When BBC Radio 1 controller, Andy Parfitt, began his talk in the BBC Bar in Manchester’s Oxford Road building, we were presented with a quote on a slide show…
“Marketing tells us that FM radio is no longer a requirement”
These where the words of a CEO of a large Japanese company that Parfitt had been to visit and at first, it brought laughter of disbelief, followed by a sudden concern. What if this was true? Despite our initial contempt for this statement, a realisation dawned that the CEO of this company could actually be making a very wise observation of something that we haven’t seen for ourselves because of a nostalgic love affair. Love is blind, right?
This statement might be a bit bold, but it’s not as far away from the truth as our passionate hearts would have us think. It’s not that people are becoming disengaged by FM radio; it’s that they are becoming engaged by something entirely different.
The amount of time people are spending on social networking websites is up 82% across the world. The audience for social network sites increased year-on-year over the past 3 years, reaching an estimated audience of over 300 million. None of this is a surprise; you have to have lived under a rock for the last 5 years to have not been exposed to social networking in some form. But this presents something other than an interesting statistic; it presents competition. It’s easy to underestimate the impact this has on our medium. Radio is competing with this and several other platforms for time and money, not to mention the challenges presented by iPods and personal music players.
I think, in the most part, we are coping with it well. Andy Parfitt expressed his frustration at not yet being able to create an iPhone app for Radio 1. The BBC Trust is still considering its impact in the market place before giving the green light. I have many radio station apps on my iPhone. The vast majority of stations have facebook pages and twitter accounts and are embracing social networking in a positive manner. However, I overheard a conversation last week between a boss of a large radio network and a colleague, it’s not somebody I work with or know personally, but he made a comment that annoyed me, frustrated me and worried me in equal measure.
“I’m don’t understand all this technical hoo-hah”
How can you be able to survive the future challenges presenting the core values of our industry if you have a mentality like that? The online team at Galaxy are some of the best in the business. With David Farrar at its head, it manages to engage with its audience well beyond the FM dial, and if we are to survive in this modern world, then we have to respond to this. I firmly believe we can and will, work well alongside these other mediums. I think they played their part in driving overall listening figures up in the last quarter of Rajar and as long as we keep on top of the situation they won’t present us with a problem, they’ll present us with an opportunity.