ACTION STATIONS!

The IBA's Ideas For Introducing Additional Independent Radio Stations [1988]

Those who wish to provide new radio services, different from those which currently exist, have had to put up with a good deal of stop and go over the past four years. When we heard that new radio legislation was to be delayed by a further year, my colleagues and I examined ways in which we might help.

Existing ILR stations were in good financial and audience shape, while correspondence and conversations with would-be broadcasters and listeners indicated that more specialised and different radio would find a market and fulfil a need. The Broadcasting Act 1981 requires the IBA's radio contractors to broadcast a wide range of programmes in their area. It occurred to us, therefore, that we could develop radio services broadcasting a narrower range of output, provided they were sited where ILR services already fulfilled the Broadcasting Act's requirements. That is why we called the new services 'incremental' their broadcasts would be in addition to ILR services already available.

We quickly realised that 'incremental' would also mean a great deal of additional work. These days there are only six executive staff in the IBA's Radio Division. We knew we would have to advertise 12 ordinary ILR contracts in 1989 resulting in much staff work and a fair number of Authority interviews. We also knew that the Home Secretary would need to approve our proposals and would probably wish to leave the new Radio Authority with sufficient frequencies to accelerate development once appointed. All in all, 20 incremental contracts seemed about the upper limit of what we could achieve.

We were delighted to be given the goahead on 2nd November 1988. Our aim was and is to expand listener choice and to give opportunities to new broadcasters. With only 20 incremental contracts available, we were determined to advertise in those geographical areas where there was either great Interest or evidence of fresh ideas. We advertised for letters of intent to apply.

The Community Radio Association, the Association of Broadcasting Development and the trade press gave us generous coverage and by the deadline on the 2nd December 1988 we were literally overwhelmed by the 540 letters received. People wanted to run classical music, arts, jazz, rock, funk and country and western stations. Over a hundred wanted to provide something for ethnic minorities - Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Greek, Turkish, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and European languages. Many others just wanted to be more local than existing statioins could be, providing either a 'mini ILR' service or opening their studios to individuals and community groups of all sorts - students, voluntary bodies, the disabled, local drama clubs, local politicians and business ... the list is endless.

This mass of information has been invaluable in helping us with the difficult task of deciding what areas to advertise. We were helped also by the guidance we received from the Community Radio Association, the Association of Independent Radio Contractors and the Association for Broadcasting Development and by the understanding and swift response of the Department of Trade and Industry. Without the frequencies for broadcast, all our proposals are mere wishful thinking.

We have already embarked upon our plan of advertising incremental ILR franchises in blocks of four or five a month. Those who tell us that they wish to apply are sent a contract specification, transmission and studio specifications, precise details of the geographical area to be covered and an application form. This last should provide us with all the information Authority Members will need to make an award in each case, however the applicant intends to raise and utilise revenue. Applicants may propose to provide any of the services mentioned earlier and many others besides. However, in certain areas, having analysed the letters of intent, the Authority will already have chosen only to offer a contract to an applicant wishing to provide a service to an ethnic minority or minorities. This will be made clear in the adverti sements concerned.

Applicants have two months in which to complete and return their application forms. The selection process will take a further month and will not involve interviews save in exceptional circumstances.

We hope our system for selecting incremental contractors will be both swift and fair to all applicants. We know that we will only be able to satisfy a fraction of the aspirations reflected in the hundreds of letters of intent we have received and we fully understand some of the frustrations that will result. We believe, however, that we are currently the best placed to continue radio development and make the difficult but necessary decisions over the interim period. We ask to be judged after rather than before the event and in the knowledge that the new Radio Authority should be able to launch,many other new ventures in about two yearstime.


The locations from which 20 incremental contracts will be drawn are as follows:

London: Greater London (FM), Greater London (AM - ethnic), Brixton (ethnic), Haringey (ethnic), Hounslow (ethnic), Thamesmead;
West Midlands: Central Birmingham, Coventry (ethnic) or Wolverhampton (ethnic);
NorthWest: Central Manchester (ethnic), Stockport;
Scotland: Bathgate (West Lothian), Easterhouse (Glasgow) or Paisley, Stirling;
Other regions: Belfast, Bradford (ethnic), Bristol, East Newcastle or Sunderland, Isle of Wight, Kettering or St Albans, Rufland, Sheffield and Tendring (Essex)


By Paul Brown - Head of Radio Programming at the IBA.

