"Whatever happens, (Radio) is by its nature the poor relation in broadcast media: and poor relations are much easier to love than rich ones."
The new listeners
In this age of high-definition TV and digital gadgets, surely no one tunes in to radio any more. So how come listener figures are soaring? Zoe Williams thinks she has the secret to the allure of the airwaves
Friday August 24, 2007The Guardian
It is difficult to keep interested in facts, unless there is an obvious loser. So last week's Rajar figures posed a conundrum: radio listenership is soaring.
Commercial radio's overall reach is at its highest for four years and, in the second quarter of the year, advertising earned the stations a whopping £150m. BBC stations, ceding some of their audience share to the flourishing commercial sector, nevertheless record brilliant numbers. Chris Moyles is hoovering up listeners as if they were Pringles: he now has Radio 1's breakfast listenership up to 10.87 million. It is closing the gap with Radio 2, which is by no means struggling itself, at 13.7 million listeners. Its director, Lesley Douglas, is so popular in the corporation that she can have as much money as she wants, for anything, and they are currently trying to clone her on the back of a mouse. The digital stations BBC 6 Music and the speech-only BBC7 inspire Joan of Arc-like loyalty.
Audience-wise, Radio 3 looks to the uninitiated like the poor relation (1.78 million out of the UK's total 45.6 million listeners), but in other ways it remains a heavy hitter: it is the largest commissioner of new music in the world, with insiders portraying it as an artistic patron on the scale of Louis XIV. (Roger Wright, the controller, remarks in a measured way, "People do describe us like that, forgetting we are a radio station. And it's true that there are certain things that we do and that the licence fee allows us to do which we wouldn't do if audience numbers were our only consideration." Of which, more in a minute.)The commercial sector is gaining on the BBC, recording its highest listener-share at 43.5%. Virgin, to pick one example, has increased its audience by 200,000, to record its highest numbers for four years.
Listening figures for digital radio, meanwhile, have increased from under a million in 2003 to 12 million in the first quarter of this year. That is more than a quarter of the UK population, listening through either digital sets, televisions or the internet: when you consider how many people can't work out how to use Freeview, and didn't know you could listen to the radio through it anyway, that proportion is phenomenal.
Old people think they are the only ones listening to radio because the young have taken over the telly with their shouty nonsense. Young people think they are the only ones listening to it because old people don't know how to use it properly (4.4 million listeners access the radio via their mobile phones, up more than 25% on last year: 1.8 million of them are 15-24). The middle-aged (which I mean in the old-fashioned sense: people who are neither young nor old; me) think we are the only ones listening to it, for both of those reasons. Radio's popularity does not simply climb - it dovetails with new technology, so that, unlike television (and, ahem, print), it can see web developments as a boon rather than a threat. And it does not just dominate the mainstream, it picks up new listeners, from new generations, listening in new ways. TV would kill for a growth curve like this. When did radio get so good?
It is partly just the way the internet-cookie crumbles. Podcasts have worked very well for radio, intensifying listener loyalty. Three of the top 20 downloads on iTunes are BBC shows, and they are not even serials (Chris Moyles, Russell Brand and Colin Murray) - you're not even going to miss anything, in other words; there is no narrative arc, this is just chat, so called "linear" entertainment, stuff you want on all the time, when you're ironing (although I can't see Moyles's fans doing much ironing ... or Murray's, for that matter).
When people download pirated television shows, or avail themselves of the natural wonder that is Sky Plus, it is for "on-demand" viewing, the kind of thing that also comes in a DVD box set, the kind of thing that is, frankly, most often American.
Television here has been hoist with its own petard. Buying shows from America seemed like a brilliant idea, and indeed it was. It is cheaper and quicker than making them yourself, and they are good. But they give the viewer a different relationship with the telly: we are empowered by the box set. We need not sit through that woman shouting at toddlers. TV cannot compete with its own foreign imports any more, which would be just about bearable if those imports weren't also available via the internet: where technology has been a facilitator to radio, it is a competitor to telly. The act of just flicking on the set to see what is on is very old-fashioned now, and it shows in the demographic trends. The average Briton watches 25 hours and 30 minutes of telly a week; for the average 16- to 24-year-old, that drops to 18 hours 20 minutes.
But none of that would make any difference if radio were not superior in the first place. For this article, I canvassed opinion from all over radio - from controllers, DJs and producers. All their points were very different, all were incredibly convincing. If you were to stake them out, though, and pin down their thumping heart, I think it would be: follow the money. TV costs too much; the stakes are too high; the tolerance of risk is too low; and it attracts the wrong sort of people ...
An independent producer of local radio from the Midlands, who wished to remain nameless, said: "Even before these Rajar figures [showing commercial local radio dominating the commercial share overall], I would have said the main difference between radio and TV is that community radio is, or can be, quite cool, where community TV is rubbish." There is something uniquely depressing about regional television, which is nothing to do with local talent or anything else. The sheer cheapness of it makes it look unprofessional and schlocky and like it's just about to fall over, which has a certain knock-on effect on its credibility, even when it's talking about something as local and believable as the weather. The invisibility of radio, besides making it much cheaper, closes the gap between national and regional output, in terms of production quality, and all the benefits of being local come to the fore: a sense of community, of immediacy, of belonging.
