There’s been much wringing of hands about the BBC recently. Under pressure from the media, the Opposition and particularly the Murdoch empire, it has felt compelled to publicly wield the axe on some sacrificial lambs, easy targets like the web site, 6music and the Asian Network.
For those that don’t know or live on the other side of the world, 6Music is a music station that supports new music, it doesn’t play the usual pap you here on normal commercial radio and it has no ads so it can afford to be daring.
The state of music radio
There’s nothing new about playlists, they’ve been around since at least before I started listening to “youth” radio in the 1970s. We’ve always had smug DJs and formulaic business models that served the major record companies far more than the audience.
Even before the advent of commercial FM radio stations in the UK in the 1970s, BBC radio stations (Radios 1 AND 2) had a list of recently released songs that were played once a day for a given period.
When the commercial stations appeared (one per city at the time), the pressure became greater because advertisers wanted listeners and listeners were quite happy to listen to the same things over and over again.
We’ve now reached a point when things are getting ridiculous, songs are being played 2, 3 or 4 times a day. Yes, we’ve got it, we heard your song. In fact we’ve heard it so many times that we’re sick of it and don’t want to go out and buy it, it’s too much: overkill.
Why should 6music be saved
That old fashioned thing called public service broadcasting. It fills a gap for all of us that grew up with that vast majority of music that isn’t in the mainstream, the stuff that isn’t heard elsewhere and that doesn’t treat its listeners like an ATM.
According to the British Phonographic Industry, 6music has a “unique role in supporting new artists” playing four or five times as much new music as other stations. Translate that as it is fulfilling the BBC’s role “to inform, to entertain and to educate”.
It plays a variety of music that no other public or commercial radio station plays.
It’s not afraid that people won’t like what it plays. I remember Stuart Maconie playing an orchestral version of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. That’s not the most accessible piece of music at the best of times, but it put it out there as a challenge to its audience.
It will challenge it’s audience. It has intelligent, articulate DJs who are passionate and knowledgeable about what they play in the same way as John Peel, Bob Harris and Annie Nightingale were in the 1970s
Commercial radio stations (and to a large extent the other two BBC “pop” stations), play safe music that is likely to attract audiences and advertisers. 6music doesn’t have that type of constraint.
What should you do?
Sign up to the Facebook page set up by Rage Against The Machine Christmas number one campaigner Jon Morter. It includes the names of all the members of the BBC Trust that will be reviewing the decision and asking your opinion in the next few months
Write to your MP and all the candidates. Remember, this decision was probably made in the light of the coming election. Let the incumbent and the pretenders know what you think. Ironically it may be a great PR exercise for the radio station because if not many people knew they were out there before, they do now. You never know, they might have an epiphany like shadow culture minister Ed Vaizey who changed his mind last weekend calling 6music “brilliant” after previously towing the party line supporting the cuts. Opportunism? You decide.
Listen to 6music!
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