[Source: IBA]

A Response To The Proposed Expansion Of Independent Radio

ON 31 JULY the Independent Broadcasting Authority announced the winners of the final batch of four incremental local radio contracts. The 20 which have now been offered are, in the words of the IBA, intended to be "the forerunners of the type of service that will be provided by the several hundred small radio stations to which the forthcoming broadcasting legislation will give the green light".

Curiously, the estimate of a possible 300 radio stations in Britain is based on the availability of frequencies to carry the services rather than any attempt to assess listener demand or the availability of funding. Frequencies are no more than a means to an end.

The aims of more and better radio will be achieved only if there are adequate financial resources and the talent to produce programmes that listeners want to listen to. We should have learned from the mistakes made in cable television. Five years ago there was much heady talk in the press of 20 new television channels, simply because cable had the technical capacity to carry them. Cable has generated minuscule quantities of original programming and is little more than a retail outlet rather than a signiftcant source of production.

Radio can and should expand and, with a plurality of services, can cater for greater diversity in listeners' tastes than before. But if this expansion is to take place wholly or mainly in the private sector, the availability of sufficient advertising revenue may prove to be a more severe constraint on expansion than has been imagined.

Indeed, I fear that on their present funding, a quarter of the new stations will have gone bust within two years. It is quite clear from their applications for the contracts that many community radio operators have been relying on public subsidy and their operations are simply not viable if they are to earn their keep in a commercial world.

It also has to be asked whetherthere is really evidence of pent-up demand from listeners for more localised neighbourhood stations. The Broadcasting Research Unit report, "The Listener Speaks", found that there was not - but it did find that 18 per cent of those who wanted new neighbourhood stations expressed an interest in running them, and 33 per cent in helping to make occasional programmes.

That means that people who want to make programmes make up a third of those who say they want to listen to them. That does not augur well for their viability and hardly represents a sensible use of scarce frequencies.

I suspect that listeners will quickly become bored with radio if it is too introverted. Certainly they want a mirror held up to their own community, but they also want a window on the wider world.

The experience of the smallest Independent Local Radio stations suggests that those covering a population of less than 100,000 are going to flind life quite difflicult.

Some of the new services may attract not enough revenue to survive but just enough to damage the viability of existing stations. These in turn will. have to cut programming expenditure to survive and we would end up with less listener choice not more.

A third of the new stations have been defined specifically as ethnic services, including some interesting attempts at time-share which will either produce the United Nations or a Tower of Babel.

Unless the new Radio Authority intends to hire a large number of interpreters, I see some diffliculty in the monitoring of output.

The smallest group of new contracts was the community of interest stations. Since the appeal of these stations is generic rather than geographical, there is a strong case for allowing them to cover as wide an area as possible. In some cases, this will be required to ensure viability since a programme format with narrow appeal will require a larger population base to survive.

It is, also important that the Radio Authority takes an active role in determining the optimum number of new community-of-interest services to be offered. Too
many would simply produce very narrow formats and precarious financial viability. Eight to 10 London-wide stations would be enough to cater for most tastes.

By James Gordon - managing director of Radio Clyde.



Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Looking at this 20 years on, James Gordon was absolutely correct. Too many stations were introduced by the Radio Authority and Ofcom - being allocated merely on the availabilty of frequencies rather than the sustainability of programming and choice.

This has, as James Gordon predicted, rather perversly lead to LESS listener choice, not more. Initially some of the 'incremental stations' failed - as predicted - The existing 'heritage' stations were forced to contact in the face of ever increasing competition. Without the proper regulation that Mr Gordon said would be necessary to achieve diversity, the majority of local commercial stations provide very similar middle of the road and pop music output.

There are not the vast range of different and specialst music stations that were promised. Most of the original 'heritage' ILR stations have been swallowed up into a handful of large conglomerates and have minimal locally produced output; programmes being either 'voice tracked' from computer without live presenter involvement or networked across dozens of stations from a remote studio nowhere near the transmission area! All this undermined the IBA's pipe-dreams of a wide and varied array of stations up and down the country and up and down the dial.

There are one or two bright spots, of course, some stations provide differing output to the mainstream and there are a number community funded and volunteer based community radio projects up and down the land. Listenership probably isn't what was hoped for and I feel that it's a far cry from what was hoped for back in 1988!



A Quiet Revolution   [1989]

The radio industry has begun to adapt to the era of the marketplace. Tim Blackmore anticipates the outcome.