John Cassels set up The Saint FM in the Essex town of Burnham-on-Crouch eight years ago, and the station really typifies how low overheads can work in a medium's favour: everyone involved is a volunteer, it will not even have a permanent licence until the end of this year (it has been running off one-month licences for nearly a decade), and yet the Rajar figures show a very substantial 10% listenership in the area it reaches. "I suppose it's more immediate [than television]," says Cassels, "because it's less bulked out with all that clobber."Stuart Maconie, who does the Radcliffe and Maconie show Monday to Thursday on Radio 2, delights in the more generalised sense of proximity you get from this disembodied voice. "It's much more intimate and alluring, isn't it? When you see someone on television, you think they're talking to everyone but you. When you hear someone on the radio, you think they're only talking to you.
"You know how it is with telly - everyone says they want to do something brilliant and original, but really they want something that everyone else is doing, that they know works." There is a risk-culture in radio, which paradoxically increases that sense of intimacy. The mistake television makes is to think that the less demanding the content, the more universal the experience will be. In fact, the opposite is true: the more people are stretched beyond what is familiar to them, the greater their sense of identification and belonging.
Of course, you will never get 20 million people listening to a concert of new music on Radio 3. But that is not a thought that causes much dismay. Even the most popular radio station in the country - Radio 2 - has yet to embrace the idea that listener figures are all. Radio 4 pretends to be proud of its massive listenership (11.2% of the total share, second only to Radio 2), but privately, many of its producers envy the more esoteric, devil-take-the-listening-figures approach of 3. Roger Wright outlines the priorities of the station, which are focused "particularly on new work, both new music and new writing. We wouldn't have a programme like [the 'arts and ideas' show] Night Waves in the heart of the evening schedule if all we wanted to do was to get people listening to us. We're also about patronage; it's about supporting new ideas as well as juxtaposing the classical cannon, both in music and in drama. So you genuinely try to take people further than they wouldnormally go." Wright is not what you would call a show-off, but he does concede, "If you pulled our investment away, the cultural life of the whole country would be denuded."
Of course the commercial sector is much more, well, commercial, but the days are gone when the music was just there to separate the adverts. I think adverts play a very different role in commercial radio than they do in television.
Because TV is much greedier for your attention in the first place, it requires you to sit still and usually not read or crochet or anything; adverts, then, are a sensory relief. They present no relief on the radio, just an interruption of the intense and intricately imagined relationship going on between the presenter and the listener. This would explain why radio adverts have never taken any place in the cultural-historical silt; advertising is the one aspect, indeed, of the media in which television succeeds creatively and radio does not. But as a result, TV has been much readier to imbibe the values of the advertising industry, viz, go for bulk; if someone else is getting more than you, copy them; if it turns out later that you are after ABC1s and not just any old scumbag, it is always easier to skim off flotsam than to start from scratch.
And then, of course, there is the trusty archive. The two great success stories of the BBC's digital output, 6 Music and 7, are essentially object lessons in the proper use of a back catalogue: in the case of music - ie, 6 - the answer is to reinstate elitism. Commercial radio and, of course, Radio 1, have playlists, which are repetitive and governed entirely by the market and as mainstream as they could be. They leave little room for idiosyncrasy or expertise. I would say 6 Music was inconsistent, but that is because I don't like everyone on it: it would not be idiosyncratic if it were possible to like them all. I like Gideon Coe a lot. Sorry, I digress: the point of the station, as a whole, is to de-democratise. Take the emphasis off interactivity - if everyone wants to have a go, they can go to a karaoke bar.
And at the risk of sounding too BBC-centric - this bit has to be, really: the Beeb's the one with the archives - BBC7 introduces us to archiving as an art form, rather than just 100 Best Ways To Do Something Really Cheap. Mary Kalemkerian, the channel's controller, is terribly well thought-of for turning what could have been a sub-visual UK Gold into the most successful digital channel there is, unless you count Five Live's cricket coverage (which they undoubtedly do). The distinctive thing about her approach is that with comedy (much of the station's output) she is not looking for kitsch or nostalgia, but for programmes that actually make people laugh. Not that even she would claim a 100% success rate. "We have a regular feature called the Comedy Controller," she says, "in which we invite a well-known comedian to select six of his favourite archive shows. Bill Oddie chose some programmes, and he said, 'My God, I remember these being really funny.' And he said so on air.Some of these things just don't last." Again, it comes down to discernment, a word so old-fashioned it even looks dated on the page.
In conclusion, radio is not blooming by accident: it commands a very great loyalty, for every one of these reasons and no doubt just as many again, and they all boil down to the same thing. Whatever happens, it is by its nature the poor relation in broadcast media: and poor relations are much easier to love than rich ones.
· Guardian Media Group owns 37 radio stations under networks that include Smooth Radio and Real Radio.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/radio/comment/0,,2155442,00.html
(Source: Fred Waterer/ODXA)