If this article is true and the threat to the BBC’s 6Music station is critical and more than the BBC Trust’s rap on the knuckles to get the station out there and focus more on music…then not only BBC has turned it’s back on quite a large 25-45 year old target age group who want to hear new music, but really it will hit Digital Radio hard, ironically as the analogue to digital TV switch over means more people and more bandwidth will become available. The technology is still early days and lack of sets and listeners over the millions of analogue radio sets means the listener base is small, but it will grow – and 6Music and the other stations will grow with it. Totally short sighted.
I mean XFM is too restrictive and corporate blandie so I left that (as well as most of it’s decent talent) for 6Music – Radio 2 is too old and plays the disgusting likes of Coldplay and Snow fecking Patrol. Radio 3 is OK but not really a fan of 15th century madrigals and plinky plinky modern jazz. Radio 4 is for upper-class politics/news heads (that will NEVER be cancelled as the Powers That Be listen to Radio 4, however utterly boring) and spoken word/Listen with Mother types, and much older, although not as old or targetted as 3. And I like to hear music, not banal chat with RP-types with strangely no idea how to interview nor not umm and err – the podcasts that survived iTunes/BBC’s commercial deluge offer better production and skills than this!
Radio 1? Well don’t make me laugh…it’s been for 15 year old illiterate Dappy-types for years, nicking most of the chav demographic. Very little for me there…used to be good with John Peel and Rob Da Bank is good, but there’s been a general dumbing down since Peel’s death into a Moylesland of dull r’n’b and Edith and Colin stupidity.
The strength of 6Music is a remit for new music, not one a commercial station will or ever has fulfilled, unless in the ‘glory days’ of chasing Radio 1’s crowd (1960s-1980s) when it was actually breaking new ground playing new or wide selection of music, sometimes during the day. I doubt that will happen again because the boring US-style ‘drivetime’ and zoo formats are entrenched, and the bland audiogum of Keane Coldplay Patrol and Snow Travis Winehouse are too endemic and popular with advertisers chasing a middle of the road M&S Mylene Klass mediocrity.
If 6Music goes, I doubt I will pay much attention to BBC, either TV or Radio – TV is pretty dire and too banal, broad-based and dumb apart from Doctor Who (which you can see via other channels/methods anyway) and even that’s changing and looks more ‘kiddie’ than ever. As some of the comments over at the Times points out – how does Radio 2 and BBC3 survive, with banal identikit comedies and the laughable likes of Sarah Kennedy and Ken Bruce, and the cheap to run innovative niche stations go which definitely fulfil a needed remit rather than chasing an uninterested mass audience definitely catered for elsewhere? It boggles the mind.
The irony is that the BBC muscling into the podcasting scene with ‘listen again’ too early and iTunes preferring commercially based podcasts destroyed nearly all the innovative indie podcasts which where outgunned and all podfaded – and thus has probably left us with nothing now…a lack of independent voices promoting fresh new music on either platform – Sigh.
And where will Adam and Joe go?
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