The spirit of radio

This week the BBC announced that they were going to "re-arrange the deck chairs", by closing two radio stations, close down part of its web-site and cut back on importing TV shows. The savings will be re-invested in "quality programming" which is a relief as "rubbish programming" would have been less appealing.

I never listen either of the chosen radio stations (6 Music & the Asian Network) or explore the parts of the website to go. I probably should watch one of the imported programmes (Madmen) but otherwise it doesn't affect me at all.

The loss of Radio 6 music has, however, instigated a "cause célèbre" campaign on twitter and in the media to keep it alive. The main reason being that, it's small audience are very loyal, it is one of the easiest places to listen to non-formatted radio, with a good chance of hearing something new and it fills the gap between Radio 1 & Radio 2. Now to be honest, I rarely listen to music radio at all these days, so I can't really comment on the rights and wrongs of that argument. It does occur to me, however, that in this age of the internet, there are probably far more places to hear new music than there ever were. The "gap" issue makes sense and certainly my limited knowledge of demographics, target audience and all the other things that focus the minds of radio controllers, leads me to believe that there isn't anything else doing what 6 Music is currently doing.

The problem has been the listening figures and that in turn leads to how you can access it, as it is only really available on a DAB radio or online. While at home, I only listen to the radio on a DAB set, but I'm an exception and the majority of people still use FM for their daily intake, which excludes    both these stations.

So is the BBC saying that DAB is dead? Well the evidence is no, as Five Live for example don't quote their AM frequency in trails. They say "on DAB, digital TV and online" these days. Furthermore the Government planned switch off of FM/AM means that unless online and mobile access completely takes over, then DAB has to have a future. Mind you when DAB was launched, no one had thought of listening to your radio on your mobile phone, so the alternatives to DAB are already giving it a run for its money and that competition will only get more intensive. The one saving grace that it has is that car manufacturers are now putting DAB radios into new cars. I'm sure that one day (and probably quite soon) we will stream internet radio via 3G into our cars, but in the mean time DAB will be the new technology that we will explore on the move.

As a non listener, a bit of me hopes that 6 Music will get a reprieve, to take the benefit of that opportunity.