Amidst all the anticipation of a radio revolution it is easy to miss the fact that perhaps the greatest change has already taken place. What remains is a consolidation and expansion of that change.

Since the birth of broadcasting, UK radio has been regarded as something special; not for broadcasters the self-indulgence of opinionated newspaper owners and editors, not for radio the easy change of ownership that can bring about an almost overnight redirection of company policy. For almost the whole of living memory, radio has been regarded as a source of British creativity, not just a mirror to the creative energies of others. Writing for radio, musicmaking for radio and a host of other initiatives have ensured the critical attention of other media and commentators in general.

Today, however, the accelerating impact of market forces is changing radio's role from that of creative force to the far simpler role of relayer of information and commercially available music.

The last few years has seen a less stringent interpretation of the Broadcasting Act by the IBA with resultant changes in the pattern of ownership and operation of existing commercial radio stations. The publication of the Government's Green Paper, Radio: Choices and Opportunities, was the first major assessment of the medium to ignore British broadcasting's foundation in an obligation to educate, inform and entertain. As a result of this changing environment, most UK stations have already eliminated all but the most cost-effective forms of programme output. Drama, speech-based programmes, religious programming, classical and other forms of 'specialist' music have all been significantly reduced. With the move of several radio companies into public quotation of their shares, it is becoming clear that the increased perception of radio stations as commodities itself provokes the need for a new assessment of radio's future role.

Simpler Industry

My own suspicions are that radio is to be an even simpler industry. As technological innovation continues, even our studios are becoming more user friendly. Technically fluent operators are already rare and with the move to digital and solid state processes, the need for engineering maintenance staff will be reduced. It may not seem as much fun for existing broadcasters to work without turntables, cart machines or even faders, but for the listener technical standards could well be improved.

The continuing move away from programmes towards a seamless robe of programming should result in a reduction of production and other programme, support staff. A radio station broadcasting only Top 40 music, classical music or any other generic style has no need for production staff with expert knowledge editorial decisions can be taken centrally and their execution policed by the very latest in computerbased systems. In theory, the music chosen for a well programmed station in Bristol should be equally effective for a similarly targeted station in, say, Oxford. Indeed programming decisions could be centralised even further, creating a series of super controllers each handling their own chain of stations. The ultimate extension of this process could involve the need for only one controller for each type of programming format - effectively the return to a system of national editorial control.

Market Forces

In such circumstances the initiative in creative development might well pass to the new and smaller community stations, who could see themselves as having less to lose from experimentation than the half dozen or so major radio operators, whose multi-million pound companies will dominate the industry within a couple of years. Whatever those market forces dictate, it is important to consider the implications of an increasingly generic radio system.

For instance, it is now taken for granted that British music makers are among the world's finest and, just as importantly, the world's most commercially successful. But it was not always the case. Through the 1950s and early 1960s hardly any of them enjoyed international success. When it came it was often in the shape of novelty performances such as Laurie London's 'He's Got the Whole World in his Hands'or Lonnie Donegan's 'Rock Island Line'.

Our move into the international big time came about as a direct result of a uniquely British synthesis. Many of our leading music makers from the 1960s and 1970s now credit British radio as a crucial source of inspiration from a (then) wide range of musical styles. Similarly, the narrow programming of most American stations was blamed for the relatively poor emergence in the 1970s of world-beating music makers from the USA - some stations' policies involved the 24-hour rotation of just 17 records. It is in just such areas that the shift of radio from its base as a culturally creative force to its probable future as a predominantly sales and marketing medium could most significantly ifect the life of our nation. 1 .

As programme director of an independent programme production company, my own belief is that alongside the simplification of programming for most commercial stations, there is a potentially important role for programme providers working with a number of individual stations. Such outlets will generally be unable to justify full-time access to programme specialists, expert researchers, nationally known broadcasters or programme resources such as comprehensive music libraries. Programme production companies, on the other hand, will be able to utilise such assets creatively and economically for the benefit of radio stations everywhere.

The challenge, however, will be just as great for companies such as ours as for broadcasting companies: to avoid the lack of imagination so often fostered by the narrow confines of singlemindedness.

[Source: IBA. Tim Blackmore is Programme Director of PPM Radiowaves and, until 1988, the first Director of the Radio Academy. He began his production career with the launch of Radio 1 in 1967, and from 1977-82 he was Head of Music and Head of Programmes for Capital Radio.]