2 is an excellent radio station. It is! But you look at a show like Alan Carr and Emma Forbes' 'getting ready to go out' show and it doesn't exactly emit Reithian qualities, does it? If you run a TSA of 250k and run a 'getting ready to go out' show for 25 to 44s how are you expected to compete with a programme on the BBC that's promoted on TV, ad free, presented by two well known and talented presenters, on any radio platform you may want to consume it on and plays songs, all of which, would appear on Heart. So if you're a commercial radio station you have the option of doing your own version or counter-scheduling. And should a commercial radio station, of which this kind of show is there bread and butter, be forced by Radio 2 to put on something else? But, I suppose if we follow Nicky's advice we should just let the DJ have more freedom and that would fix all the problems. Yeah right. There are two reasons why local radio DJs don't talk as much as presenters at BBC stations. 1. They're not as good. I'm not saying they're rubbish at all. But if you're on a national BBC network you are, of course, going to be better. Commercial radio will be playing catch up. 2. They have to play adverts. Ads are interruptions to music. It's not ads that listeners find annoying, it's interruptions to the bits 'they like'. This can be a duff song, an over-long link or a presenter they don't like. In commercial radio we're already doing ten (often more) minutes of interruption an hour, with the rest of the time, what are you going to do? You're a music radio station. The most sensible thing to do is play more music – and that's music that you know your listeners like. The alternative is to talk more and play a few more unfamiliar songs. This increases the chances of listeners finding more bits they don't like. I'm over-simplifying this, but at a BBC station you have those ten minutes more to play with; to do things that might not work, or play a song that might not be familiar and still have the same level appreciation as a commercial radio station that has to be perfect in the ears of listeners for the other 50minutes. This was only going to be a short post…. What BBC radio does cannot be compared to commercial radio. It's like comparing apples and formica tables. Radio 1 online has more staff than the whole of XFM and Capital FM's on-air and on-line production team . I'm not saying that Radio 1 shouldn't be allowed to make great websites, i'm just saying that the two sides are actually completely different industries. There is no doubt that commercial radio could do a better job in some areas. However when you look at what's stacked against it, it's really amazing it can do as well as it does. The reasons it complains about the BBC is because even if it succeeds in the smallest of its suggested changes the effects are potentially huge. Moving Radio 2's average age just ten years older would probably allow a decent number of stations to return to profitability. We're not talking about Murdoch-style dominance. We're talking about local radio stations being able to exist. Actually I think what annoys me most about Nicky's tweet (and the other BBC staffers who re-tweeted it) is what they're actually doing is dismissing as idiots the people who are trying to make entertaining radio on miniscule budgets in super-small areas in a massive recession. I own a loss-making, little radio station. It's currently losing less money than it's ever lost before and with a prevailing wind i'd hope we could turn that into a small profit by the end of the year. We are a national radio station for children under ten. We try not to bleat about 'the situation we're in', we, like most people in commercial radio just get on with trying to do what we can and make an interesting, popular radio station. I try not to think too much about the BBC's kids radio output. What they do is excellent and what they spend on it (compared to what we can afford to spend) is Brewsters-Millions-style huge. I can't think about it too much, otherwise the envy would become all-consuming. And to exist, it's something I have to compete with. The BBC recently moved the majority of their kids radio programming to breakfast time. This is, potentially, like most commercial stations, the slot where we can make the most money. There was no consultation for the programme change or a market-value test investigating whether they should be allowed to concentrate the majority (of the large amount) of money that they spend into a show that competes directly with the most important part of the only commercial radio competitor. Nicky – letting my DJs 'be more creative' won't help me fix this new problem. I have not 'bleated' about this – until now. I'd hope you'd allow us (and other radio stations who have to satisfy different audiences, in different ways, to survive) to be able to suggest (with evidence) that it's not your existence that threatens us it's your ability to change, grow and get stronger, whilst simultaneously being able to pull the rug from under our feet, using our money. Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: 6 Comments |
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Posted on 07.09.09 by Matt @ 10:47 am
Oooh, it's be a busy radio morning, hasn't it? We've got Mr Moyles celebrating becoming the longest serving Radio 1 Breakfast DJ and Sir Tel announcing (after a little Daily Mail intervention) that he's abandoning his TOGs for a weekend show and letting that young whipper-snapper Chris Evans have another BBC breakfast show. I don't think there's any particular surprise in the Radio 2 announcements – they've replaced a hugely successful presenter with the next most sucessful presenter on the network. Though, as Adam points out, there is a bit of a demographic issue. What it doesn't do is help the arguments about Radio 2 moving younger in the commercial heartland. However, and I think we all know this, they really couldn't care less and so carry on regardless. However, what I think this does do, is open up the opportunity to make a stab at turning drive into something a bit more public service-y. Already Drive with Chris has business and sports elements to make it more than pop and prattle, but with a likely move of Mayo to 2 from 5 there's a real opportunity to make it even more striking. Though his heritage proves that Simon can do mainsteam pop really well it would be great to see him bring things like his book reviews and more in-depth interviews (along with the Good Doctor) to a new drivetime show. Radio 2 already does this marvellously at lunchtime, it would be in keeping with Tim Davie's recent announcement if they made their new drive show even more distinctive. Remember you can get these straight to your inbox by entering your email address at the top right of this page. The RSS link is up there too. Comments: None |
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